L'ARPÈGE

Definitely recommend.

Highly satisfied.

Here is the English translation of your message:

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I am endlessly grateful for the dinner on May 26, 2025. This was my second visit, and I want to say a heartfelt thank you for this experience. Your restaurant is not about food — it’s about emotions and memories.

Yesterday, I was transported back to my childhood, filled with the scent of meadow herbs, the boldness of radishes, the slightly “burnt” crust of bread, and the taste of the plant we used to call “little watermelons” — prosvírnik (mallow). Every child in the Soviet Union ate it in the 1980s. Back then, we were carefree and happy.

This was an incredible journey, and I feel so lucky to have experienced it in your restaurant.

A special thank you for giving me the opportunity to thank the chef in person.

As someone who has worked as a chef my whole life — for whom cooking is a passion and a calling — seeing Alain Passard in person, in his kitchen, felt like witnessing the creation of the Mona Lisa.

Unfortunately, I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t manage to say anything coherent to him. If possible, please pass on my gratitude to him for the motivation and inspiration he gives — through his craft and his very being — to so many chefs around the world.

Looking forward to seeing you again in August.

Always a wonderful dining experience.

Overall, our experience was an immense disappointment. One of my dishes had paper stuck to lettuce, which I discovered while eating the dish. It was not a significant problem so I did not bring it up with the waiter, but it is surprising given the level of attentiveness to details I expect at a restaurant of this caliber. I figured that mistakes happen, and it was not a big deal. For dessert we were each given one strawberry, which would have been fine if my strawberry was not eaten through by a worm or some other type of bug. If you are only going to give a diner one strawberry, it should at least be a nice strawberry. When I alerted our waiter, he could not have cared less, barely listened, but did bring a new strawberry (and left the bug-eaten strawberry on my plate). The other dessert was a rhubarb dish. Mine came with a weird large rough item, which clearly was not supposed to be part of the dish. My dining companies did not have anything like it in their dishes and we all thought it seemed odd. I asked the waiter about it and he said it was simply the leaf of the rhubarb and it was fine because everything came from a farm. But rhubarb leaves are toxic for humans, so it is a problem. The combination of dismissiveness from the staff and the careless mistake after mistake was frankly shocking to me. They place vegetables on the tables instead of flowers, which is a lovely idea and looks stunning, but the cauliflower at our table was crawling with aphids, which meant our table was also crawling with aphids throughout the meal. I get that they want to showcase their growing practices, but the cauliflower should have been rinsed before being placed on a table or they should have selected a vegetable that is easier to clean. As a vegetarian, I have been eager to visit this restaurant. It is highly unusual for me to bring up issues as a diner, or even write a bad review, but after this experience I thought I should warn others. Some dishes were good and the space was serene, but not enough to make up for the experience or the price. I would never recommend this restaurant. It was the worst 3 star Michelin meal I've eaten, and worse than many restaurant experiences in general--- and I should emphasize that it is not bad because it is plant-based or because it is boundary pushing, it is bad because they were sloppy, dismissive, and just did not seem to care about diners or the food they were serving.