What It’s Like to Eat a Mostly Vegetarian Lunch at L’Arpège in Paris

See what it’s like to eat the vegetable menu at L’Arpège, a three-star Michelin restaurant in the heart of Paris. Spoiler Alert: It was one of our favorite meals of the year!

Nordic dining standard bearer Noma serves an all veg menu to summer diners. In fact, if you subtracted the few meat dishes from the Copenhagen restaurant’s Game and Forest menu we enjoyed last fall, the remaining dishes would be remarkably more vegan than those served at L’Arpège.

But that diminishes nothing from Passard’s genius and his mostly all vegetable menu that draws heavily from his farms outside Paris. There’s an almost Beethoven-esque quality to his food which is not as much about innovation as it is about expression and refinement.

Brief History of Arpege in Paris

In many ways, the history of L’Arpège parallels the history of its owner, Alain Passard. The restaurant and the chef are intertwined.

Passard earned his first Michelin star in 1987 and quickly secured his second in 1988 and third in 1996. He’s been featured for decades on International food shows like the original Iron Chef in Japan and received a glowing tribute on Netflix’s Chef’s Table, France. L’Arpège currently occupies the 31st spot on Pellegrino’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

Receiving those accolades and maintaining three stars for more than two decades are feats for any restaurant. It’s especially notable considering the monumental menu changes that Passard instituted in 2001.

Passard started cooking exclusively with vegetables that year. No chicken. No beef. No seafood. Instead, he elevated the natural bounty grown on his farms to the main event.

It should be noted that Passard’s current menu is not vegan or even vegetarian in the strictest sense. Rather, we call the menu vegetable-forward and, as omnivores, we would have it no other way. In our opinion the world does indeed need to eat less meat; however, we believe this can be accomplished in a way that doesn’t necessarily omit all animal products from a menu.

Passard’s brilliant carpaccio of vegetables proves that point. Sure, the rainbow of sliced radishes works as a base element to the dish. But Passard is able to see the need for something more – more in this case being bottarga from Kalamata, Greece.

The dish, if nothing else, should be lauded for its immaculate execution. Radishes provide a vegetal sweetness against a background funk of bottarga. Meanwhile, crunchy crystals of sea salt complete every bite. Since Passard studied at the foot of Nouvelle cuisine masters like Alain Senderens, you can taste that wisdom at L’Arpége.

L’Arpège’s menu is filled with classics like the restaurant’s most iconic dish – Chaud-Froid d’Oeuf (i.e. Hot-Cold Egg). After two decades, it’s fair to say that Passard has perfected the art of filling an egg shell with cold cream, warm yolk and sweet maple syrup.

The creamy egg inside an egg would have also worked as a dessert. The sweetness of the custard yielded to savory, fatty egg yolk. Both of our eggs were sublime, not to mention perfectly symmetrical.

It’s a dish we’ve enjoyed at numerous luxury restaurants including Maison Bras and The French Laundry around the world. Passard’s version is, without a doubt, the best we’ve ever eaten.

Desserts at Arpege

Stuffing a large chocolate macaron with Jerusalem artichoke didn’t quite work as the result was too savory and earthy for our tastes. But we wholeheartedly approve of his porcini-shaped mocha profiteroles.

We also approved of Passard’s Mignardises selection that included sage-infused truffles, rosemary caramels, miniature apple tarts and celery macarons. Since we were literally stuffed to the gills, we ate the miniature French pastries the next morning for breakfast. If you’re curious, celery macarons taste much better than Jerusalem artichoke macarons.

Yes. We have to say that the Jerusalem Artichoke Macaron was a dud but it was the only bad dish in a meal where every course was remarkable. And, in a world that’s always trending toward the latest fashion or gimmick, it was refreshing to taste food born from an artist that understands culinary wonder.

Alain Passard is a genius and his vegetable focused menu justifies a lunch splurge.

Our Lunch at L’Arpège

We knew that lunch L’Arpège wouldn’t be cheap but we felt it would be a fitting climax to Daryl’s birthday celebration. We were neither wrong nor disappointed.

At the time of our visit, the restaurant offered three different lunch options – a mostly vegetarian multi-course Déjeuner des Jardiniers (i.e. gardener’s lunch) for 185€, a Terre & Mer (i.e. land & sea) multi-course lunch for 490€ and an à la carte menu with dishes ranging in price from 54€ to 240€.

We chose the gardener’s lunch option. Not only did this choice give us the biggest bang for our buck, or in this case euros, but it also let us virtually walk through the chef’s gardens based on the current bounty of the season.

While we weren’t in a rush, that may not be the best answer If you’re looking to make a late afternoon visit to the Louvre. Our lunch, which played out in twelve savory courses and three sweet courses, lasted four full hours.

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Original Publication Date: March 12, 2022