Petit Boutary – Benin flavours behind a chequerboard floor in Batignolles

On a quiet street in the Épinettes corner of the 17th arrondissement, a few minutes from the cafés of Batignolles, Petit Boutary carries a well-known name lightly. It is the right-bank, more relaxed address of Maison Boutary, the caviar and wine house founded in 1888 in south-west France, which today runs three Paris restaurants and a fourth venue in Tokyo's Akasaka district under its red-and-black colours. Charles de Saint Vincent moved the Maison's restaurant into these premises – formerly the bistro La Tête de Goinfre – in June 2018, and since March 2024 the kitchen has belonged to chef Roméo Agbodjan, who cooks a single surprise tasting menu that changes with the market, the season and his own mood. It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide, a classification that falls short of a star but marks out a kitchen worth watching on a street where nothing on the façade gives away what happens inside.

01The room and the setting

Petit Boutary occupies two spaces built for two moods: a bistro dining room dressed in the Maison's colours, with a broad counter and small square wooden tables, and, beside it, "La Table du Chef", looking directly into a kitchen left wide open for anyone who wants to watch Roméo Agbodjan work. In the warmer months the restaurant spills onto a terrace large enough, and sunny enough, to make it one of the Batignolles quarter's better lunch spots outdoors.

The address has its own small history: before Charles de Saint Vincent installed the Maison's right-bank outpost here in June 2018, the premises belonged to a bistro called La Tête de Goinfre. Rue Jacquemont, a short residential street in the quartier des Épinettes on the fringe of Batignolles, takes its name from the nineteenth-century botanist and traveller Victor Jacquemont – a detail few diners register on their way past the brasseries of Place Clichy to find the door.

02The chef

Roméo Agbodjan took over the stove in March 2024, bringing a route into French cooking that started a long way from the 17th arrondissement. Born in Benin, he cooked there before a connection made through the Rotary Club brought him to France to pursue classical, "escoffière" training. He was formed at Le Pergolèse under Stéphane Gaboriau, Meilleur Ouvrier de France 2004, and then at Le Divellec on the edge of the Esplanade des Invalides – two addresses that explain the precision now visible in his fish cookery.

Insider tip

Open Tue–Sat for lunch and dinner; no fixed menu; nearest metro La Fourche, Line 13.

Seafood remains his private passion as much as his professional one: Agbodjan fishes in his own time, and counts it good fortune that his current kitchen belongs to a house that also produces its own caviar.

03The cooking

There is no printed menu to study before arriving. Agbodjan works with total freedom in the kitchen, and nothing is listed in advance for diners to choose course by course. What lands on the table depends on the market, the season, and, as the house itself puts it, the chef's mood on the day.

The evening's longest format carries a name worth knowing: Carte Blanche "Tchigan", Tchigan meaning "prestige" in the Mina language, a tasting menu that draws on flavours running from Benin to Ethiopia. Running through every menu, whatever its length, is the Maison's own caviar, raised on a sturgeon farm the family keeps in Bulgaria – the ingredient that gives the restaurant, and its grander Left Bank sibling, their name.

04What to order

The dish regulars describe before they can remember its name is the house's edible signature: potato set on a cream and crowned with a generous quenelle of caviar. On the current menu it appears as the Pomme de terre au caviar Boutary, offered as a supplement to the tasting menu, and it has also turned up on the table as a crushed potato with Isigny cream and a quenelle of Baeri caviar.

For anyone who wants the Maison's defining ingredient on its own terms, caviar tastings start at €15. At lunch the kitchen runs a two-course menu for €35 (Tuesday to Friday), a three-course menu for €42 and a four-course tasting menu for €55; in the evening the dégustation runs to four courses for €65, five for €79, or the full Carte Blanche "Tchigan" for €109 – prices read on the restaurant's own site in October 2026.

05The neighbourhood

Rue Jacquemont sits in the quartier des Épinettes, the quieter edge of a Batignolles that has filled in recent years with wine bars and small galleries without losing its village scale. The nearest metro is La Fourche, on line 13, a few minutes' walk away.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.