This tiny restaurant on the Rive Gauche by renowned French chef Jean-François Piège revolves around a unique concept: French pasta. We’ve been fans of Chef Piège for years (we specifically love his orange cake recipe and his bistro), so we were eager to give Clover a try. It’s like nothing you’ve experienced before. While it’s a pasta centered restaurant, it’s really based on classical French food and flavors while also incorporating housemade pasta.
The kitchen is tiny. It’s amazing what they do in such a small galley kitchen in the back. The wine list has a lot of classical and natural wine options, predominantly from France. The short but powerful menu has two options – 3 or 5 starters – and then a short selection of main dishes. We chose the 5 which included charcuterie, a delicate scallop ceviche (one of the highlights of our lunch), and mussels cooked in hay. The dishes were as delicious as they were beautiful.
For our main course, we tried the langoustine pasta and crab curry. The flavors here were great and we now understand what they meant by the dishes being based on classical French cuisine. We really loved the crab curry, which was perfectly spicy and topped with romanesco and herbs. We finished with the apple cake – one of the best we’ve ever had. All of this was paired with a crisp bottle of natural white wine from Provence.
We’d highly recommend this restaurant if you’re looking for something different and unique in Paris and especially if you’re a lover of French wine. You really can’t go wrong with anything on the menu or wine list.
Clover Saint-Germain, 5 Rue Perronet, 75007 Paris, France
Note: Clover Saint Germain provided support for the reporting of this story.