Paris’s Best Fine Dining Restaurants Are International

When Enrique Casarrubias came to Paris from Mexico in 2007, he had no intention to stay. He planned to follow a well-established playbook among international chefs, who make the pilgrimage to the French capital to study at prestigious culinary schools, train in Michelin-starred kitchens, and stage under mentors like Alain Ducasse, Pierre Gagnaire, and Alain Passard. After lining a CV with kitchen experience from the most demanding restaurants in the world, many chefs leave, able to secure support from investors to open restaurants in their home countries.

“In the beginning, our plan was to go back to Mexico after our studies,” Casarrubias says. “We said to ourselves that it would be easier financially to open [a restaurant] back home.” But his boss at the Michelin-starred Restaurant Akrame, French Algerian chef Akrame Benallal, encouraged Casarrubias and his wife, chef Montserrat Estrada (a vet of La Tour d’Argent and Le Meurice), to stay and open their dream restaurant in Paris.

“He said, ‘Enrique, the type of cuisine you want to do, no one else does here,’” Casarrubias says of Mexican fine dining. In 2018, he and Estrada opened Oxte near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris’s tony 17th arrondissement. It earned a Michelin star in 2021 for its “colorful, punchy and well-seasoned food.”

Paris has recognized plenty of international chefs in the top tier of its storied fine dining scene. Kei Kobayashi opened Restaurant Kei in 2011 to showcase his mastery of French flavors and techniques in haute cuisine; in 2020, it became the first restaurant helmed by a foreign-born chef to earn three Michelin stars in Paris.

But over the last decade or so, a generation of immigrant chefs has been shaking up Paris’s fine dining world. Instead of leaving to set up restaurants back home or twisting themselves to fit traditional molds of French fine dining, they’re opening up ambitious restaurants — including Michelin-starred restaurants like Brazilian chef Raphael Rego’s Oka and Japanese chef Yuichiro Akiyoshi’s Chakaiseki Akiyoshi — bearing their own personal signatures and taking creative liberties that bridge their lives in France with cuisines they grew up with.

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For chefs with fine dining ambitions, classic French gastronomy has always been a safe bet, particularly in Paris where expectations are high — and where everyone’s a critic.

“A lot of people in France and the food world still consider French cuisine to be the number one in terms of haute gastronomy,” says Christine Doublet, the deputy director of restaurant guide Le Fooding. And while sauces and dishes in the French repertoire may be rich and deep in flavor, French palates are famously spice-averse, Doublet adds, making it particularly tricky to introduce punchier cuisines. “I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the French aren’t super adventurous when it comes to big bold flavors.”

This kind of national pride can easily shape-shift into arrogance and disparagement of international cuisines.

Over the last few decades, though, consumers have become more curious about international cuisines, especially as they’ve encountered dishes through social media and international travel. This has been like a green light for immigrant chefs in fine dining to break out of the confines of classical French cuisine and inject more of their own heritage into their food.

“For a long time foreign chefs would stick to the very French lane,” Doublet says. “In the past few years, all these chefs with different backgrounds have been feeling like they have more freedom, [armed] with the basic [techniques] that they’ve acquired in French gastronomy, to go back to their roots and open mid-[tier] to fancy restaurants of their own.”

Before Casarrubias and Estrada opened Oxte, all that most Parisians knew of Mexican food was tacos, burritos, and guacamole. Mexican cuisine had enjoyed a wave of popularity about a decade earlier, when Parisian hipsters flocked to places like El Nopal, a shoebox-sized takeout taqueria that opened in 2010 in the gentrified Canal Saint-Martin neighborhood, and Candelaria, a 2011 speakeasy hidden by a taco bar in the Haut-Marais. But misconceptions remained. To the dismay of Mexican expats, the French confused Mexican cuisine with Tex-Mex, while fast-food chains selling “French Tacos” — flour tortilla-wrapped meat, fries, and cheese, flattened on the grill — did little to clear up the confusion.

Casarrubias wanted to show the French that Mexican cuisine could be refined, complex, and sophisticated. The restaurant’s base mole, for instance, is made from scratch with up to 40 ingredients, creating a tapestry of flavors layered enough to surprise unexpecting diners. Meanwhile, Estrada summons the flavors of her native Acapulco, Mexico in her signature sea bream ceviche, punctuated by a mild jalapeno sauce that shows off a nuanced, refreshing sense of spice.

Chef Park Ji-hye had a similar uphill battle on her hands. Until recently, Korean cuisine in Paris was relegated to bibimbap and barbecue.

“With bibimbap, you have to mix up all the ingredients, and in French culture you don’t mix food like that,” Park says. “It’s not sexy. It’s seen as pejorative.”

