Alliance

Alliance is a restaurant with two Michelin stars on Rue de Poissy in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Its name stands for the partnership between chef Toshitaka Omiya and Shawn Joyeux, who runs the dining room.

Omiya comes from Osaka and first trained in Italian cooking before moving to Paris. There he learned at L'Arpège, at Le Cinq and at L'Agapé alongside David Toutain, and it was at L'Agapé that he met Joyeux, who worked front of house. Their restaurant marked its tenth anniversary in the same season that it gained a second star, which made it the oldest of the Paris restaurants promoted to two stars that year. It reopened for service only hours after the news.

The cooking is entirely French, built with a Japanese sense of restraint: a dish rarely holds more than a few main ingredients. Diners choose a tasting menu of four, five or seven courses and leave the rest to the kitchen, since the dishes are not described in advance. A chilled velouté of white asparagus, crab wrapped in radish ravioli and a small croque monsieur of scallop have all appeared on the menu. Jerusalem artichoke can arrive roasted, smoked, crisp and burned over a flame on one plate, and a poached pear with Calvados ice cream closes the meal. Working one vegetable in many textures shows how the kitchen gets depth from a short list of products.

The room is compact and minimal, with only eight tables dressed in white cloths. At one end, a window onto the kitchen lets diners follow Omiya at work, and a private dining room sits across the street. The calm decor leaves the attention on the plates and on the service, the two halves of the alliance that gives the place its name.