Decide If You Have Four Hours and a Palace-Hotel Bill Before You Book
Christian Le Squer's dining room inside the George V asks for a whole evening and most of a month's rent. The cooking justifies the first ask more cleanly than the second.
The scallops arrive under a crumble of coral and sea urchin, sliced thin enough that the plate reads as one continuous surface until you break it with a fork. This is the dish to order, and it holds up — the urchin does the seasoning, the coral does the texture, the scallop does almost nothing except be very good scallop. It is the first course of a meal that will run past eleven o'clock and cost more than a weekend in Reims.
Le Cinq occupies the ground-floor dining room of the Four Seasons George V, five nights a week, dinner only. Christian Le Squer has run the kitchen for long enough that the room has settled into a specific rhythm: high-ceilinged, thickly carpeted, biscuit-and-taupe, with a service brigade that is warmer than the room's proportions suggest it should be. This is the palace-hotel haute cuisine tradition in its purest current form in Paris — not L'Ambroisie's austerity, not Guy Savoy's theatricality, but the George V's own particular mode: formal architecture, friendly people, a bill that arrives without apology.
The cooking justifies the four hours. Whether the four hours justify the bill is a question the room cannot answer for you.
Editorial Deep
The sweetbread is the dish that gives the least. It is technically flawless — the exterior lacquered, the interior yielding, the sauce reduced to the consistency haute cuisine requires — and it is also the course where you notice that flawless execution is not the same as memorable eating. A serious eater has had this dish, in this register, at four other rooms in this city. It does not surprise.
You come in through the George V's main entrance on Avenue George V, past the flower arrangements Jeff Leatham has been installing at the hotel since the late nineties, past the concierge desk, and only then does the dining room reveal itself through a set of doors on the left. The approach is part of the meal. You have been walking through a five-star hotel lobby for ninety seconds before you sit down, and the room reads differently because of it — less like a restaurant you have entered and more like a room the hotel has decided to open for you.
The people this booking model rewards are the ones who plan their Paris trip two months out and know which night they want to eat. The people it excludes: anyone travelling on short notice, anyone hoping to book lunch (there is no lunch service — dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday, 19:00 to 21:30), and anyone who tries to book inside the four-week window without a hotel concierge in play. Le Cinq sits at number 29 on the RFK Top 50 hardest reservations worldwide, which sounds theatrical but describes six to eight weeks of realistic lead time.
The Epicurean Escape of Christian Le Squer is €640 before drinks, and tax and service are inside that figure, as they are on every French menu. On the carte, starters run €120 to €185, fish €160 to €240 and meat €175 to €280; cheese and desserts are €52 each. The tasting is the format the kitchen is built for, and it is the one to take. The carte is where the bill starts to look strained, and the sweetbread is the plate that shows it: flawless, and no surprise.
Ordered this time: the tasting menu, which is the correct answer, plus a supplement of the sweetbread from the carte, which was not. Ordered next time: the tasting menu only, and the grapefruit dessert with a second look at the cheese cart. The sweetbread is the course to drop; the timbale and the scallop opener are the courses to hold. That is the shape of a second visit — the same room, the same four hours, one fewer plate the kitchen is not making its case with.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The tasting menu, with the Dublin Bay prawns, the spaghetti timbale, the marinated scallops with sea urchin, and the grapefruit dessert. Do not skip the cheese cart.
“The palace-hotel dining room that gets service right and asks you to defend the price yourself.”
Book six to eight weeks out, take the tasting rather than the carte, and skip the sweetbread supplement. If the sticker is the issue, Plénitude at the Cheval Blanc makes a stronger top-of-city case for the cooking; if the format is the issue, the four-course lunch at Guy Savoy is a materially lower spend for the same tier of experience.
The Verdict