After arriving in France as a student in 1991, she worked for years as an interior designer before following her passion to cooking. She opened Oma (“mom” in Korean), her Korean bistro in the 9th arrondissement in 2017, where she would regularly sell out her signature mulhué. A dish typically eaten by fishermen while out at sea, mulhué traditionally consists of raw fish and vegetables in an icy, spicy red pepper broth. Park’s version is elegant, befitting Parisian sensibilities, with crystal ice pebbles soaking in a peppery pink broth, bejeweled with thin, translucent radish coins.

The recipe attracted the attention of hotelier and entrepreneur Olivier Bertrand, who was so impressed he invited her to relocate to the five-star boutique hotel Château des Fleurs, which he opened in 2023 off the Champs-Élysées. Once a bastion of French fine dining, the ritzy area has become home to international fine dining options like Oma and Oxte.

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For Casarrubias, who came to Paris at the age of 20 and threw himself into restaurant work, industry recognition was hard-earned.

“I’m very proud to have lived through that time,” he says. “It wasn’t our cuisine, it wasn’t our language, and it wasn’t our country. But I remember a chef told me that I can succeed if I work four times harder.”

That’s a sentiment shared by many immigrant chefs, including Alan Geaam. Fleeing the South Lebanon conflict in 1999, Geaam, then 24, paid human traffickers to bring him to Paris. He didn’t speak French, had the equivalent of 30 euros in his pocket, and slept in the streets. By day, he worked on construction sites, and at night, he worked as a dishwasher at a Lebanese restaurant, where he got his first big break when the chef was injured.

From there, he undertook a journey of merciless self-improvement, teaching himself French, gathering cookbooks, arriving early to shifts at French restaurants, and staying late. After 20 years of cooking French cuisine, Geaam felt it was time for his work to reflect that journey.

“I didn’t want to stay hidden behind a story that didn’t belong to me,” Geaam says. He decided to open a French Lebanese restaurant bearing his own name in 2017, Restaurant Alan Geaam in the 16th arrondissement. Six months later, his gamble paid off and Restaurant Alan Geaam earned a Michelin star.

At the restaurant, dishes evoke both France and Lebanon, like charcoal-blackened falafel served with smoked eel and chickpeas on a bed of creamy tahini, or pigeon cooked in a nutty, earthy buckwheat crust, offset by a tangy, sweet pomegranate glaze.

“Little by little, I saw that people were starting to grow curious about Lebanese gastronomy and I felt a lot of emotions when I started to mix the two cuisines,” Geaam says. “When you look at the plates, they’re very modern, very European, but you’ll always find the flavors of Lebanon in every dish.”

As Doublet points out, a quick study of the most successful immigrant chefs in Paris’s fine dining scene reveals a similar pattern: French techniques, international flavors.

“They’re taking a lot more liberties and freedom of expression playing with traditional French codes,” she says, “but using herbs, spices, pastes, and techniques from all over.”

One recurring dish at Oxte pays tribute to Casarrubias’s grandfather, a butcher in Mexico, while evoking boudin noir (blood sausage); the chef seasons his house-made sausage with chipotle and cinnamon and serves it with marinated octopus flavored with recado negro (a bold Yucatan chile paste) and a rich beet mole.

And at Oma, Park merges flavors that are comforting for Korean and French kids with her Oma rice; topped with soy sauce-braised beef, poached egg, seaweed, and marinated radish, it might remind French diners of coquillettes (macaroni, cheese, and ham).

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Growing interest in high-end global flavors might be the natural result of a harsh and ego-bruising truth: French gastronomy has lost some of its luster.

“At a certain point, you have to ask, ‘How many more classic French restaurants can you open?’ I think people want to try something different,” Doublet says.

The French government agrees. At a press conference to launch a new gastronomy program in April, French tourism minister Olivia Grégoire said competition from Asia, Spain, Denmark, and Peru had cast a shadow on France’s haute cuisine.

“[French] gastronomy has been facing the rise of foreign gastronomy since the end of the 1990s and has found itself left behind by the performance and influence of other countries,” Grégoire said.

As part of the plan, the government will support French chefs launching projects in markets like Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong, and send chefs abroad to learn new cuisines and skills to apply back home. While ambitious and well-intentioned, the government might just want to look closer to home, tapping into the wealth of talent from outside France that’s already in Paris.

Vivian Song is a Korean Canadian journalist who moved from Toronto to Paris in 2010, where she produces everything from food and travel features to breaking and investigative, long form news stories, cultural criticism, and personal essays. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, BBC, Vice, Robb Report, Lonely Planet, and the Telegraph UK, among others.

Mr. Tripper