Since July 1, 2021 Jean Imbert is the new French chef leading some 220 staff across the five restaurants at the Dorchester Collection Hôtel Palace Plaza Athénée in Paris, including the restaurant gastronomique Jean Imbert au Plaza Athénée, for which he received a Michelin star just nine weeks after the opening.
In additition, in 2022, Jean Imbert became the chef of the historic Paris boutique the Christian Dior fashion house, the private island resort Le Brando in French en Polynesia, the luxury hotel Cheval Blanc on the island of St-Barth and the legendary Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. Since 2023, he is also the chef at Hôtel Martinez by Hyatt in Cannes.
For Jean Imbert, the Hôtel Palace Plaza Athénée ressembles an ocean liner that has carried countless travelers on its journeys. The comparison seems appropriate because the Art Déco interior of Le Relais Plaza, one of the hotel’s restaurants, was famously inspired by the dining room of the SS Normandie, the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat in the 1930s, holder of the Blue Riband. Already in the early years of Le Relais, the likes of Jean Cocteau, Edward G. Robinson and Norma Shearer have been spotted at the brasserie.
The period features of Le Relais Plaza include the stained-glass panel with zodiac motifs in the entranceway and a spectacular chandelier, both by Lalique, as well as the bas-relief over the bar depicting Diana as goddess of the hunt (all immaculately preserved and now protected landmarks included on France’s supplementary list of historic monuments).
The chef at the restaurant gastronomique Jean Imbert au Plaza Athénée. Photograph © Hôtel Plaza Athénée / photographer: Cyrill Matter.
In his foreword, the chef Jean Imbert shares the confidence of his favorite rooms at the Plaza Athénée, starting with 888, from where you can admire the view of the Eiffel Tower. He mentions 244, so secret; 204, with its view of Avenue Montaigne; and 124–125, with their French doors snuggly wrapped in ivy, like all the rooms overlooking the garden courtyard. Then there is Room 750, on the top floor where he can see himself as nine-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), the hero of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, ordering ice cream from room service in New York’s Plaza Hotel.
Among his culinary roots, Jean Imbert mentions Grandma Nicole’s recipes—and Mamie Nicole’s sense of repartee, too!—for such dishes as celery rémoulade, mutton stew, crème caramel. Mamie Nicole is the very reason he wanted to pursue this trade in the first place, creating things that are ephemeral. He opened a restaurant with her (the restaurant Mamie par Jean Imbert, in Paris), and he closed it when she left us, at age ninety-four.
Today at the Plaza, he feels Mamie Nicole’s presence with him always, e.g. whenever he prepares her recipe for the hotel’s Terrine du Relais, her navarin printanier (lamb stew with spring vegetables), her petits pois à la française (new peas cooked with lettuce and tiny onions). Her presencere assures him, taking her place among the spirits of legendary chefs such as Antonin Carême and Auguste Escoffier, who nourish Jean Imbert’s imagination.
The hotel’s flagship is the restaurant gastronomique, Jean Imbert au Plaza Athénée. The chef offers no chichi, no jargon. He mentions elegantly structured dishes, such as a langoustine with finely sliced vegetables draped like fish scales along its back, or the fruit carpaccio, which helped him astonish the judges on the TV culinary show Top Chef in 2012.
Jean Imbert underlines that, at the hotel, guests can dance, as they did during one of Beyoncé’s after-parties — till dawn. He loves how historic dishes can be served while hip-hop plays in the background.
Detail of the bar at Le Relais Plaza with the original 1936 Art Déco mural by Constant Lefranc, the architect and interior designer. Photograph © Hôtel Plaza Athénée / photographer: Bobby Odieux.
Marc Lambron writes about the famous fashion houses on Avenue Montaigne, where the Hotel Plaza Athénée opened its doors on April 20, 1913. In 1946, Christian Dior, then one of the primary designers for Lucien Lelong, became one of the first to open a lastingly successful and iconic couture house on the prestigious Avenue Montaigne, at No. 30, with financing from the wealthy entrepreneur Marcel Boussac. Both before and since, the neighborhood has boasted some of fashion’s most glittery addresses, including Ungaro and later Armani at No. 2, Prada at No. 10–12, Louis Vuitton at No. 22, Guy Laroche at No. 29, Nina Ricci at No. 39, Chanel at No.42, Jean-Louis Scherrer (and now Chanel) at No. 51 and Calvin Klein and Yves Saint Laurent at No. 53 — and that’s by no means the full list.
The Plaza Athénée has long provided a haven for couturiers, their clients and models. Marc Lambron writes that the hotel has offered the perfect stepping stone for many a career, an ideal place for conspiratorial meetings, perfumed intrigues, confessions, reconciliations and avowals of loyalty.
