Arnaud Donckele offers a comprehensive dining experience at Paris' Plénitude restaurant: his classically based cuisine elevates the art of sauces, a key feature of the tasting menu, while guests move through various spaces, pampered by a warm and friendly service.
Cover photo: AFP
The restaurant
Plénitude’s restaurant, adorned with three Michelin stars plus the Passion Dessert award, is the place to go in Paris right now. If, indeed, for quite some time, French cuisine seemed to struggle, as if overwhelmed by the burden of too heavy inheritances, now a generation of incredible chefs have stepped in to give it a shine again. They are French to the core and know how to play with the sacred fetishes with playful agility.
Arnaud Donckele is certainly part of this, an authentic poet of sauces, who embodies the essence of French cuisine. The Plénitude restaurant, of which he is the chef patron, opened in 2021 in the spaces of the Hotel Cheval Blanc, on the banks of the Seine, and received the consecration of the red guide in record time, within a few months, in 2022. Credit also goes to a team of young, motivated, and talented professionals, among whom stands out the director Alexandre Larvoir.
The entrance is the impressive lobby of the hotel, as told by theworlds50best.com; from there, you pass through the wine cellar, which is the first point of contact between guests and the dining room staff, where discussions about wine reveal the initial information, before reaching the intimate 30-seat dining rooms. There are two menu options: the Symphonie menu, comprising six courses dedicated to sauces, priced at 450 euros, and the Fuguons Ensemble, offering a choice of four courses from a range of options, priced at 390 euros. Central to both is the sacred little bowl, highlighting a multitude of carefully detailed ingredients. "Sauce gives the dish its soul. It is a liquid that conveys emotion and honesty. You can't cheat. I consider it the heart of the recipe, no less than the meat, fish, or vegetable that it accompanies, or that accompanies it."
There's a dish whose completion guests are asked to witness in the kitchen. "And that's a moment where we often feel a shift in spirit and energy." There's also a secret room dedicated to cheese, where guests who request it can linger after the main course. At the end of the meal, after dessert created by Maxime Frédéric, guests head up to the tenth floor to take in the nighttime view of the Ville Lumière. This way, Larvoir observes, guests become actors in the drama of the dinner, no longer passive spectators.
"I ask my chefs to cook as they would for the people they love most in the world. Same for the front-of-house team—I ask them to give the guests everything they can, to be truly generous. That's how magic happens," says Donckele, a native of rural Normandy. "We try to create a new style of service that's relaxed and not too formal. We bring a bit of countryside spirit, something you wouldn't expect to find in a luxury hotel. For me, the hospitality of the staff, through its most poetic approach, forms the emotional backbone of every dish."
