Origines -- 6 rue de Ponthieu, Paris 8

Apr 03, 2025

I first became aware of Chef Julien Boscus in the mid-2010s, when he was the original chef at Les Climats, a restaurant with an all-Burgundy wine list on the Left Bank, just down the street from the Musée d’Orsay. The restaurant justifiably was awarded a Michelin star. Boscus left Les Climats about six years ago to open his own restaurant, Origines, on the right bank.

The restaurant is in one of the most fashionable areas of Paris, near the Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, several high-end art galleries, luxury apparel and accessory stores, and the Élysée Palace and some government ministries. For mere mortals, it is also close to the Champs Élysées and the Grand and Petit Palais museums.

In the five years since the restaurant opened, I have been a few times at lunch. They were very good, but not exceptional, and I was bothered by the very high markups for the wines on the wine list. (Les Climats originally had this markup policy, too, but came to realize that the purpose of having wines is to sell them to customers, and with very high markups, not many customers will order the wines.)

I heard, from various sources, however, that the food was significantly better at dinner. With that in mind, I decided to book for dinner and figured I would bite the bullet on wine, as I had done at lunch, likely just for one or two glasses, as I would be dining alone.

The interior of the restaurant is unassuming, and even somewhat anonymous.

In contrast to the lunches I’ve eaten there, where there were people who worked in the area interspersed with tourists, the evening seemed much more filled with (upscale) non-locals, although the first interior picture above shows a table for nine that was later filled by a group of five Americans from Chicago and four French people; over dinner, they were having a finance-centered discussion.

The carte and menu for the evening:

The wines by the glass:

As I mentioned above, I had long been put off from going to the restaurant because of the extremely high wine markups on the otherwise outstanding wine list. But the prices have moderated and are now within the range that I consider acceptable for a restaurant. (Origines is not the only restaurant in Paris where I have noticed this change, and it would appear to be a function of the high prices from producers and distributors and weak demand for wine.)

I took the menu in four services at 95€ and decided to order wines by the glass of my own choosing.

I began with a glass of Riesling “Harth” from the very good Alsatian producer, Schoffit. This wine was excellent on its own with plenty of minerality and gripping acidity.

The amuse-bouche was a three-cornered hat filled with leek and egg mimosa, beef tartare with sliced radish, and then smoked haddock in toast, the last being a specialty of the chef.

These were all excellent, especially the smoked haddock (shown at the top of the photo) which was above and beyond the others in complexity and overall deliciousness. These bites demonstrated, as was to be continued throughout the meal, the chef’s commitment to precision and clarity of flavors, very much in the style of the Japanese chefs who set the pace here in the early 2010s. The rest of the Riesling proved to be a perfect pair for these dishes.

Next was a dish based around white asparagus. Inexplicably, I have no photo of it. It, too, was delicious with great precision for all the elements. The asparagus was grilled on a barbecue and complemented by blood orange and trout roe.

With the white asparagus and carrying over to the next dish, I took a glass of Chardonnay (appellation l’Étoile) from one of my favorite Jura producers, Domaine Montbourgeau:

If you don’t know Chardonnays from the Jura, they are definitely worth your making an effort to find (not difficult in Paris, but they can require some work in other places). The wines generally have a particular minerality, clarity, earthiness, and structure that sets them apart from Chardonnays from anywhere else.

The next course was monkfish with a curry sauce and carrots:

It showed the richness of monkfish and was very well matched with the L’Étoile from Montbourgereau.

The meat dish was beef with a crépinette:

While the presentation didn’t thrill me, again there was great precision in the flavors. Curiously, while the other dishes were also available à la carte (see the carte above), this dish was not.

I took a glass of Côtes Catalanes with this dish: the wine, from near Perpignan, was rich and powerful; I didn’t like it as much as the two whites that preceded it, but it fulfilled its purpose.