What happens when dinner stops behaving like dinner?
What if the best part of a restaurant is the moment it begins to forget what a restaurant is supposed to be?
At Le Poisson Volant, in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, the answer arrives somewhere between a plate of wontons, a Thai Basil Smash and the sound of a room slowly surrendering to the night.
Opened in October 2026 by Bertrand Chauveau in collaboration with chef Yanxin Yin, this new restaurant-bar-club is less interested in fitting into Paris’s crowded hospitality scene than in creating an entirely different universe within it. One where Chinese culinary traditions, French technique, hypnagogic interiors and underground nightlife occupy the same frame without cancelling each other out.
The timing feels almost too perfect. Paris has barely emerged from Fashion Week, and Le Poisson Volant has already entered the conversation around the city’s new places to see and be seen, with CELINE choosing the venue for its Summer 2027 afterparty. Yet the more interesting question is not who walks through the door. It is what happens once they do.
The art of losing the plot
We arrived expecting a sophisticated reinterpretation of a Chinese restaurant. Good dumplings, perhaps an inventive cocktail, a beautifully designed room and the familiar choreography of a fashionable Parisian dinner.
What we found was considerably harder to categorize.
The first surprise was culinary. The second was architectural. The third came when it became clear that neither experience was intended to remain static.
Le Poisson Volant operates on the idea that a night should have a pulse. It should build, change direction, become louder, less predictable and eventually lose track of the hour. Dinner is not the main event followed by an afterthought. It is the opening scene of something that continues to evolve long after the plates have been cleared.
This is where the project becomes compelling. Paris knows how to dress a restaurant, how to create a beautiful bar and how to turn a fashionable address into a social currency. Combining all three is considerably easier than making them feel like parts of the same idea. Le Poisson Volant attempts precisely that, treating hospitality as a continuous experience rather than a sequence of separate services.
A wonton with a French accent
In the kitchen, Bertrand Chauveau and Yanxin Yin approach the meeting of French and Chinese culinary cultures without reducing it to a predictable exercise in fusion. Their collaboration is more interesting than the terminology suggests. Yin brings knowledge of Chinese cooking traditions developed through his training in Xi’an and Lanzhou, alongside his experience with Asian cuisines. Chauveau contributes a French culinary sensibility shaped by years in professional kitchens, including those of Jean-François Piège and David Toutain.
The result is a menu that understands the difference between borrowing a flavour and understanding what makes a dish work.
Chinese classics sit alongside more personal creations, with French ingredients and techniques entering the conversation without demanding to lead it. Pork-and-chive potstickers provide a familiar point of entry. Braised chicken with vin jaune and black mushrooms moves into more complex territory, allowing the depth of a French Jura wine to meet the savoury character of Chinese braising. Ray meunière with miso and sake beurre blanc makes the exchange even more explicit, placing a recognizably French preparation in dialogue with Japanese ingredients.
The dish that stayed with us, however, was the wontons with pig’s trotter and langoustine tartare.
On paper, the combination sounds deliberately provocative. In practice, it is the kind of idea that makes you reconsider the boundaries between comfort food and culinary ambition. The dumpling provides the structural logic; the pig’s trotter introduces richness and texture, while the langoustine brings a more delicate, maritime dimension. French culinary instinct meets Chinese technique without either becoming a decorative reference to the other.
It is a small dish with a larger argument behind it. Elevation does not necessarily mean removing a cuisine from its context, making it precious or disguising its origins beneath a series of elaborate gestures. Sometimes it means taking an established form seriously enough to discover what else it can do.
The distinction matters. Chinese cuisine does not need Parisian approval to be sophisticated, and the most convincing Franco-Asian cooking should never suggest otherwise. What makes this collaboration worth paying attention to is the possibility of a genuine exchange, in which both culinary traditions retain their identity while creating something neither could produce in isolation.
The cocktail as a second opinion
The Thai Basil Smash accompanied the meal with precisely the kind of presence a good cocktail should have. Rather than competing with the food or functioning as an interchangeable accessory, it offered another way into the evening, adding aromatic definition and freshness to the experience.
There is a difference between making a drink that tastes good and making one that changes how you experience what comes before it. The best pairings create a conversation between successive sensations, shifting attention without overwhelming the palate. Here, the basil-led cocktail gave the meal another register, keeping the flavours vivid and the rhythm moving.
It also made sense within the larger philosophy of the place. At Le Poisson Volant, the bar is not a separate department attached to the restaurant. It is part of the same sensory language, a bridge between the table and whatever awaits beyond it.
The menu follows a similar logic elsewhere, with the Dirty Lychee Martini, Yuzu Margarita and Fancy Old Fashioned moving between recognizable cocktail structures and more personal interpretations. The point is not novelty for its own sake. It is continuity: the feeling that the evening has been considered as a whole.
Architecture after dark
Then there is the room itself, designed by Laure Gravier and Soizic Fougeront of Claves, the studio also responsible for the interiors of Le Cornichon.
The architecture does not attempt to disappear behind the experience. It actively shapes it.
