You may not know, but the centre of Paris has seen some major restyling in the last few years – huge travel hub and shopping centre Le Forum des Halles has been completely overhauled and the difference is huge (only the garden has yet to be completely finished). New boutiques and restaurants are part of the facelift, which explains the presence of smart new restaurant Champeaux.

Designed to continue the grand tradition of the Parisian brasserie (classic dishes available all day) and bring it into the 21st century, it could have been a pretentious and overpriced tourist trap with disappointing food.

But it’s not! Michelin star chef Alain Ducasse – who also helms the Jules Verne on the Eiffel Tower, as well as quite a few other places – has another success on his hands!

Here’s our review.

The Forum des Halles has four basements – luckily Champeaux is outside on the ground floor, and couldn’t be easier to find. The restaurant has a view of the gardens (at least it will do in 2018) and is apparently Alain Ducasse’s eleventh venue in Paris (he has more abroad). It’s a vast space that takes the best of the past and tries to push it into the future.

This choice of modernity is in harmony with the new ‘canopy’, as the big roof over the shopping centre is called. The huge metal structure went way over budget, and not everyone agrees it looks very nice (especially that colour), but if you knew the old space, the change is a radical one.
Champeaux is on the corner of one of the buildings, with a great view of Saint-Eustache. You’ll be able to people watch to your heart’s content, or get a table nearer the centre of the restaurant if you want a little intimacy.

The restaurant’s interior design is vaguely industrial, with the white air conditioning pipes apparent (much like the nearby Pompidou Centre), giving a retro-futurist look to the place. The lighting is subtle (we’ve accentuated it a little for our shots) and each table has a dimmable LED light with a concrete base that all the tables around us would gladly have stolen had it not been so bulky and heavy.

One wall of the restaurant near the kitchens has the sort of large display you might have found in airports in the 1970s, clicking away with the list of dishes on offer (and their prices). It’s a cool touch that we appreciated from afar, but may be a little too much if you’re sat next to it.
For a big restaurant in the heart of Paris, run by a chef with more Michelin stars than anyone else we know, the prices are not too harsh. Perhaps there’s a desire to honour the working class roots of the area, which was originally a huge market, “the belly of Paris”?

The dish of the day changes every day, and a main course will cost you between 20€ and 25€. The drinks are a little steeper in price though – be careful when ordering as the bill can quickly go up!

(click the image below to check out the main menu and shorter afternoon menu)

So there we find ourselves, comfortably sat in a restaurant confidently mixing old and new. The bread basket looks traditional, but it’s made of woven metal. The serviettes are cotton, the cutlery is smart, the table’s a slab of marble. You can tell that someone has thought about these details and invested in quality materials…
Anyway, time to eat! We decided to start with a classic – prawn cocktail with avocado “our way” (as it says on the menu) and “raw/cooked seasonal vegetables, with a top and herb pesto”.

It’s rare that one of our meals starts on such a positive note. The salad was a little plate of poetry, crunchy and humble – no over-fussy details – and the prawns were almost as soft and tasty as the avocado. The lemon hints in the sauce were great too. Exceptional stuff.
For the main courses we chose the mini macaroni (coquillettes) with ham, comté cheese and black truffle (without the ham) and a cheese soufflé (not often seen on menus, as it’s rather fiddly to prepare) accompanied by homemade chips and a half bottle of white wine.

Once again we were pretty amazed how lovely it all was. The pasta was in a rich sauce which smelt heavily of truffle – such a delicious smell – and the cute little soufflé was perfectly prepared. Even the wine was outstanding!

The only little problems were that the wine took a good ten minutes to turn up, and the order for the chips was forgotten, meaning that they arrived after the soufflé had been finished and had to be eaten alone.
The mains were of a decent size, but it required a certain effort on our part to order dessert. As you may know by now, we’re always ready for a challenge (!) so we decided on a lemon tart with a scoop of sorbet, and chocolate mousse using chocolate from Ducasse’s very own chocolate factory (more about this in our article about the best chocolate shops on the Left Bank).

Both were delicious, especially the chocolate mousse – so light, so creamy, with lovely shavings of chocolate on top. Actually, we could probably have eaten two!
And to finish off, a little espresso with a cute chocolate and a triple reminder of the restaurant’s smart logo…
What a successful meal! The service is adorable (a young but efficient team), the interior design is perfect, the prices are average for the area and the food itself was memorable.

We can’t wait to go back once the garden is completely visible (or even before).

The restaurant Champeaux (here) is open every day from 11.30am to midnight (1am Thursday-Saturday)

Tel: +33 (0)1 53 45 84 50

Online booking: here

Website: www.restaurant-champeaux.com

Facebook: facebook.com/alainducasse

Instagram: instagram.com/alainducasse

To check out all our photos of Champeaux, simply click here.