We’ve rated Eme as FINE with one star *
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When Capitaine closed, the southern Marais lost something important. That restaurant never fully delivered on its promise, but it occupied a real gap: an affordable modern bistro in the shadow of the Place des Vosges, a neighborhood that has always deserved gastronomically better than it gets. A local told me that he’d been hoping the Capitaine space would become something he could actually afford to visit on a Tuesday. Instead it became Eme — a gastronomic tasting menu where lunch starts at €75.
That’s not a criticism in itself. If it’s great, it’s worth the price. And things did appear to be promising. Nazareno Mayol Curti is a Uruguayan chef with a CV that commands attention: stints at Mirazur and David Toutain, plus a celebrated residency at Fulgurances in 2023 that made critics take notice early. His Argentine partner Mara Ballester runs the room. They opened Eme in late 2025, and the press has been warm.
THE FOOD
The 5-course lunch menu (€75) opens with the meal’s best bite: a shiso leaf folded around chicken skin and black garlic, lemon sharp against the richness, served alongside a mushroom bouillon with dill oil that is genuinely profound — deep and clean at once. This is the moment where the cooking feels most personal and most alive, and it sets expectations the rest of the meal doesn’t consistently meet.
An oyster in whey emulsion with grilled leeks and oyster leaf is technically accomplished but lands flat. The oyster leaf — a herb that mimics the taste of oyster — feels redundant when actual oyster is present, and the dish, like most that follow, arrives soft and cool in a ceramic bowl.
White asparagus with wild garlic and coriander is delicious in the way that dish reliably is when the asparagus is good, the fat smoky, and the acidity well-placed. It’s a small bowl. It’s fine.
Then pigeon — presented in two parts, breast and leg, with parmesan cream, pistachio pesto, fried sage, and a leg that arrives on a walnut board with a rope-wrapped bone and a knife. The cooking is genuinely excellent. But the dramatic claw presentation has been on so many Paris plates in recent years that it no longer reads as drama. It reads as a chef doing what young chefs do. To illustrate, here are similar compositions from the restaurants A.T., Hémicycle and Maison.
The ingredient vocabulary throughout the meal — marigold, miso, black garlic — is similarly fluent, and similarly familiar. Other critics frame Mayol Curti’s Uruguayan roots as central to his cooking. What you taste here is more like a confident command of current Parisian tasting-menu grammar.
The one moment where his South American identity announces itself clearly is the bread course: a char-marked pan criollo cooked on the barbecue with duck fat, listed on the menu in Spanish rather than French. It is the greediest, most satisfying thing on the table.
Dessert of honey, pollen, and miso — two textures, one smooth, one closer to sorbet, with toasted grain and fromage blanc — has genuinely good flavors. By this point you may be tired of soft food in bowls.
THE DRINKS
The wine program is serious—and seriously expensive—built around natural growers, with real depth in Jura and Loire and prestige Burgundy for those inclined. For non-drinkers, the sans-alcool section includes juices from Patrick Font, kombucha, and a house-made iced tea that is quietly excellent. This is a considered program, not a token gesture.
THE VIBE
The space is handsome in a quiet way — walnut tables, sage-grey walls, two paintings in bright orange and green that mirror the flowers waiting at the entrance. It feels more like an evening room, and at lunch on a weekday the atmosphere is correspondingly muted: a few solo diners, two in the kitchen, one in the room, jazz playing at a volume that doesn’t quite fill the silence. The service is correct without being warm. The menu describes food driven by emotion. I didn’t feel much emotion in this room.
THE VERDICT
Eme is skillfully made food from a talented chef, but the lunch menu at €75 feels like a pricey entry point for the cooking. Dinner is €115. Paris has never had more tasting menus than it has right now, and if you’re not exceptional, the format starts to feel like a constraint rather than an invitation. Cypsèle, a few blocks away, is exceptional. Eme is fine — which, in this neighborhood, in this moment, may not be enough.
EME
4 Impasse Guéménée, 75004
Open Thursday-Saturday for lunch & dinner
Open Tuesday & Wednesday for dinner only
Closed Sunday & Monday
Reservations online or at +33 1 44 61 11 76
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