Vendémiaire – Paris brasserie named for Napoleon's nickname

Vendémiaire holds a prized corner of the Gros-Caillou, the hushed pocket of the 7th arrondissement between Les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower, in a dining room that still keeps the white marble counter of its predecessor, Jacques Lacipière's Chez les Anges. It opened in July 2024 under the impetus of Vendémiaire Nadd-Mitterrand, a former lawyer and property developer turned restaurateur, who named his restaurant after himself and, through him, after Vendémiaire, the grape-harvest month of the French Republican calendar and the nickname Napoleon earned after crushing a royalist rising on 13 Vendémiaire before the Église Saint-Roch. It is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide. The kitchen passed in November 2025 to chef Jeffrey Quetin, who succeeded opening chef Santiago Guerrero, and today cooks seasonal brasserie dishes a few streets from the Invalides dome and Napoleon's own tomb.

01The room and the setting

The redesign came from Black Balloon Agency, led by Joaquin Jacom-Giler with Julien Roche, working alongside the owner's wife, Laetitia. Marble, wood, earthenware and stucco mix under a play of mirrors in the main dining room, and a large terrace runs along the boulevard frontage for days when Paris allows lunch outside. The private lounge, hung with photographs of sportsmen and women who have shaped sporting history, takes parties of three to twelve for business lunches, seminars or family celebrations.

02The chef

Jeffrey Quetin took over the stoves in November 2025, succeeding opening chef Santiago Guerrero. Only 32, he trained at Bruneau in Brussels and Le Trou Gascon before moving through Maison Rostang and L'Orangerie at the George V, and spent his last post as sous-chef at the three-Michelin-starred Le Gabriel inside La Réserve Paris. Guerrero, a Swiss-Colombian chef who had cooked at the Pré Catelan and the Prince de Galles before leading kitchens at Biondi, Maison Mère and the Terrass Hotel, opened Vendémiaire's kitchen in 2024 alongside pastry chef Asia Goncalves, who joined from Lenôtre. Eloi Poch now runs the dining room.

Insider tip

Open Monday–Saturday; book ahead for the terrace or the 12-seat private lounge.

03The cooking

Quetin's carte stays close to the house's founding brief: French classics made in-house, using neighbourhood suppliers wherever possible. Oysters from Isigny arrive with lime, daikon, apple and nashi pear; a pork pâté en croûte comes with pistachios, foie gras and a red-berry chutney; and a pike quenelle is finished the old way, with Nantua sauce and mashed potato. A beef selection runs to a kilogram rib of Holstein beef, dry-aged forty days and carved for two at the table, alongside a 300g Pie Noir de Bretagne rib-eye and a Simmental tenderloin with pepper sauce.

04What to order

Start with the Vendémiaire-style eggs mayonnaise, sharpened with jalapeño and Espelette pepper, or the marinated sardines with fried courgette blossom and white peach. The croque-monsieur, built on twenty-four-month Comté and Prince de Paris ham, is a comptoir classic; so is the pike quenelle with Nantua sauce. For dessert, the red berry pavlova with yoghurt and basil sorbet cuts cleanly through a meal built on beef and butter.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar is a joint project between Nadd-Mitterrand and his friend Thierry Guémas, whom the house calls its 'red eminence and partisan-caviste'. Bottles are chosen glass by glass and bottle by bottle by sommelier Gabriel Raffard, ranging across Burgundy, the Jura, the Loire, Languedoc and Champagne. At the comptoir, mornings run on coffee roasted in the Paris region and croissants from Maison Bergeron, while evenings turn to a cocktail list and French pop under candlelight.

06When to go and booking

Vendémiaire serves lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday. Book ahead for the terrace or the private lounge, especially given the steady flow of visitors to the nearby Invalides.

07The neighbourhood

Nadd-Mitterrand grew up a few streets away, in the Gros-Caillou, and says the restaurant began as a childhood idea: a grand table big enough for family, friends and every passer-by on the Champ de Mars. Fifty years on, he opened it in the same quartier, between the gold dome of the Invalides and the iron lattice of the Eiffel Tower, a short walk from both Napoleon's tomb and the ministries of the 7th arrondissement.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.