Ritz Paris afternoon tea: Salon Proust, the €125 menu and how to book a table

Salon Proust is named for a writer who was loyal to the Ritz from its first years. Marcel Proust wrote, dined and entertained at the Ritz, and his favourite seat was beside the fireplace in a corner of the lobby, from which he watched the guests in the grand gallery for hours. The room that carries his name has wood panelling, shelves of vintage books, armchairs and an open fire on cold days.

The hour is older than the room. The 5 o’clock tea at the Ritz was established when the hotel opened in 1898, and was once known as «the magic hour». The version on the table today belongs to Olivier Lainé, a Breton and the son of a chef, who taught for 8 years at the École Ritz Escoffier and has led all of the hotel’s pastry since January 2026. The tea is the newest of his menus.

He builds it like a French lunch. First a savoury course; then what he calls the bridge, something slightly savoury treated as a dessert, such as burrata with vinegar or pear in vinaigrette; then a third course that is all sweet. On 11 October 2026 the card printed 12 lines under one heading, in this order: blue lobster French toast, smoked trout roe, salmon-filled croustade, Parisian-style vegetable brunoise, homemade roll, roasted vegetable jus, burrata cream with pear, buckwheat baba, «herbaceous kiwi», sunflower blossom and Earl Grey tea, bergamot lemon and lemon balm, and «my dad’s chocolate charlotte». The card does not mark where one course ends and the next begins. The burrata with pear matches Lainé’s own example of the bridge, which puts the lobster, the trout roe and the salmon before it and the baba and the charlotte after; that division is our reading. Lainé says the charlotte looks plain from outside and hides its layers until it is cut.

The one menu on sale comes with the champagne or its alcohol-free alternative, and a hot drink for each person: the salon’s list has rare teas, chocolates and what the hotel calls a world tour of coffees. From 6pm the room doubles as a champagne bar, so the last hour of tea overlaps with it.

The hotel’s page disagrees with itself on one point. Under «Food restrictions» it says that this «is a sweet tea time only», while the same page calls the tea «a sweet and savoury culinary interlude» and the card opens with lobster. The hotel does not explain the line. It may be left over from the tea served before: a visitor of October 2025 described that one as «100% sweet things only», and 2 reviews of 2025 name François Perret as its pastry chef. The hotel gives no date for the change of menu, so read the reviews of 2025 as accounts of the earlier tea, and those of the first months of 2026 with that doubt in mind.

This year’s visitors mostly write about the service, and none of the reviews read describes the savoury course. One in April found the tea very generous and the pastries neither too sweet nor heavy; a family in June praised service that was attentive and discreet; a first-time visitor in September thanked 2 of them for their advice. A woman who came in July after shopping on Place Vendôme saw hotel guests seated ahead of her, was given a table by the door and found the service slow, though she praised her waitress. In February another wrote that she had been turned away for the third time.

At Le Meurice tea is served in Restaurant Le Dalí and ends on Cédric Grolet’s fruit-shaped desserts; it costs €95 a person, and champagne is ordered apart, from €36 a glass. On Sundays it is served only from 4.30pm to 5.15pm.

Le Bristol serves its tea at Café Antonia in 3 stages, savoury bites, a pre-dessert and pastries, with a glass of champagne or a sparkling drink without alcohol, for €95. At the Four Seasons George V the pastry chef Michael Bartocetti’s tea adds a bakery piece by the head baker Guillaume Cabrol, made to share.