Il Carpaccio – Sicilian Baroque theatre at the Royal Monceau

Inside Le Royal Monceau, the Raffles palace hotel on avenue Hoche a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe, Il Carpaccio turns an Italian table into a piece of Sicilian theatre. The kitchen belongs to Oliver Piras and Alessandra Del Favero, partners both at the stove and in life, who reopened the restaurant on 7 September 2021 in partnership with chefs from Da Vittorio, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant of the Cerea family near Bergamo. It holds One MICHELIN Star, first awarded in the spring of 2022 and reconfirmed in the 2026 selection, and that same year 50 Top Italy ranked it the second-best Italian restaurant in the world. Philippe Starck designed the dining room as a luminous Baroque fantasy, reached through a corridor embedded with mother-of-pearl shells. It is one of the few places in a Paris palace hotel where Italian food feels like a destination in its own right, not a courtesy menu beside the French one.

01The room and the setting

Le Royal Monceau has stood on avenue Hoche since 1928, and Philippe Starck's remake plays on the hotel's roaring-twenties past, when the halls were once walked by Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway.

For Il Carpaccio, Starck imagined a Sicilian Baroque grotto: guests pass through a corridor studded with thousands of mother-of-pearl shells before reaching the dining room, a scheme that artist Thomas Boog extended with a hand-glued shell fresco across the walls. The room itself is a light-drenched glass conservatory draped in white fabric, a Starck signature, which opens onto a raised terrace overlooking the hotel's central water feature.

02The chefs

Oliver Piras, born in Sardinia, trained in some of Europe's most demanding kitchens, including El Celler de Can Roca, Noma in Copenhagen and Joël Robuchon's dining room in London. Alessandra Del Favero, born in Veneto and trained at the ALMA culinary school, refined her craft in her family's hotel in the Dolomites.

Insider tip

Book by phone; lunch Tue–Fri, dinner Tue–Sat; weekday lunch menu €80 per person.

The two met in 2012 in the kitchens of the three-Michelin-starred Da Vittorio in Brusaporto, and by 2015 had opened their own restaurant, Aga, inside Del Favero's family hotel in the Dolomites, which earned a Michelin star the following year. In 2021 they took the helm at Il Carpaccio; the table earned its first Michelin star in 2022, and the Guide reconfirmed it for 2026.

03The cooking

The restaurant takes its name from Vittore Carpaccio, the Renaissance painter whose vividly coloured paintings inspired the invention of the thinly sliced raw-beef dish that bears his name, a small homage built directly into the menu.

Piras and Del Favero cook in a formal arrangement with Da Vittorio, devising their menu together with the Cerea family's own chefs, and the two kitchens still trade ideas directly: on 12 December 2025 brothers Chicco and Bobo Cerea came to Paris for a six-hand dinner alongside the Il Carpaccio duo. Their guiding idea, as the restaurant describes it, is complexity presented through simplicity, cooked not only behind the pass but tableside, in front of the guest.

04What to order

Signature dishes include beef carpaccio with truffle, the Elephant's Ear — an outsize veal Milanese — and paccheri alla Vittorio, a pasta finished tableside in a sauce of three tomatoes, basil and fresh Parmesan.

Dessert is the domain of pastry chefs Yazid Ichemrahen and Alexandre Favre, who rework Italian staples with a lighter, more contemporary hand: a Michelangelo's affogato, chocolate stracciatella and a deconstructed panettone among them.

05When to go and booking

As published by the hotel in October 2026, lunch runs Tuesday to Friday from midday to 2.30pm and dinner Tuesday to Saturday from 7pm to 10pm; the restaurant is wheelchair accessible. A weekday lunch menu, introduced for gourmets on a tight schedule, offers an amuse-bouche, a starter and a main for €80 per person, with the dishes changing weekly according to the chefs' mood and the market.

Tables are booked by phone on +33 1 42 99 88 12 or by email, and given the room's size and the hotel's standing, reserving ahead is sensible for both lunch and dinner.

06The neighbourhood

Avenue Hoche sits a few minutes' walk from the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées, close enough for an evening's shopping but set back from the crowds.

Inside the same horseshoe-shaped courtyard, Il Carpaccio shares the hotel's restaurant row with Le Long Bar and Nobu Matsuhisa's Japanese table, Matsuhisa Paris, all facing the same central pool that Starck built into the design.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.