Alliance, 5 rue de Poissy, Paris 5: An Update

Apr 24, 2025

It’s been one-and-a-half years since I wrote about a lunch at Alliance. Since then, I have been back numerous times, always with a spectacular meal, but have not written about it again. It is quite simply my favorite restaurant in Paris — for the unsurpassed food and impeccable service, and given that quality, it is a great value, too. But it is not an easy restaurant to write about because of the multiple course which contain numerous ingredients, so unless one takes notes at the table, which I refuse to do, it can be difficult to remember exactly what each dish was. Finally, I decided I will show you pictures of most of this superb meal (for one or two dishes, I neglected to take a picture) and minimal commentary.

First, I recommend going at lunch rather than dinner. It’s curious, but some restaurants in Paris are better at dinner, others at lunch, and while Alliance at dinner is good, I think the lunches are the truly special experience. Moreover, because of the abundance of dishes, we find that we are fully satisfied with the “three-course” offering (95€), although on occasion we have pushed to the “four-course” lunch menu (130€). I might have been able to handle the “five-” and “seven-course” menus decades ago, but no more.

What Alliance is: it is a very small restaurant offering food that is of the highest and most imaginative interpretations of what passes for contemporary classic French cuisine. The chef, Toshitaka Omiya, although not the first, is the epitome of the Japanese chefs who came to Paris and turned what had been a declining restaurant culture around. His dishes are notable for their harmony, precision, and originality.

L doesn’t like pigeon, the main course, so she would be getting lobster. As a result, we took a fairly rich white, from Corbières in the Languedoc region of France, that would go with both (and the other dishes).