The official hospitality at Roland Garros is handled. L'Orangerie is perfectly competent. The Jardin des Chefs — a new open-air food court tucked beside Court Simonne-Mathieu where Pascal Barbot, Yves Camdeborde, and Christophe Adam rotate through the lunch service daily until June 5th — is genuinely worth a detour if you have twenty minutes between sessions. But if you have a box on Philippe-Chatrier and a dinner reservation to make, the Bois de Boulogne is right there. You just have to know which direction to walk.
The first address anyone serious gives you is Le Pré Catelan. Frédéric Anton has held three Michelin stars in that Napoleon III pavilion since before half the box-holders had their first private jet card, and the room still sets the correct tone for a dinner that started with a first-set tie-break. It is ten minutes from the Porte d'Auteuil on foot — less, if someone drops you on Allée de Longchamp. The kitchen does not adjust its pace for tennis schedules, which is either a problem or exactly the point, depending on what kind of evening you want.
Two hundred metres away through the trees, La Grande Cascade operates at a slightly different register: the pavilion that Napoleon III originally used as a hunting stop, now dressed in white tablecloths and climbing roses, with a terrace that remains the most underused lunch setting in the 16th during the fortnight. A table there at 1pm on a second-week Wednesday, between sessions, is something to be engineered rather than assumed.
Down the hill and back toward the village, L'Astrance deserves the detour even though it sits just outside the perimeter of where the tournament crowd tends to drift. Pascal Barbot and Christophe Rohat relocated the restaurant to rue de Longchamp in early 2023 — the former Jamin, Joël Robuchon's original three-star address — and the cooking has settled fully back into form. It is not large. Book before you land.
The fourth table is less obvious and more useful. Auteuil Brasserie, at 78 rue d'Auteuil, runs the full span from breakfast through last orders at 2am, serves the neighbourhood rather than the tournament, and has the kind of corner banquette and reliable sole meunière that makes the post-match argument about the second set both easier to have and easier to survive. The box-holders who know it tend not to mention it.
"The play, the second week, is always the same: get the seat, skip the L'Orangerie queue, and have someone hold the table at La Grande Cascade for 8pm. The rest is tennis."
What nobody is writing in the tournament programme is that the Bois de Boulogne at dusk in late May, after a long match, on the walk between the courts and the pavilions, is one of the quieter pleasures Paris offers. The crowd thins. The light does something specific. The dinner table is already booked.
— Camille
