With art nouveau décor made especially for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, and some contemporary touches added by the new owner after 2011, le Pharamond is beautifully preserved and looking good. When we learned that it’s possible to book a private room for dinner, we thought we’d test the place out and see if the food is as impressive as the setting.

Here’s how it went…

One of the landmark restaurants of the central Les Halles area since 1879, le Pharamond is proud of its heritage, but not afraid to embrace the future. On the ground floor, you’ll find a typical ‘1900s bistrot’ décor amazingly well preserved. We found it very impressive.The first floor can seat 40 people, has a high ceiling, a beautiful turning wooden staircase, and a few contemporary touches, such as modern photos or designer lighting.But we were eager to see the private rooms on the floor above. There aren’t many restaurants in Paris that offer this service, and with a small supplement (around 10€ per person) two to twelve people can have their own special little room! The Alexandre salon is the biggest, then there’s the Orient Express salon ,the Cloud salon (the most ‘design’ of them all), and our salon, the Feathers salon.Here’s our quick film to show you around the private rooms…

It felt like a great priviledge to have this room to ourselves (actually, there was no-one at all on our floor, and no-one on the floor below either). There was a button for calling the waiter if necessary, a view onto the buzzing pedestrian street out front, and we’d even brought our own mini sound system in order to drown out Amy Winehouse playing on the restaurant’s speakers.

It was a warm evening, so we opened the window and let ourselve soak in the atmosphere of Les Halles…But despite loving the ambiance and décor, a few little things started to mar our experience. A waiter came into the room visibly sweating from the heat (as well as running up two flights of stairs) and he stank of cigarettes. Two minutes later, a different waiter came, and he smelled really strongly of body odour. Not great.

So we concentrated ourselves on the menu, which is pretty classic with a good selection of meat  Unusually, most fo the dishes are marked with an asterisk to show that they were prepared entirely in-house, which is quite rare in Paris.

There are a number of fixed price menus that aren’t excessively priced (from 15€ to 40€) and you can even get 40% of the à a carte menu if you book via The Fork, although you’ll have to enter into their crazily strict criteria – no reduction on fixed price menus, no reduction on drinks, you have to be between 2 and 4 people, each person has to order at least a starter and a main course or a main course and a dessert, and after all that there are certain times of day when the reduction doesn’t apply! Wow.

After a sparkling wine cocktail, we ordered some red wine, just one starter  à base de crémant, nous avons commandé du vin, une seule entrée (pressed chicken with basil, served with a port caramel) and our main dishes. A little pre-starter was brought in too – fromage frais and some toast.The pressed chicken was alright but not memorable, and we chatter and took the time to enjoy our private room (we had paid for it, after all). The waiter came in (we didn’t ring for him) and asked if we were ready for the main course. We said we hadn’t quite finished the starter, but that didn’t stop him from coming back immediately and placing the main dishes on the table – he’d obviously brought them up already and had no alternative but to serve them.

Although we were still munching our first courses, the table was now filled with the main dishes too – chicken breast with mashed potatoes, roasted cod with a fennel and dill salad, and pan fried scallops with seasonal vegetables.Although the presentation wasn’t too bad, bringing the plates up two floors from the kitchen had not been kind to our meals – they were warmish instead of hot. Worse still, they turned out to be rather greasy and not very tasty. Disappointing.

We did however decide to continue with a cheese dish and three desserts – a domed citrus fruit cake with fresh mint jelly, eggy bread with salted caramel ice cream, and Normandy ice cream. 10€ seemed a little steep for three small slices of cheese (good as they were) and the desserts were as washed out as the dinner – the eggy bread was dull, and the Normandy ice creams (the most expensive dessert at over 10 euros) had no taste to them. Oh, and where was that ‘fresh mint jelly’ we were promised? Disastrous.And so Le Pharamond left us with mixed feelings. The décor is amazing and tastefully done. However, The food is pretty bland. Why boast that you’ve made it all yourself, if you’re not going to make it well? Prices are more or less correct for the area, but service was disorganised, and the food not hot (in both senses of the word). What a shame.

On a positive note, we did love our little salon (a little extravagance) that left us with the impression of  a special evening nonetheless. If only the food were as impressive as the décor, the Pharamond could easily be one of our favourite eating places in Paris.

Le Pharamond (here) is open every day of the week for lunch and dinner.

Telephone: +33 (0)1 40 28 45 18

e-mail: le.pharamond@orange.fr

Online booking: ici

Official site (in English): www.pharamond.fr

To check out all our photos of the Le Pharamond , click the play button below, then click the four little arrows bottom right to go into fullscreen mode.