Lucas Carton reopened on the Place de la Madeleine on Monday 28 September with a menu signed by Cyril Lignac. The first card lists 28 dishes, from €18 for spinach shoots with artichokes to €195 for a kilo of Noire de Baltique côte de boeuf for two or three, with Prunier caviar, a sole meunière at €85 and a beef and foie gras tourte at €90 along the way. It is served in a dining room lined with the carved woodwork that the MICHELIN Guide credits to Majorelle, inside a building that has faced the Madeleine since 1845. The opening hours, the wine list and the desserts have not been published, and the guides have yet to rate the new kitchen. But one of the most storied rooms in Paris, a three-star table in the 1930s and the house of Alain Senderens for almost thirty years, is open again as a classic French restaurant, à la carte.
Twenty-eight dishes and a kilo of beef
The menu runs to two pages, French and then English, under the line “Maison historique depuis 1880”. It has six sections: hors-d’oeuvre, raw dishes, fish, meat, the house classics and sides. The starters go from the spinach and artichokes at €18 to an aged Gouda soufflé with truffled emulsion at €20, a traditional pâté en croûte with foie gras and duck at €24, six Burgundy snails at €26, Prunier smoked salmon with buckwheat blinis at €30 and the house duck foie gras at €35. The Breton lobster salad, to share, is €60. The raw dishes are tuna tartare, sea bream, yellowtail and flambéed langoustines. Fish runs from Label Rouge salmon at €34 to the sole meunière, with Noirmoutier sea bass in Champagne sauce at €45, or €95 with Prunier Oscietra caviar. Among the meats are a Lucas Carton burger at €30, chicken with sauce suprême and morels at €39, a Châteaubriand at €50 and the côte de boeuf with béarnaise. The two dishes listed as Lucas Carton classics are the tourte and “La pomme de terre”, a potato with Prunier Oscietra caviar and Isigny cream, at €100. Sides are €10. No tasting menu is listed.
Majorelle’s woodwork on the Madeleine
The dining room is the other signature. The MICHELIN Guide writes of the restaurant’s “famous carved woodwork by Majorelle”, the Art Nouveau panelling that covers the walls of the ground floor; the restaurant itself has said the carving took more than four years to complete. The building is older than the woodwork. Number 9 belongs to the Galerie de la Madeleine, the covered passage designed by the architect Théodore Charpentier and completed in 1845, whose street and passage façades, floor and glass roofs have been listed as a historic monument since 1987.
From Lucas to Senderens, and back
The house dates its story to 1880, the year printed on the new menu. It took the name Lucas Carton in the 1920s, after Francis Carton took it over, and held three MICHELIN stars from 1933, according to the French press. Alain Senderens cooked there from 1985. In 2005 he gave up his three stars and renamed the restaurant after himself, and the Lucas Carton name later returned. In September 2021 the MICHELIN Guide reported that Hugo Bourny, who had worked alongside Hélène Darroze and Anne-Sophie Pic, had begun a new page in the restaurant’s history, and the guide listed Lucas Carton with one star in its 2022, 2025 and 2026 selections.
Cyril Lignac, from the Rue du Dragon to the Madeleine
Lignac became known to French television viewers in 2005 with Oui Chef, and his first restaurant, Le Quinzième, won a MICHELIN star before it closed after fifteen years. Today his own website lists Aux Prés at number 27 Rue du Dragon, in the 6th arrondissement, with Dragon at 29, Bar des Prés at 25 and Le Bar at 34 on the same street. There is a second Bar des Prés on Rue Bayard, with others in London, Dubai and Saint-Barth, and Le Chardenoux in the 11th, a bistro whose own interior is listed. With the pastry chef Benoit Couvrand he runs the Pâtisserie Cyril Lignac, with shops across Paris and in Saint-Tropez. He has said little in public about the new house. He told Le Figaro, as Sortiraparis reported, that he wanted to “rendre un lieu mythique aux Parisiens”, to give Parisians back a legendary place, and he has described the cooking as “française, gourmande et résolument classique”: French, gourmand and resolutely classic. As a young cook arriving in Paris, Yonder recalls, he had sent his CV to Lucas Carton, among other great houses.
The ratings, for now
The guides have not caught up yet. The MICHELIN Guide’s page still shows the star of the 2026 selection, earned by the previous kitchen, with the restaurant marked as temporarily closed. Gault&Millau has put its toques “entre parenthèses” until its inspectors have tasted Lignac’s classic cooking. Bookings go through SevenRooms from the restaurant’s website. For more of the city’s tables, see where the fashion crowd eats in Paris, and for rooms a short walk from the Madeleine, our guide to the Fashion Week hotels.
The Luxury.it perspective
What stands out about this reopening is the format. Lucas Carton has come back without a tasting menu, as a restaurant where the guest decides the evening: a sole meunière, a pâté en croûte, a Châteaubriand, a lobster salad to share, and a bill that can run from a €30 burger to a €195 côte de boeuf for the table. The house points to its own classics, the tourte and the potato with caviar, and those are the dishes to order on a first visit. The room does the rest, Art Nouveau woodwork across from the Madeleine. For visitors, the practical advice is to book through the website and to wait for the hours before planning a lunch. For Paris, one of its legendary dining rooms is open again, in the hands of a chef who wanted to cook there as a young man.
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