The Best Restaurants in Paris, Chosen Properly

Le Cinq is the last word in classical French dining: chandeliers, floral arrangements the size of small trees, and Christian Le Squer's cooking at three stars. The set lunch costs a fraction of dinner and loses almost nothing.

L'Ambroisie is its opposite in temperament — four tapestried salons on the Place des Vosges, no tasting menu, no website booking. You telephone, and you dress for it.

Septime remains the reservation everyone wants: a short vegetable-led menu that reads modestly and lands beautifully. Seats open three weeks ahead at 10:00 Paris time and vanish within minutes.

Frenchie, on the Rue du Nil, is the room that started this whole way of eating in Paris. Two months' notice, or take the wine bar opposite.

Le Chateaubriand holds its later seating for walk-ins, which makes it the best answer to a dinner you did not plan. One changing set menu, sharp and unexpected, in a 1930s bistro nobody has bothered to modernise.

All five sit within twenty minutes of the Tuileries. Le Meurice puts you on the Right Bank within walking distance of two of them, which matters more than it sounds at midnight.