The Hôtel de Crillon’s Latest Restaurant Nonos Is All Grill and Bones
What’s more Parisian than escargots, onion soup and a saucy steak?
Nothing, as far as the Hôtel de Crillon and Michelin-starred chef Paul Pairet are concerned. And that’s exactly what’s on offer at Nonos, the freshly opened, more relaxed dining option at the palace on Place de la Concorde.
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As a follow-up act to the brasserie that opened in 2017 after the hotel’s extensive renovation, its team wanted to introduce a retro French grill concept. Pairet felt like the right partner, particularly for managing director Vincent Billiard, who’d lived in Shanghai and met the chef at three-starred Ultraviolet after eating regularly at his Mr. & Mrs. Bund steakhouse with an expansive seafood counter.
Having long admired the palace hotel, Pairet imagined this “retro grill that could have been from the 1950s or ‘70s with the characteristics of those international restaurants,” right down to the carving trolley that brings a rack of beef to be cut at the table, nestled in the back of the hotel and accessible through Rue Boissy d’Anglas.
The star chef liked the idea of “ordinary things — dishes that are familiar, that many people offer [on their menu] — done with care,” and offering things “as simple as a green salad” as a kind of comfort food for Francophiles.
On the menu are anything from fresh radishes served with a generous dab of butter, slices of freshly baked quiche, pepper steak, all manners of pâtés from around France, along with snails bathed in garlic butter. To follow, there are eggs mimosa, seafood platters and plenty that gets thrown on the grill, to be served with house sauces. It’s mostly European fare livened up with touches that hail from elsewhere.
But before digging into anything Pairet is offering, there’s another very French ritual: a basket of thickly sliced warm breads from master baker Benoît Castel, including a piece of his waste-busting “Pain d’Hier et de Demain” (or “bread of yesterday and tomorrow,” in French), that uses leftover loaves as the starting flour for freshly baked ones. This comes with a thick swipe of Pairet’s spread, a blend that includes butter, soy sauce, cream and a touch of olive oil.
Nonos owes its name to the cute word French children use instead of saying “bone,” or “os” in French, which Pairet chose as “a meat-eater and friend of dogs” to express the new establishment’s unfussy personality and star cooking ingredient, bone-in meat.
Taking over the “second restaurant” of such a hotel was a challenge Pairet was particularly interested in, not least because it was an opportunity to balance out the sharply chiseled gastronomic experience offered by its fine dining restaurant L’Écrin, which has one Michelin star.
“In a hotel, if you want to speak to its clientele but also external customers, it’s very good to have an edgy [gastronomic] proposition with maximum risk-taking or strongly themed, but to offer a secondary proposition that is almost an extension of in-room dining,” he explains, characterizing such a menu as a wide and lasting array of tempting crowd-pleasers, classics or seasonal choices alike.
The menu at Nonos “is an exercise in simplicity, almost home-style cooking. So don’t expect any gastronomic pirouettes,” Pairet says with a laugh.
But how else to describe a deceptively simple cheese soufflé that’s served there? A recipe 10 years in the making, it arrives piping hot in its dish, only to be turned out into an elegantly sparse bowl and finished with a culinary siphon’s worth of airy cheese foam, for a result as decadently more-ish as it sounds.
Simplicity also felt like a way to demystify the Hôtel de Crillon, a legendary address and long-standing luxury property, and turn it into “a place that you can enter and dwell in if you just step inside,” he says, as reflected in the range of dishes and prices.
The menu was finessed to be democratic enough, starting under 10 euros for his “distractions,” appetizers and hot or cold starters under 20 euros, all served in portions large enough to be shared, and up to 250 euros for a 2.5-pound Black Angus porterhouse, indicated to serve two — or more.
Three weeks in and proof is in a room filled with diners, as servers efficiently dispatch orders, wheel the carving trolley and cheese cart, or flambé a chocolate soufflé for those with room left for dessert.
