Maxim's, at 3 rue Royale in the 8th arrondissement, reopened to bookings in November 2023 under the management of Laurent de Gourcuff's Paris Society — the same operator that runs Castel, Loulou at the Tuileries, Girafe, and the Le Bristol pool restaurant. The Belle Époque interior, designed by Louis Marnez and opened in 1893, has been restored under the direction of Cordelia de Castellane, the artistic director of Dior Maison. The upstairs floors — Pierre Cardin's Art Nouveau museum, his private dining rooms, the spaces that operated only as a museum and event venue for the last twenty years — are being progressively returned to active use. Maxim's, fifty years after it functioned as a serious Parisian dining room rather than a museum, is again a working address.
The Paris members'-club category had, until recently, a structural problem. The city's UHNW residents had two real options: Le Cercle de l'Union Interalliée, founded 1917 at 33 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Jockey-Club de Paris, founded 1834. Both functioned on a near-perfect imitation of the St James's model — sponsorship, multi-year admission, formal dining — and both had, by the 2010s, aged into institutions whose median membership was no longer the same demographic as the city's actual decision-makers. The new Parisian principal looking for a working clubroom went to London. The maths did not, for a long time, change.
Maxim's is the largest of the current corrections. Paris Society's reopening returned the kitchen to serious operation under chef Léa Hosatte, and the upper floors are being reactivated as a club-format programming space — private dinners, cocktail evenings, the kind of cross-pollination that the museum-only configuration could not host. The room is not, formally, a members' club; the access is being managed through Paris Society's broader hospitality network, which now resembles a club in everything but the formal subscription model. The de Gourcuff operation has, in effect, built an unofficial membership through programming rather than dues.
Casa Tua Paris, which opened in late 2024 inside the JK Place hotel on the rue de Verneuil, brought the first true members'-floor format to the city — sponsored entry only, the Casa Tua reciprocity running across Miami, Aspen, New York and now Paris. The room above the restaurant is, in 2026, the most contested late-evening invitation in the 7th arrondissement. The Faubourg crowd has, for the first time in a decade, a reason to cross the river after dinner.
Bus Palladium, in Pigalle, reopened on 10 April 2026 as a 35-room five-star hotel with a rooftop, a restaurant by Top Chef contestant Valentin Raffali, and a stage-club configuration that returns the legendary Pigalle music venue to active use. The Studio KO redesign — Yves Saint Laurent's preferred architecture firm — has handled the brutality-to-hedonism balance the venue requires. The club itself will open later in 2026. The membership format has not been formally announced, but the operator's positioning, in early 2026 press coverage from Wallpaper and Sortiraparis, suggests a curated-access model in line with the city's broader move.
The structural question is why this is happening now. Three answers, none of them sufficient on their own. First, the UHNW resident population in Paris has materially shifted post-2022 — the Brexit relocation flows, the American flight to Saint-Germain, the wealth-tax exemption that has retained the senior French principals who would otherwise have moved to Brussels or Geneva. Second, the operators who run the new rooms — Paris Society in particular — have understood the Parisian distaste for the formal Anglo-Saxon membership model and have built around it. The format is not 'pay £3,000 to join'. The format is 'be the kind of person the operator wants in the room', and the door enforces that without the bureaucracy.
Third, and most structurally: the older Parisian institutions — Le Cercle Interallié, the Jockey, the Automobile Club — are demonstrably not the answer. The new operators have read the gap and are filling it. The Paris private-club geography in May 2026 — Maxim's reactivated, Casa Tua established, Bus Palladium imminent, Castel still running under Paris Society, the Beefbar Paris members' arm operational — is the densest the city has been since the 1970s. Whether the format holds depends on whether the operators, in the next three years, resist the temptation that broke Soho House. The early signs, in Paris Society's case, are that they understand the problem.
— Camille Vedy
