Datil, revisited

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In the autumn of 2023, I texted a friend from the middle of a meal to tell them I was eating something outstanding. That happens a few times a year, out of more than a hundred restaurants. It happened then at Datil.

Datil opened that year on rue des Gravilliers, in the northern Marais, in a long atelier with a glass roof over the middle of it. It is the first restaurant from Manon Fleury, who runs the kitchen with her co-chef Laurène Barjhoux. The food is plant-forward with fish and meat used as condiment rather than centerpiece — and the whole project is built on short supply chains, small producers, and a zero-waste ethic that feels real rather than decorative.

In 2023, my five-course menu felt like a steal. It opened with a suite of four small things all made from corn, including a broth infused from the parts of the cob that usually get thrown away, and it was smart and delicious at once. There was one dish I didn’t love. It didn’t matter. At 65€, a bargain absorbs a misstep. I rated Datil GREAT and put it on our 50 Favorites, where it stayed until our most recent update.

I returned in June to check on Datil, as we do for every restaurant that’s on our list of 50 favorites. The most important change I noted is that the price has risen since Datil was awarded a Michelin star. Lunch is now 95€, a 46% increase for the same five courses.

The meal opens exactly as it did in 2023 — a four-part overture built from a single vegetable, with the discarded parts of that vegetable infused into a drink. This June it was asparagus: a consommé of asparagus skins, a cracking tuile, a small pot of sliced asparagus concealing a cold-confited egg yolk, and a tremendous herb fritter.

The fritter was the best thing on the table: a whole fistful of herbs, fried, salty and light and fun to eat with your fingers. It was also the only part of this overture with no asparagus in it.

When the next course arrived, the asparagus reappeared. White spears stood upright, draped in a foam flavored with capers, parmesan, anchovy, parsley and lemon. A Caesar salad, essentially, and a good one. I liked it.

I liked it and I was still annoyed, because it was the fourth asparagus dish at a time when Paris markets were full of so many other delicious things — broad beans, artichokes, courgettes, radishes and cherries. The restaurant has since explained on Instagram that this was deliberate — for the first time, two dishes built together with asparagus as the through-line. Which means nobody in the kitchen was troubled by the repetition. I thought it was a spear too far.

The kohlrabi course was lovely, and the best-conceived plate of the day: raw shaved courgette and kohlrabi sharpened with preserved lemon and cornichon, over a pumpkin seed pesto, with a saffron sauce poured on top. It looked beautiful and it ate beautifully.

The fourth course, “salads, apricot and tuna,” is two plates, and they could not have been further apart.

The tuna was a ssam, after the Korean dish — tuna and roast apricot on butter lettuce, to be folded and eaten by hand. It was genuinely good, and if I’d been served it on its own I’d have been happy.

The other plate was a mistake. It’s described as a millefeuille of different salad leaves: layers of potato, a filling of almond praline with fresh apricot and nasturtium leaves on top, and a butternut-almond-miso condiment on the side. Individually, none of those things is wrong. Together they tasted like two or three different vegan dishes from a food co-op, mixed in a takeout box on the way home. I ate very little of it.

Dessert was a fraisier, deconstructed — sponge, whole strawberries, a tarragon-infused cream, and an olive sorbet for depth. The restaurant describes it as a childhood birthday memory rebuilt with pastry chef Ysaline Guibertin.

Mignardises followed, closing with a tea infused from plum stones, the same gesture as in 2023.

The wine list is beautiful, heavily weighted toward female producers, and it climbs steeply — reds open around 50€ and reach 350€. Pairings are 65€ at lunch and 85€ at dinner, and on my previous visit I put myself in the sommelier’s hands and she really delivered.

But beyond the wine list, Datil is an outstanding place for non-alcoholic drinks. There’s a house pétillant alternatif called Oma Frida, made with verjus, linden, rosemary and elderflower (12€). There’s a cold-brewed Milky Oolong served iced, four juices from Nos jardins imparfaits in the Franche-Comté at 11€ each, and kombuchas from Archipel in Paris. And there are full 75cl bottles, properly made, at 40–45€.

We drank the Oma Frida to start and then a bottle of Elsa Steullet’s “Christine,” a fermented pear with meadowsweet and citron, for 40€. It was the same sommelier who steered us there, and she was as good on this list as she is on the wine.

The feeling is unchanged, and still lovely. The room is calm and full of light. Service is warm, unhurried, and entirely free of the stiffness that a star often brings.

And it’s still very earnest: you are handed a printed card before you eat: nineteen staff named, eight producers thanked by first name, an invitation to listen to their recorded voices in the bathroom, a promise of generosity and joy and attention to human and environmental issues.

I believe all of it. The zero-waste ethic is genuinely on the plate — the asparagus skins in the consommé, the plum stones in the closing tea. The producers are real. The kindness is real.

Following this return visit, Datil moves from ★★★ GREAT to ★★ GOOD, and comes off our list of 50 Favorites. Nothing here is broken. The kitchen can plainly cook: the tuna ssam, the kohlrabi and the herb fritter were all excellent, and the asparagus Caesar was a delight despite the repetition. The room is one of the nicest in the Marais. The sommelier is a pleasure.

What’s missing is someone saying no. No to a fourth asparagus. No to the salad millefeuille. In 2023 those calls barely mattered, because lunch was 65€ and a bargain forgives a dud. At 95€ I need the dishes to hit differently. I need to not feel repetition. I need a little more excitement alongside my kitchen scrap recycling.

Still go if you want one of the most thoughtful non-alcoholic drinks programs in Paris — this is a restaurant where a non-drinker eats and drinks properly, not apologetically.

Still go if you’re vegetarian — the tasting menu as printed is not vegetarian, but the kitchen will make it so if you ask when you book. I confirmed this with the staff. Given how good this kitchen is with vegetables, that’s a real offer.

Think twice if you are counting the cost. When I think of the other tasting menu lunches I’ve recently loved (Ebène, Cypsèle, Bittikesu), Datil isn’t delivering at the same level. Datil is still good, but there’s a gap now between the plate and the price.

13 Rue des Gravilliers, 75003
Open Wednesday-Friday for lunch & dinner
Open Monday & Tuesday for dinner only
Closed Saturday & Sunday
Reservations online or at +33 1 80 05 74 98

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