Lasserre – dinner under a roof that opens to the Paris sky

Facing the Palais de la Découverte, at the point where avenue Franklin-D.-Roosevelt meets the Champs-Élysées roundabout, Lasserre has been one of Paris's great stages for French gastronomy since 1942, when the young Béarnais René Lasserre took over a wartime bistro and began building an address that would define grand dining for a generation. The house climbed through the MICHELIN hierarchy with unusual speed: a first star in 1949, a second in 1951, before reaching three stars in 1962 and holding them for more than twenty years, until 1983. Today Lasserre holds One MICHELIN Star, a mark of confident, unhurried classicism rather than reinvention. Behind the Directoire façade, dinner still unfolds beneath René Lasserre's celebrated mechanical roof, a piece of theatre that drew André Malraux, Salvador Dalí and Audrey Hepburn through its doors and keeps Paris's believers in old-school luxury dining coming back.

01The room and the setting

A small lift carries guests up from the avenue to a dining room built as a kind of private theatre: columns, orchid planters, crystal chandeliers and Chinese porcelain gathered beneath a ceiling that can slide open to the open air. René Lasserre, drawing on his years working at the Lido, had the device built over the first-floor dining room as the building was raised to resemble a private mansion, so that diners could eat under the sky of Paris itself.

Over the decades the room has gathered an improbable guest list, among them André Malraux, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Romy Schneider, Audrey Hepburn, Jean-Claude Brialy and Frédéric Dard. It was over lunch here with Malraux that Chagall decided to paint the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier, a story the house still tells with quiet pride.

02The chef

The kitchen today belongs to Jean-Louis Nomicos, who spent his childhood in Allauch, a village between Aubagne and Aix-en-Provence, before training under Alain Ducasse between Juan-les-Pins and Monaco. His first head-chef post came at La Grande Cascade, where he devised the stuffed macaroni with black truffle and foie gras that became his signature dish.

Insider tip

Dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday from 7pm; elegant dress required.

Nomicos first ran the Lasserre kitchen between 2001 and 2010, winning the house two MICHELIN stars, before leaving in December 2010 to open his own restaurant, Les Tablettes Jean-Louis Nomicos. He returned to Lasserre's stoves in 2019, bringing the macaroni back onto the menu alongside the pigeon André Malraux and the orange-glazed Challans duck that built the house's reputation decades earlier.

03The cooking

Nomicos reads the grand repertoire of French gastronomy through a contemporary lens: noble produce, simple appellations and, above all, sauces built with real patience, aiming for cuisine that is light and reassuring rather than showy. The menu is organised in three tiers, from a four-course Menu de Saison to a six-course Menu Dégustation, each one keeping the house's classic dishes in dialogue with lighter, more seasonal ideas.

04What to order

Start, inevitably, with the macaronis farcis aux truffes noires, céleri et foie gras de canard, the dish that has followed Nomicos from La Grande Cascade and back to Lasserre. Among the fish courses, the bar de pêche étuvé comes with Imperial caviar and sea potatoes smoked over beech wood, while the pigeonneau du Finistère façon André Malraux and the cannette de Challans à l'orange, served for two, are the house's oldest classics, still on the card decades after René Lasserre created them. Finish with crêpes Suzette flambéed at the table in Grand Marnier, or the Timbale Élysée, the house dessert reinvented for 2026 with vanilla, rosewater and raspberry.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar is listed among the restaurant's notable features, and both the Menu de Saison and the Menu Dégustation can be taken with a matched wine pairing, built course by course around the kitchen's classic sauces rather than around fashion.

06When to go and booking

Lasserre serves dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday from 7pm, and is closed Sunday and Monday. Elegant dress is expected throughout the dining room, with a jacket recommended for men and sportswear such as shorts and t-shirts turned away at the lift. Given the restaurant's reputation and its limited service days, a table under the roof is worth booking well ahead, particularly for a clear evening when the ceiling is most likely to open.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.