A framework of columns and beams establishes a distinctly architectural rhythm, drawing on Brutalism while allowing decorative details, patterned surfaces, mirrors and patinated metal to interrupt its severity. An oval bar anchors the ground floor. Reflections multiply perspectives, creating the impression that the room is both more expansive and more elusive than its physical boundaries suggest.
Brown and purple tones, Chinese-inspired patterns and hand-painted mirrors give the interiors a character that feels deliberately difficult to date. Nothing is quite retro, nothing entirely contemporary. Instead, references are allowed to collide, producing a world somewhere between an imagined Shanghai at night, a late-seventies underground haunt and a cinematic set waiting for its next scene.
The influence of Wong Kar-wai is particularly legible in the relationship between light, colour and atmosphere. The ambition is not to reproduce a film still or turn the room into a themed environment. It is to borrow cinema’s ability to make a physical space feel emotionally charged, as though something might happen there that would not happen anywhere else.
A specially commissioned work by Chinese artist Shuo Hao introduces another narrative into the interior. Further down, the staircase leads towards the basement club, where the DJ booth and a private room concealed behind an aquarium extend the feeling of moving through different worlds within the same building.
Lighting by Matière Noire and sound developed with FLEiK complete the architecture’s transformation. As the evening advances, the light becomes more dramatic and the sound takes on a greater role. The room changes its behaviour without needing to change its identity.
This is design understood as something temporal. A space is not finished when the furniture is in place or the photographs have been taken. It is finished, if it ever is, through the people who occupy it, the music that fills it and the different ways it can be experienced over the course of a night.
From dinner to the underground
The transition into the club is where Le Poisson Volant’s central idea becomes tangible. From around 11 p.m., the restaurant gradually shifts towards nightlife, continuing into the early hours on selected nights. The change is not simply a matter of turning up the volume and switching on coloured lights. The architecture, sound and lighting have been conceived to make the shift feel like a natural extension of the evening.
That distinction separates a genuinely hybrid space from a restaurant with a DJ.
There is something almost old-fashioned about the pleasure being proposed here, in the best possible sense. Before nightlife became so relentlessly optimized for visibility, a great night out depended on a certain loss of control: conversations running late, strangers becoming familiar, music changing the mood of a room and the original plan becoming irrelevant.
Le Poisson Volant gestures towards that tradition while giving it a distinctly contemporary setting. Its references to historic Chinese-American dining and nightlife establishments suggest a world in which restaurants could develop their own nocturnal identities, becoming gathering places that existed beyond the conventional boundaries of eating out.
The underground element is not merely a visual aesthetic. It is an attitude towards time, sociability and the possibility of staying somewhere because the night has become more interesting than the next destination.
For a city with Paris’s complicated relationship with nightlife, that proposition feels particularly relevant. The best places are not always those that offer the most spectacular experience in isolation. They are the ones that make leaving feel premature.
The fashion crowd is only the beginning
Le Poisson Volant’s arrival during Paris Fashion Week has inevitably accelerated its visibility.
CELINE’s choice of the venue for its Summer 2027 afterparty placed it within a fashion conversation almost immediately, reinforcing its potential as a meeting point for designers, image-makers, musicians and people who move between these worlds.
The association is significant, although the real test will be what happens after the Fashion Week crowd moves on.
A room can become fashionable overnight. Building a lasting identity takes longer. The distinction lies in whether a place offers something beyond the reassurance of being seen there, whether its atmosphere, food, music and design can sustain interest once the initial curiosity has passed.
Le Poisson Volant has the ingredients to attempt something more enduring. Its visual language is distinctive without being entirely dependent on spectacle. Its culinary concept offers a point of view beyond the usual Parisian shorthand for Asian fusion. Its club format gives the space a second life, allowing it to attract people for different reasons at different hours.
The question is whether all these elements can remain equally convincing as the novelty fades. That is where the ambition of the project will ultimately be measured, not in the number of fashionable faces photographed at the bar.
Bring your favourite people. Leave the schedule behind.
What I found most unusual about Le Poisson Volant was how difficult it was to assign it a single identity. I have rarely encountered a Chinese restaurant that feels so deliberately connected to the visual culture of design-led nightlife, yet becomes more underground rather than more polished as the evening progresses.
That contradiction is its appeal. The place has the confidence of a designed environment without feeling obliged to behave like a showroom. It can be a dinner destination for two, somewhere to explore a menu with attention, or a place to bring a group of friends when the objective is to let the night take its own direction.
I would choose the latter if you can. Go with people who enjoy eating as much as talking, who notice the details of a room but do not need to discuss every one of them, and who understand that a good evening is rarely improved by knowing exactly when it will end.
The wontons with pig’s trotter and langoustine tartare are a strong reason to arrive. The Thai Basil Smash is a persuasive reason to stay. The architecture gives you something to discover between the two. The music eventually changes the terms of the evening altogether.
Le Poisson Volant is not simply a restaurant that turns into a club. It is a place built around the idea that the best experiences resist being divided into neat categories. Food becomes atmosphere; architecture becomes movement; dinner becomes a night out.
Perhaps the real luxury is not the reservation, the design or the address. It is the freedom to lose track of what you came for.
And to discover that the night has given you something else entirely.
Photos by Camille Mompach & Felix Dol Maillot