Ritz Paris restaurant guide: Espadon, Bar Vendôme, tea at Salon Proust and the Sunday brunch

Espadon opens onto the Grand Jardin, with a terrace under the trees for warm evenings and an open kitchen that you see through bay windows as you come in. Eugénie Béziat cooks French food coloured by a childhood in Africa and family summers in Provence. The restaurant won its Michelin star in March 2024, the only one on Place Vendôme, a month after it was given 3 Ecotable macarons for sustainable cooking. The herbs come from a garden inside the hotel and the vegetables from the Ritz’s own kitchen garden at Versailles.

The menus have names. Esquisse is 3 «sequences» at €190, offered on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; Correspondences is 5 at €250; Illuminations, 7 at €320. From the carte, artichoke with rosemary and sunflower is €90, spiny lobster with verbena and fir tips €140, pigeon with red pepper and saffron €140, veal sweetbreads with sorrel and tobacco leaf €150, and either dessert €45. 2 wine pairings are listed beside each menu, each on a line of its own: «Souvenirs» at €170, €230 or €300, and «Legendary», from the most famous vineyards, at €320, €450 or €650.

One date stands apart. On Friday 23 October 2026, for the restaurant’s third anniversary, Anne-Sophie Pic cooks beside Béziat: 8 courses from 7pm at €333 a person without drinks, €633 with wines and €983 with the grander pairing. Sea urchin from Galicia, berlingots with Banon cheese and matcha, and a Normandy scallop are on the card.

Bar Vendôme is the hotel’s brasserie and its all-day room: banquettes, velvet, portraits of famous regulars, and a patio under a Belle Époque glass roof where a pianist plays jazz in the early evening. In fine weather it spreads onto a terrace by the fountain, open from noon to 10pm, no reservation required. At lunch the menu has a dish of the day at €68, vegetable risotto at €52, spaghettoni with lobster at €98, a Caesar salad at €55 and a chicken club sandwich at €62. At dinner a Josper charcoal oven takes over: sirloin at €105, grilled blue lobster at €125, a 1.4 kg rib of beef at €285, and turbot meunière for 2 at €189. Every dessert is €25.

Breakfast is served twice: from 7am to 8.45am in the Salon Marie-Louise, then from 9am to 11am at Bar Vendôme. The Vendôme breakfast, with juice, a hot drink, pastries, yoghurt and cereal or fruit, is €62; the Ritz breakfast adds eggs Benedict or French toast and costs €74. Between 3pm and 6pm the brasserie serves burgers, salads and a croque-monsieur with truffle cream at €56. On Wednesdays from 8pm there is live music, a different mood each week of the month, with a 3-course dinner at €130.

Tea is taken in Salon Proust, panelled in wood and lined with old books, with a fire in winter; Proust’s own seat, the hotel says, was next to a fireplace. The pastry chef Olivier Lainé’s tea «à la française» comes with a glass of brut champagne, or a sparkling drink without alcohol, and a hot drink. The current menu begins with savouries, among them a blue-lobster French toast and a salmon croustade, and ends on what the card calls his dad’s chocolate charlotte. From 6pm the salon becomes a champagne bar.

On Sundays Le Grand Brunch fills the hotel’s salons: buffets from France, Asia and the Mediterranean, plant-based dishes, house pastries and a pianist. A family who went in September 2026 called it generous and the service equal to the room; a couple with a small daughter, in June, found nothing to fault. In September, too, a visitor thanked 2 members of staff by name after tea in Salon Proust, and in August a diner praised the food, the pianist and the staff at Bar Vendôme. Breakfast divides people more: one guest in September singled out the French toast, and one in July waited 45 minutes for an omelette.

Espadon has one star and serves dinner only. Epicure, at Le Bristol, has 3 under Arnaud Faye and opens for lunch as well as dinner from Tuesday to Saturday; a jacket is compulsory. Le Meurice Alain Ducasse, 2 stars, works on weekdays, with dinner from 7pm and a chef’s-table lunch at noon, and closes for the whole of August.

Le Cinq, at the Four Seasons George V, holds 3 stars under Christian Le Squer, who has led it since 2014; its page lists dinner from Tuesday to Saturday.