Mallory Gabsi – sauce first, memory always, by the Arc de Triomphe

On rue des Acacias, two streets from the Arc de Triomphe, Mallory Gabsi opened his eponymous dining room in April 2022 and, within a year, saw it rewarded with one MICHELIN Star and Michelin's Young Chef title of 2023. The Brussels-born chef, a semi-finalist on Top Chef in 2020, had already earned his stripes at Yves Mattagne's Sea Grill and the triple-starred Hertog Jan before deciding that his own cooking should carry both halves of his family: the rigour of French technique and the generosity of a Belgian-Tunisian childhood kitchen. The dining room follows the same logic. Velvet banquettes, turquoise accents and a thread of saffron running through the décor echo the chef's own memories, while an open kitchen lets diners watch the brigade work. Nothing here is decoration for its own sake – the plates, the sauces and the room are built from the same set of ideas.

01The chef

Mallory Gabsi was born in 1996 in Ixelles, in the Brussels region, and his cooking still carries the two households he grew up between – a Tunisian grandfather and a Belgian grandmother. He trained at the Hotel School in Bruges and then at Louvain, before working the line at Yves Mattagne's Sea Grill in Brussels and at the triple-MICHELIN-starred Hertog Jan. Those years in starred kitchens gave him the technical grounding he would later take public on Top Chef, where he reached the semi-final of the eleventh season in 2020 and became one of the show's better-remembered faces.

He opened his own restaurant on rue des Acacias two years later, and the accolades followed quickly: one MICHELIN Star and the Guide's Young Chef of the Year award in 2023, alongside three toques and the Jeune Chef de l'Année title from Gault & Millau the same year. Television kept calling – he spent several seasons alongside Philippe Etchebest on Cauchemar en Cuisine before stepping back from the show in early 2024, not long after the birth of his son Aslan. In June 2026 he returned to his first culinary love with 140°, a Belgian fritkot he had already opened in Brussels in 2021, this time installed on rue des Petits Carreaux in Paris's Montorgueil district – fries cooked at the temperature that gives the place its name, served alongside a sauce menu that includes an Andalouse spiked with Belgian honey and harissa, a nod to his Tunisian side.

02The room and the setting

The restaurant's decor is conceived as an extension of the kitchen rather than a backdrop to it. Warm velvet seating and turquoise touches run through the room, with saffron used as a connecting colour between the chef's childhood memories and the palette of the space. Custom-made ceramics sit alongside Bernardaud porcelain and Christofle cutlery, the same care given to the tableware as to what lands on it. The kitchen itself opens directly onto the dining room, so the gestures of the brigade – the plating, the saucing, the rhythm of a service – are visible rather than hidden behind a door.

Insider tip

Open Mon–Fri only; book by phone weekday mornings; closed over summer and New Year.

The restaurant can also be taken over entirely: an intimate alcove seats five, long tables face the open kitchen for bigger groups, and a full privatisation runs to thirty-two guests, each configuration designed to keep the experience intact regardless of the size of the party.

03The cooking

Gabsi's own description of his kitchen is that the sauce is never an afterthought – it is the starting point around which the produce, the texture and the acidity that wakes a dish up are all organised. A touch of rhubarb, a slightly bitter herb, a citrus that cuts through: these are the decisions that give his plates their liveliness, an effect he wants to feel crisp and melting, powerful and delicate, hot and sharp within the same mouthful. It is, in his words, a cuisine French in its discipline and Belgian in its soul, direct and generous without ranking one emotion above another.

The clearest expression of that idea is his eel in green sauce, a Belgian classic he has reworked across the menu – eel, herbs and shallot appear on the lunch menu, the Menu des Sens and the Menu Turquoise alike, a dish he has reportedly rebuilt through seven different versions on the way to the one he now serves.

04What to order

At lunch during the week, the three-course Menu Déjeuner (€75) runs eel with herbs and shallot into royal gilthead bream with grey shrimp and potato, finishing on hazelnut, cep and lemon. The four-course Menu des Sens (€150), served at both lunch and dinner, opens with langoustine, bergamot and verbena before the eel course, moves to brill with celeriac and trompette de la mort mushroom, and closes on the same hazelnut dessert.

The seven-course Menu Turquoise (€195) is the full statement: langoustine, bergamot and verbena; eel, herbs and shallot; beef, coffee and Roccolo cheese; brill, celeriac and trompette de la mort; mallard, Jerusalem artichoke and chestnut; hazelnut, cep and lemon; and a final course of wild berries, smoked chocolate and wild pepper. The à la carte list lets diners build their own route, with starters such as beef, coffee and Roccolo (€38) or langoustine, bergamot and verbena (€40), mains including mallard with Jerusalem artichoke and chestnut (€72), and desserts running from the hazelnut plate (€29) to tobacco, vanilla and coffee (€30).

05Wine and drinks

Both tasting menus come with their own pairing options rather than a single set wine list: the Menu des Sens offers a wine pairing at €85 or a non-alcoholic pairing at €55, while the Menu Turquoise steps up to a €110 wine pairing or an €85 non-alcoholic route, letting the sauces that define the cooking be matched course by course.

06When to go and booking

The restaurant serves lunch from 12.30pm to 1.30pm and dinner from 7.30pm to 9pm, Monday to Friday, and takes telephone reservations on the same weekday mornings between 9.30am and noon. In 2026 the dining room plans a summer closure from Monday 10 August to Friday 28 August, and a winter break from Thursday 24 December through Sunday 3 January 2027 – worth checking before planning a visit either side of the holidays.

07The neighbourhood

Rue des Acacias sits in the Ternes quarter of the 17th arrondissement, a quiet residential street that runs just off Avenue des Ternes, within easy walking distance of the Arc de Triomphe and Place Charles de Gaulle. The nearest metro stop is Argentine on Line 1, two minutes from the restaurant's door, with Charles de Gaulle–Étoile and its RER A connection only a few minutes further on foot – a discreet, moneyed corner of western Paris for a table that has quickly become one of its more talked-about addresses.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.