In his opinion, the lynchpin of a restaurant is whether it is good or not. “That’s the essential ultimately. I like this adjective that defines a restaurant. I went very binary in that regard, to keep things simple,” he quips.
Among the must-try options on the menu at Nonos are the Dover sole with both sides of the skin still on, made crispy before being seared; an onion soup “that’s so rich you could well imagine it being finished with beef stock,” and that roast on its carving trolley, of course.
“It’s not grilled but slowly cooked for 12 hours then rested, in the American or British way. Not something you see much in France,” he notes.
But grill Pairet and he eventually confesses that he’d go rack of lamb with aioli sauce — “because I’m Catalan, so stick aioli everywhere, I’m happy,” he jokes.
Studies of contrasts are at the heart of Pairet’s trajectory as a chef. He’s a native of the southern French city of Perpignan, which is nestled between the Mediterranean Sea and the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains. Initially attracted to science and chemistry, he eventually veered toward another form of chemistry — cooking.
After making a mark in Paris in the late ‘90s at Alain Ducasse’s Café Mosaic, Pairet worked in Hong Kong; Sydney, and Jakarta, Indonesia, before heading to Shanghai in 2005 to open an avant-garde restaurant in the five-star Pudong Shangri-La hotel.
Then came Ultraviolet, a restaurant he opened in 2012 in a former garage and conceptualized even before he’d left Paris over a decade prior.
Equipped with scent projectors, UV lighting, the latest speaker systems, to create a context to each of the 20 dishes served over the course of an evening, the 10-seat restaurant soon became the talk of the town for developing Pairet’s theory of “psychotaste,” of the connection between taste, the other senses and the emotions triggered even before eating. Accolades piled on, culminating with its three Michelin stars in 2017, which the restaurant has retained.
After such a high, his follow-up act was an all-day dining café named Polux, in Shanghai’s trendy Xintiandi neighborhood.
And Pairet’s far from done with dichotomies.
At a time when plant-based dishes are trending, it may be surprising to see a restaurant so unabashedly put meat on the table, but the fact that Nonos is “not in the zeitgeist is not something that bothers me,” says Pairet.
The same can be said about the origins of produce, sourced in France “whenever it is superior.” Pairet did not limit himself to any given territory, favoring flavor over the “priority to the territory” habits of the time.
Case in point: the cooked ham, usually considered a Parisian specialty but here selected from a producer from Spain. “It just happened to be the one that came out on top when we did the tastings,” he explains.
The same went with a beef fillet, sourced from a French producer who specialized in raising an Aubrac-Wagyu breed, and one of the few holdovers from the former Brasserie d’Aumont concept that occupied the place now given over to Nonos. Out of dozens of options from around the country and beyond, it stood out — and stayed.
In addition to Nonos, he’s also imagined Comestibles (or edibles, in French). Think of this as a cross between the restaurant’s larder and an upscale convenience store where a selection of products will be available, either as a takeaway or for snacking on the premises.
There are three spots at the counter, but the plan is to serve this quick-and-easy fare along with the greatest hits of Nonos in the interior courtyard with a view over the underground swimming pool come warmer weather.
If Nonos & Comestibles, as the twinned eateries are known, mark Pairet’s return to Paris, he’s not here to stay — physically at least.
Though he’s about to come back on French TV screens with the 14th season of culinary contest “Top Chef,” he’s already back in Shanghai. After three years in a holding pattern due to the pandemic, especially 2022’s rounds of harsh lockdowns, the chef has gone into 2023 with cooking torches blazing.
Before Nonos’ late January opening, there was the launch of Charbon by Paul Pairet, an affordable and casual skewer-and-sundaes restaurant in the IAPM shopping mall. Next up is a pastry shop, also in the Chinese metropolis.
At 48 and with multiple accolades, Pairet is all about “something that tastes good and works well,” he says. “I’m having fun doing restaurants that are simpler. That cultivates my passion for cooking.”
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