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The Ritz Paris Just Brought Back Its Legendary Five O'Clock Tea
Salon Proust's revived Tea Time À La Française pairs savory courses, inventive pastry, champagne, and a new generation of Ritz tradition.
Credit: Emanuela Cino
BY JORDI LIPPE-MCGRAW
The ritual returns
1898: That's when the Ritz Paris opened its doors and quietly invented one of hotel history's great daily rituals. Five o'clock, in Salon Proust, became "the magic hour." Guests showed up, sat down, and let the afternoon dissolve into tea, pastry, and conversation. Now, more than a century later, the ritual is coming back, reworked by a chef who grew up nowhere near Paris.
His name is Olivier Lainé, and as of September 1, he's the one steering Salon Proust's new offering: Tea Time À La Française. He didn't dig up the old 1898 menu and reheat it. Instead, he built something new almost from the studs, a three-course progression that starts savory, pivots through a strange and clever middle act, and lands on dessert.
Three plates open things up. A salmon tartelette with horseradish and a yuzu condiment does most of the talking. Then a lobster roll, served on French toast of all things, its flavor carried by a bisque that's clearly been simmering for hours. The third plate is quieter: roasted seasonal vegetables, homemade focaccia, nothing flashy. Good restraint, actually, before the menu starts getting weird in the best way.
Because next comes the bridge course, and this is where Lainé shows his hand. Burrata, reworked to sit on lemon shortbread. A visual trick, a little trompe l'oeil moment where the eyes expect one thing and the palate gets another. Poached pear brunoise on the side, balsamic vinaigrette holding it together. It shouldn't work on paper, but apparently it does.
Dessert is where Brittany comes through, unmistakably. A buckwheat baba, dressed simply with kiwi and fresh herbs. A sunflower-shaped pastry built from Earl Grey and cardamom mousse, hiding a lemon bergamot cream inside a puff pastry shell, which is a lot of moving parts for one bite and somehow still sounds appealing. Baker-chef Fabien Morelet chips in with a croissant reimagined as a pastry, topped with candied quince or whatever fruit the season hands him. And then the finale: an all-chocolate charlotte, dense enough to feel like a real ending instead of an afterthought.
Credit: Emanuela Cino
There's also a parting gift: a dark chocolate shell, filled with toasted country bread praline, meant to be eaten later that night, once the tea itself is a memory. It’s a small detail, but sticks with you anyway.
Lainé put it this way in a statement tied to the launch: "I conceived this tea time as a dialogue between creativity and heritage." He wanted the first course to jolt the senses awake, he said, and spent the rest of the menu chasing contrast, texture, a bit of illusion, all without wandering too far from what makes the whole thing recognizably French.
His own road to the Ritz wasn't direct, and that's part of what makes the appointment interesting. Brittany-born, trained under Meilleur Ouvrier de France Laurent Le Daniel in Rennes. From there, a stint doing plated desserts at L'Oasis, a Michelin-starred spot down in Provence. He opened his own restaurant back home for a while too, before eventually landing in Paris, a move he's called equal parts personal dream and professional necessity. Under Michaël Bartocetti at Shangri-La Paris, he worked through a modern, largely vegan take on pastry. By 2018, he was teaching at the École Ritz Escoffier. This past January, the Ritz Paris made him executive pastry chef.
The price: 125 euros per person, which buys the full three courses, plus a glass of brut champagne (or a sparkling alcohol-free wine, if that's the preference), plus a hot beverage. Book it for a slow afternoon, skip lunch, and let it run long. Paris in the fall has plenty of ways to spend two hours, and this might be the best one.
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