Anne-Sophie Pic opens her new Paris restaurant today on the ground floor of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, on Place du Palais-Royal, inside the former Louvre des Antiquaires. The name doesn’t overthink it: the restaurant is simply called Anne-Sophie Pic Paris.
Pic, the only female chef in France holding three Michelin stars, still runs her flagship restaurant, Maison Pic, in Valence. Her previous Paris address, La Dame de Pic, closed on Rue du Louvre after thirteen years, and this new spot takes over. Expect her “Impregnation” approach here, a technique built around letting flavors infuse into one another rather than simply stacking them on the plate.
The opening happened in two stages. The Utopic bar came first, on September 4, open daily from 5 p.m. to midnight with no reservation needed. The full restaurant follows two weeks later. Both spaces were designed by the Moinard Betaille agency, with tables meant to sit in conversation with the artwork displayed upstairs.
Putting a Michelin-starred table inside an art institution rather than a palace hotel is a real departure for a house as codified as Pic’s. The bet assumes a mixed crowd: regular fine-dining guests on one side, museum visitors who decide to stay for dinner on the other. Whether the Impregnation style, built for the hushed dining rooms of Valence, keeps its intensity in a space designed first for contemporary art, remains to be seen.
Between the closing of La Dame de Pic and this two-stage bar-and-restaurant launch inside three weeks, Anne-Sophie Pic’s Paris comeback isn’t going unnoticed.