Alt is rated GOOD ★ ★
25 Rue le Sueur, 75016
Open Monday-Friday for lunch & dinner
Open Saturday for dinner only
Closed Sunday
Reservations at +33 1 45 00 13 05
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We don’t have much for you in the 16th. Readers ask about it often, usually because they’re staying here and have discovered that the neighborhood’s restaurants are mostly expensive, mostly dull, or both. Alt is neither. It’s a five-minute walk from the Arc de Triomphe, it seats eight people, and the cooking is some of the most precise classical French work I’ve eaten this year.
Alt is run by two chefs. Kazuaki Aoi comes from Japan, trained at Taillevent under Alain Solivérès, and he cooks. Sungmi Lee, from Korea, came up through the Robuchon kitchens in Singapore. She runs the room, assembles the starters, and was our very friendly server. They met working at L’Assiette.
There is no tasting menu and no lunch formula. You order from a short carte of three starters, three mains, and two desserts, plus one dish on a printed card that changes. Three courses runs about 55€ with service included.
THE FOOD
The best thing we ate was also the biggest surprise. Golden-seared sweetbreads arrive with prawns, oyster mushrooms and a parmesan cream. I'd never had sweetbreads with shrimp before and found the combination brilliant — the shellfish sweetness cutting the richness of the offal. It's also a starter portion, which almost nobody does. You get the joy of sweetbreads without committing to an entire lobe.
The leeks vinaigrette is a house signature, on the menu at the same price for well over a year. Leek batons are stacked into a round, blanketed in lemony crab, scattered with toasted buckwheat and veiled in sheets of turnip sliced thin enough to read through. It's very pretty. Under the turnip there is a genuinely generous amount of crab.
The roast veal was made excellent by its jus. The meat came evenly rosy from edge to edge, but it's the reduction that lifts it, dark and glossy and properly concentrated. It comes with confit potatoes, green beans, peas and a spoonful of very buttery purée.
The poached sea bass was beautifully cooked and generously portioned, arriving under the last wild asparagus of the season alongside more of that buttery potato purée. Another delicious sauce, a lightly foamed white wine sauce flecked with herbs.
Both desserts are worth ordering. The chocolate cake is indulgent, closer to mousse than cake in texture, served with a chocolate mousse quenelle and delicious red wine caramel. Chocolate lovers shouldn’t skip it.
The strawberries lift in the other direction, icy and fresh under a mound of lemon granita, and the Earl Grey cream underneath is surprisingly rich.
If you go looking for the exact dishes above, you may not find them. The carte moves with the season and the garnishes rotate. But the leeks and the chocolate have been there for over a year, and the sweetbreads with parmesan cream seem to be a fixture that changes its accompaniments.
THE DRINKS
The list is short, classical and almost entirely French, which is what the food asks for. Burgundy runs deepest, from a Matrot Maranges at 49€ up through Simon Bize’s Savigny-lès-Beaune premier cru and a Dominique Laurent Chambolle-Musigny. The Rhône and the Loire each get a handful of bottles. Bordeaux gets two. There is little here from the natural wine world, and bottles start in the mid-30s.
The part worth knowing about is the by-the-glass offer. Still wines are 7€ to 9€ and the Leclerc Briant champagne is 14€. Those are café prices in a room with white tablecloths and Christofle silver. The selection rotates, so what’s poured when you go won’t necessarily match what I saw.
Non-alcoholic options aren’t noteworthy: a few juices from Alain Milliat, Lorina lemonade, and Coke.
THE VIBE
The room came with the building and they’ve mostly left it alone. Worn pink marble tile, tobacco banquettes, a long patinated wood counter, globe pendants, mirrors. The china and silver were collected piece by piece and can’t be replaced when something breaks. On a shelf near the bar there are three books to look at while you wait, Escoffier’s Guide culinaire, Bocuse’s Le Gibier, and Dumas’s Petit dictionnaire de cuisine. On the back bar, framed, there’s an old menu from Taillevent. Nothing in this room is trying to tell you it’s new.
We ate on a Wednesday in June, in the middle of high tourist season, and there was only one other table occupied. While we ate, an American man came in to book a table for a future dinner, then asked whether he could come back that same night. Alt clearly has people who love it. It doesn’t yet have enough of them for the room to have any energy, and that’s the whole distance between good and great here.
Some diners will find an eight-seat room with two other people in it romantic. But I want food this great to have an audience. I wonder if the booking might have something to do with this problem. There’s no online reservation system at Alt. Le Monde has described the phone-only booking as a charming anachronism, a small act of human contact in a digital age. I found it awkward, in both French and English. It took three attempts to get through and the interaction was strained. If you’re booking from abroad in a language you don’t speak, this is a genuine obstacle, and it’s standing between this kitchen and the room it deserves. I really want them to open online bookings, require a deposit, and serve a full house.
THE VERDICT
★★ GOOD. The cooking is better than good. If I were rating the plates alone this would be a GREAT, and the sauce work is as good as anything I’ve eaten in Paris this year. What holds it back is a dining room that hasn’t found its people yet.
Go if you’re staying near the Arc de Triomphe and want a serious lunch. Go if you love classical French cooking done properly by people who aren’t performing it. Go if you want sweetbreads without ordering a whole plate of them. Go on a Monday, when lots of other restaurants are closed. Don’t go looking for a scene, because there isn’t one yet. And it’s a terrible idea for vegetarians, with no dish on the carte free of meat or seafood.
ALT
25 Rue le Sueur, 75016
Open Monday-Friday for lunch & dinner
Open Saturday for dinner only
Closed Sunday
Reservations at +33 1 45 00 13 05
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The resto and that dinner look like heaven to me. Getting out to the 16th is less than ideal but Alt would appear to be worth it. I too hope it finds its audience .
No one is above having online booking access in 2026! Just what no one in a time zone 10 hours apart wants is trying to call a restaurant in the middle of the night, and in another language. And it sounds like even in French there was plenty of confusion and awkwardness. Doesn't matter how good the food is if it's gatekept. Thanks for your honesty as always.