The English edition of Plaza Athénée by Marc Lambron (texts), Jean Imbert (introduction), Oliver Pilcher (photographs), Assouline, November 2023, 272 pages with over 300 illustrations, 33 x 24.7 x 3.7 cm, 2.9 kg. Order the English version of the book (accept all cookies to go directly to the appropriate Amazon page; we earn a commission): Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr.
Plaza Athénée façade illustration copyright © Garance Wilkens, Agent & Artists (Assouline).
Marc Lambron highlights the possibility to dine at the “conspirators’ cabinet,” a room built within the hotel’s main kitchen, the head chef’s private chambers, to which entrance is granted only at Jean Imbert’s discretion. Welcomed into the kitchen, the guests are invited backstage, into the very heart of the theater, where all the dishes are created, in the heat of the moment. In front of the eyes of the fortunate guests, a furious ballet performed by the members of the kitchen team unfolds.
The hotel’s famous wine cellar offers thirty-five thousand bottles, representing about eight thousand different wines, on the cellar’s original racks and shelves dating to 1913.
The English edition of Plaza Athénée by Marc Lambron (texts), Jean Imbert (introduction), Oliver Pilcher (photographs), Assouline, November 2023, 272 pages with over 300 illustrations (mostly large scale photographs), 33 x 24.7 x 3.7 cm, 2.9 kg. Order the English version of the book (accept all cookies to go directly to the appropriate Amazon page; we earn a commission): Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr.
With photographs by Oliver Pilcher and texts by Marc Lambron, a French writer and literary critic. Since 2014, Marc Lambron is a member of the Académie Française. Among his books are: L’Impromptu de Madrid (Flammarion, 1989), Une saison sur la terre (Grasset, 2006), La princesse et la pangolin (Des Équateurs, 2020).
Plaza Athénée interior court. Photograph copyright © photographer Oliver Pilcher (Assouline publishers/Hotel Plaza Athénée). The garden courtyard is enclosed by ivy-draped façades and dotted with bright blossoms—geraniums, cherry blossoms, red camellias.
Marc Lambron writes about La Galerie at the Plaza Athénée that, with its intimate tables arrayed the length of a gallery lined with columns on both sides, it offers fine views of La Cour Jardin through its great bay windows. Here, the hotel reveals one of its more poetic sides. You can gaze out at the garden courtyard’s lush greenery dotted with square red umbrellas. This view inspires an endless taxonomy of conversations. Furthermore, in La Galerie, the ceremony of afternoon tea takes place in complete harmony beside contract negotiations overa business lunch, while a harpist provides an elegant background soundscape. With its candle sconces like leafy branches, plush wing chairs and cozy sofas with cushions embroidered with floral motifs and feet carved like acanthus leaves, La Galerie is the dream of a Roman palazzo in the heart of Paris.
In winter, the interior terrace called Cour Jardin offers a mountain chalet decked with lights and surrounded by fir trees, candles and vintage skis. Here, you can enjoy Jean Imbert’s fondue. The highlight is the interior court ice rink (patinoire), which offers guests an ice skating possibility in the heart of Paris.
View of the Eiffel Tower, since from the Dorchester Collection Hôtel Palace Plaza Athénée in Paris. Photograph copyright Hotel Plaza Athénée / Assouline publishers © photographer Andrea Tamburrini.
The red geraniums in boxes outside every window are a signature of the hotel’s Avenue Montaigne façade. Marc Lambron reminds readers that they have been in their glory here ever since the actor Jean Gabin adorned the balcony of his room with a potful of the ruddy blossoms. At the time (around 1938), the Frenchman was in love with the equally famous Marlene Dietrich, who lived opposite the hotel at 12, Avenue Montaigne. The flowers were his homage to the German film star.
Incidentally, Hollywood moguls, inclucing David O. Selznick, Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck, have stayed at the Plaza Athénée. Among the long list of VIPs, Marc Lambron mentions, among many others, the actors Ronald Reagan (before he was elected president); Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif, who celebrated the release of the movie Funny Girl, directed by William Wyler, at the Plaza; Grace Kelly was a regular at the Plaza Athénée (both in her years as an actress and as Princess of Monaco); in 1971, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton reserved five rooms—a sort of improvised royal suite—and stayed for six months; in 1980, Woody Allen met Marie-Christine Barrault at the Plaza to discuss her upcoming role in Stardust Memories. Am0ng the many other film stars staying at the hotel, one could mention Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jack Nicholson, John Travolta and Sharon Stone.
View of the Plaza Athénée in Paris. Photo © Plaza Athénée / Assouline publishers / photographer Oliver Pilcher.
The English edition of Plaza Athénée by Marc Lambron (texts), Jean Imbert (introduction), Oliver Pilcher (photographs), Assouline, November 2023, 272 pages with over 300 illustrations (mostly large scale photographs), 33 x 24.7 x 3.7 cm, 2.9 kg. Order the English version of the book (accept all cookies to go directly to the appropriate Amazon page; we earn a commission): Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review have not been put between quotation marks.
Review added on January 12, 2024 at 13:47 Paris time.
