Le Grand Café: Paris Remembering What It Does Best

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Walk into the Grand Palais from the Champs-Élysées side and you arrive somewhere the building has clearly been waiting to show off. Under the Rotonde Clemenceau, beneath columns that have stood since 1900, Le Grand Café has opened its doors — and it isn't shy about the setting it's been handed.

Under the Rotunda

The address is 1 Place Clemenceau, in the Rotonde Clemenceau wing of the Grand Palais. Le Grand Café arrived in summer 2025, the latest chapter after four years of restoration led by François Chatillon, an official Chief Architect of Historic Monuments (architectes en chef des monuments historiques – ACMH)—holding the prestigious state title given to the guardians of France's national treasures, from the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe to the Château de Chambord. Three hundred and ten seats, a terrace that runs the length of a colonnade, and enough original Beaux-Arts detail overhead to make you forget, briefly, that you're here for dinner and not a history lesson.

Quite the Family Business

The name behind the restaurant is Loulou Groupe, founded by siblings Gilles and Claire Malafosse — the third generation of a Parisian restaurant family, following their father, who ran the well-known Le Flandrin in the 16th arrondissement.

Gilles tried a handful of internships at a corporate law firm, but it never quite clicked; an apprenticeship at his father's restaurant in 2004 pulled him back in, and he struck out on his own that same year with his first restaurant, Pétrus. What followed was a decade of addresses that came to define a certain image of fashionable Paris — Monsieur Bleu, Girafe, Perruche — built in partnership with restaurateur Laurent de Gourcuff.

Claire took a different road there. She spent years practising as a criminal defence lawyer in Montreal before deciding to leave the law behind and join her brother in Paris, against their father's wishes — he knew exactly how punishing the restaurant world could be, and tried to talk her out of it. She went anyway.

In 2016, Gilles and Claire broke away to build something of their own: he handed his earlier restaurants to his former partner, and together with a trusted friend and investor, they launched Loulou Groupe, opening first inside the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, looking out over the Tuileries.

The instinct hasn't changed since — a landmark setting, a view worth sitting still for. Even the brand's signature yellow-and-white stripe, designed by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, carries a bit of that same spirit: a little playful, more than a little theatrical, never quite blending in.

A Building Left to Do the Talking

The restaurant's real luxury is what was already there before anyone touched it: mosaic friezes by the artist Louis Fournier, charting the history of art across civilisations — Asian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine motifs on one loggia, medieval and Renaissance scenes running along the other. Interior designer Joseph Dirand has treated this as a given rather than a challenge to solve, adding only what the room seemed to be asking for. Under the colonnade, fluted stone columns rise toward carved capitals, and one deep, shell-shaped niche has been fitted with its own private banquette. The floor is laid in an intricate mosaic pattern, the kind that looks like it's earned its wear rather than been freshly installed.

What Dirand has brought in sits quietly alongside all of that: woven rattan bistro chairs, banquettes built directly into the stone and dressed in sage green, terracotta urns overflowing with magnolia and Japanese maple, iron lanterns strung along the colonnade for when the light starts to fade. White linen and glassware round out the picture. Landscape designer Thierry Boutemy has treated the terrace like a suspended garden above the Champs-Élysées, so that outside and in feel like two rooms in conversation rather than a restaurant with a nice view attached.

Brasserie Cooking, Taken Seriously

In the kitchen, Benoît Dargère, Loulou Groupe's executive chef, keeps close to the vocabulary of a classic French brasserie — duck foie gras, turbot quenelles, a peppered beef fillet — while letting in the occasional detour south, toward tomato, fig, and buffalo mozzarella with Parma ham, or further still, to a lobster tempura built on avocado, ginger, and lemongrass. The seafood bar is built for sharing, and the dessert menu doesn't try to reinvent anything, which is very much the point.

Behind the bar, Colin Field — thirty years spent perfecting cocktails at the Ritz's Hemingway Bar — pours a Dry Martini with the kind of restraint that comes from decades of practice, alongside a Bloody Mary and the restaurant's already-cult Loulou's Spritz.

Quietly, Into the Night

This isn't really a place built for a quick bite between exhibitions, though it can absolutely serve that purpose. Le Grand Café runs from midday into the early hours, and certain evenings bring live jazz drifting through the room — a register that borrows from Paris's great old brasseries without trying too hard to imitate them.

For Muse, this is what happens when a family that has spent three generations feeding Paris finally gets handed a room worthy of the effort — and has the good sense to mostly get out of its way.