Mieux – the hand-built bistro rewriting rue Saint-Lazare

Mieux occupies a narrow frontage on the rue Saint-Lazare in Paris's ninth arrondissement. Behind an elegant green facade, the founding trio built a warm two-level room by hand, with an open kitchen and a concrete bar on the lower floor. It opened in May 2019, the work of three friends: Baptiste Bayle, Giulian Maiuri and Thomas Bonnel, who renovated the space themselves, pouring a cement bar, buffing the 1950s tiles they found under the floorboards and furnishing the room with flea-market finds and chairs from a French school. Mieux means 'better' in French, and the ambition shows in a kitchen that rewrites its offer from lunch to dinner and from one week to the next, following whatever the market has sent that morning. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, recognition for cooking that treats bistro food as a discipline rather than a formula. Mieux matters because it does the ordinary things of a neighbourhood bistro with unusual care, and still feels, years on, like a room three people built for themselves first.

01The room and the setting

Before Mieux, this stretch of rue Saint-Lazare was just another shopfront on a street that has since filled with restaurants. Baptiste Bayle, Giulian Maiuri and Thomas Bonnel renovated the space themselves, pouring a cement bar, buffing a run of 1950s floor tiles they discovered under the old floorboards, and furnishing the room with chairs rescued from a French school and bric-a-brac gathered at flea markets. A secondhand Spaziale espresso machine, put back into service by hand, now makes coffee with beans from Brûlerie de Belleville.

Downstairs, the open kitchen sits alongside the concrete bar on a lower level, while the main room keeps a haphazard but likeable decor of exposed brick, a few bookshelves, framed prints and odd pieces of antique furniture and kitchen equipment. There is no terrace, but the frontage opens fully to the street, so the room rarely feels shut in, even midweek at lunch.

02The chef

Giulian Maiuri runs the kitchen. Before Mieux he cooked at Maison Breguet and at the Trianon Palace in Versailles, experience that shows in the precision behind what reads, on paper, as simple bistro food. He opened the restaurant alongside Baptiste Bayle and Thomas Bonnel, and all three remain involved in its daily running, a structure that keeps the kitchen close to the dining room rather than hidden behind it.

Insider tip

Open Monday to Saturday for lunch and dinner; book online or by phone; closed Sundays.

03The cooking

The format stays close to classic bistro shape: three starters, three mains and three desserts, sometimes more, rewritten regularly so the kitchen can cook spontaneously with whatever is at its best that week. Mieux's own account of its approach is disarmingly plain: here you eat a bit of everything, the menu changes between midday and evening, and tomorrow it will be something else again.

That spontaneity rests on a deliberate sourcing policy. The kitchen works with market gardeners and fruit growers chosen for farming methods that respect the soil, buys only French meat, and takes its fish from small-scale, responsible fisheries that work within the reproductive cycles of the species they land. Pastry is made with stone-ground, artisan flour, and the dairy comes from working farms rather than industrial suppliers.

04Wine and drinks

The wine list follows the same logic as the kitchen. Mieux buys from winemakers who work the land without heavy chemical intervention, choosing growers who farm organically or biodynamically for the great majority of the bottles on the list. It is a natural-wine list built for drinking rather than for showing off, in keeping with the room's unfussy character.

05When to go and booking

Mieux serves lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday; in October 2026 its own site lists hours of midday to 2.30pm and 7.30pm to 10.30pm, with tables bookable online or by phone. The nearest station is Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, a short walk from the restaurant's door, in a part of the 9th arrondissement where office lunches give way to neighbourhood regulars by evening.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.