Nhome – one table, one star, opposite the Palais-Royal

Down a few stone steps on the quiet rue de Montpensier, facing the gardens of the Palais-Royal, Nhome occupies a vaulted cellar that once hid a libertine club and, so the story goes, a nineteenth-century bakery laboratory where the croissant itself may have been born. Chef Matan Zaken turned the space into something equally unexpected: a restaurant with no separate tables, only one long table where up to eighteen diners share a blind, ten-course tasting menu that changes with the morning's deliveries. It holds One MICHELIN Star. There is no menu to study in advance and no quiet corner to hide in; the chefs themselves carry out each plate and explain it, course by course, in a room built for conversation between strangers. The result reads less like fine dining than like a private dinner party that happens to be cooked with real technique and judged by the red guide.

01The room and the setting

Nhome's cellar has had several lives before this one. Local reporting on the address notes that number 41 rue de Montpensier once housed a libertine club, and that in the nineteenth century a bakery laboratory stood on the same spot — one said, by local legend, to be where the croissant was invented. Zaken and his team kept the bones of the place: exposed stone, a low vault, and a sense of being somewhere slightly secret just behind the Palais-Royal gardens.

For the room itself, Zaken worked with designer Guillaume Terver of Studio leLAD to build the space around a single majestic table rather than a conventional dining room split into covers. Guests first pass an open kitchen visible from the entrance and a smaller table close to the brigade's energy, before reaching the main room and its 18-seat table, cut and curved to a bespoke design. The crockery carrying each course was designed in-house with ceramicist Amanda Haeghen, giving the tableware the same handmade, unrepeatable character as the room around it.

02The chef

Matan Zaken is a Franco-Israeli chef who arrived at his own address after a deliberately itinerant career. He trained in the kitchens of Frenchie in London under Greg Marchand and at Le Cinq, the Four Seasons George V's three-starred dining room, under Christian Le Squer, gathering a classical, technical base before striking out on his own. In 2019 he launched Nhomade, a private catering outfit built around exceptional one-off dinners, cooking for fashion houses including Dior, Givenchy and Alaïa as well as for events such as Art Paris.

Insider tip

Book ahead — only one 18-seat table, dinner Mon–Fri, lunch Thu & Fri only.

Nhome, his first fixed address, opened on 19 September 2022, built on the conviction that the intimacy of those private Nhomade dinners could become a nightly restaurant experience rather than an occasional one. Eighteen months later, in March 2024, the kitchen he runs with his brigade earned Nhome its first MICHELIN Star — a distinction that arrived alongside two Gault & Millau toques and a rating of 14/20 from the same guide.

03The cooking

The format is fixed, the content is not: a ten-course tasting menu served completely blind, with no printed list of dishes to anticipate what arrives next. Seasonal produce dictates the kitchen's direction rather than the other way round, so the menu is rebuilt around what the market and the chef's own instinct deliver that week. Vegetarian options are available on request, worked into the same blind structure rather than offered as a separate track.

What stays constant is the manner of service: dishes are brought and explained by the cooks themselves, sauce poured or finished at the table, so that the line between kitchen and dining room all but disappears over the three-hour sitting.

04Wine and what to order

Because the food menu is blind, the only real choice at Nhome is whether to add wine. The house has built its own list in-house, and offers a five-glass discovery pairing to run alongside the ten courses, designed to follow the rhythm of a menu that only reveals itself as it arrives. Earlier editions of the pairing were curated by sommelier Ulysse Hivroz, given what the house calls carte blanche to build a list that answers to the kitchen's shifting repertoire course by course.

For those who want the experience without the full evening commitment, Nhome also runs a pre-theatre menu, served early in the sitting between 18:30 and 19:00 — a nod to the Comédie-Française just around the corner.

05When to go and booking

Nhome's own line is «book your chair, not your table» — a reminder that this is communal seating by design, not compromise. It is closed Saturday and Sunday.

With only eighteen seats at the main table, and the restaurant consistently full since opening, booking well ahead — directly by phone or through the restaurant's own site — is not optional.

06The neighbourhood

Nhome sits in the 1st arrondissement, close enough to the Jardin du Palais-Royal to borrow its quiet after dinner, and within a few minutes' walk of the Comédie-Française and the Louvre. The nearest metro station is Palais Royal – Musée du Louvre, served by lines 1 and 7, about five minutes on foot from the restaurant's door — making it an easy final stop after an afternoon in the museum's galleries or before an evening at the theatre next door.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.