The pick of this year’s entries for the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, as selected by Time Out Paris:
In a modern-day gastronomic and architectural fairy-tale, avant-garde Spanish designer Jaime Hayón and chef Antonin Bonnet, formerly of Mayfair’s The Greenhouse, have rescued a former pub on the Ile St Louis from a future of tourists and bad beer and turned it into a princess among restaurants.
Stone walls and a medieval-inspired decor are finished with modern white and green touches that work with the changes in daylight, bright and clean during the day and romantic and sophisticated in the evening. Enormous mirrors shaped like suits of armour set the tone, and the rooms are open and spacious, with a glassed-off kitchen overlooking a dining room done out in handsome, solid wooden tables, banquettes and sofas.
The ‘carte blanche’ menus (€65 or €95 at lunch, €95 or €145 at dinner) offer daring versions of classic French dishes cooked with ingredients carefully selected from the best producers – dishes that have quickly earned the Sergent a Michelin star.
Amelie Weill, Food & Drink editor, Time Out Paris
Sergent Recruteur. 41 rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, 4e, Paris, France. +33 1 43 54 75 42.
Elsa Pereira, food critic and Theatre editor at Time Out Paris, on Le 110 de Taillevent:
Elegant design and genuine French cuisine go hand in hand at the Gardinier brothers' new brasserie. One hundred and ten wines from the Taillevent vaults are on offer at the brasserie, and are skilfully matched to the cooking, with four wines at various price levels recommended for each dish. Impressive as this is, it's impossible not to appreciate the perfectly matched decor created by architect Pierre-Yves Rochon. Wholesome oak abounds, with emerald green flasksarranged in wooden racks, gilded frescoes of vineyards painted by Thierry Bruet and black and white photographs of grape-pickers hung on the walls; it's an ode to vineyards and the scent of wine barrels.
When it comes to the food, as befits a wine-worshipper's paradise chef Emile Cotte's menu concentrates on flavour and aroma, with things like golden, crispy calamari topped with fine slices of chorizo and Espelette pepper, roasted duckling and caramelised endives with gingerbread, or for dessert, iced nougat melting beneath strawberries spiked with balsamic vinegar.
Le 110 de Taillevent. 195 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 8e, Paris, France. +33 1 40 74 20 20. www.taillevent.com/les-110-de-taillevent-brasserie.
More on Le 110 de Taillevent from Time Out Paris