Some restaurants announce themselves by the queue stretching along the pavement right at lunchtime. Argile, on rue de Milan in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, is one of them. A two-minute walk from Hôtel R de Paris, in a tiny dining room with around thirty covers, a raw black-and-white setting, red floor and open kitchen, chef Romain Lamon has, since late 2024, been serving one of the neighbourhood’s most precise and generous tables.
Romain Lamon: palace training, bistro cooking
Before Argile, Romain Lamon opened Polissons in Montmartre in 2018, a first restaurant noticed for its high standards and fair prices. But his original training comes from grand establishments: Éric Fréchon at Le Bristol, Arnaud Faye, Michel Roth at the Ritz. Those years in palace brigades give his cooking its technical backbone — sauces, jus, cooking precision — in the service of a resolutely bistronomic approach, with no fuss and no detours.
At Argile, the name says it all: back to raw material, shaping with what is at hand, serving straightforward, boldly seasoned dishes made to be mopped up to the very last drop. The house sourdough bread, served with whipped lemon butter, is a telling sign.
The menu: plant precision, a revisited bistro
At lunch, the set menus (€22 for two courses, €26 for three) offer almost an anachronistic level of value for the quality of cooking on the plate. You might find a layered potato pie with Parmesan sauce and herb gremolata, sea bream with a deeply savoury sauce and silky polenta, or an indulgent mille-feuille — clear, well-seasoned dishes that never try to do too much.
In the evening, the menu expands and leaves more room for the chef’s creativity: duck tataki with red beetroot and Muscat grapes; mussel ravioli marinière with melting leeks; celeriac pie in the spirit of a beef Wellington with vegetable jus; whole pigeon cooked in a clay crust with sweet-and-sour braised red cabbage. For those happy to leave it all to the chef, a 5-course tasting menu at €65 is available — a carte blanche that is especially worth it.
Vegetables are given pride of place: cauliflower prepared Milanese-style with lemon gel and mimosa sauce, the celeriac pie, seasonal vegetables treated with as much care as the meats — that is one of Argile’s signatures.
