Bertrand Chauveau and Yanxin Yin open in Paris’s 11th: a menu split between Xi’an and the Jura, interiors by Claves, and a room that runs as a nightclub until 4am
Le Poisson Volant opened in October 2026 at 5–7 rue Marguerite Moret, in the 11th arrondissement. Dinner starts at 7pm. At 11pm the music comes up, the lighting narrows, and the room works as a nightclub until two in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday and until four from Thursday to Saturday. One address, two trades, eight hours apart.
The project belongs to Bertrand Chauveau, chef and co-founder — with Paul Henri — of Le Cornichon, the café-restaurant-bar-tabac that opened in the same arrondissement in 2024. He cooks here with Yanxin Yin, previously with Bao Family in Paris and on the opening of Gros Bao in Marseille. The interior architecture studio Claves, which did Le Cornichon, has gutted and rebuilt the space. Lighting comes from Matière Noire, sound from FLEiK, and a commissioned diptych from the Chinese artist Shuo Hao. All of it was briefed together, because a room that changes use halfway through the night cannot be lit, wired or furnished twice.
Le Poisson Volant chefs: Bertrand Chauveau and Yanxin Yin, two trainings, one carte
Chauveau trained at Ferrandi and spent about ten years in starred kitchens — Jean-François Piège’s Le Grand Restaurant, then David Toutain’s — before taking over the kitchen at Garance, in the 7th. Le Cornichon was the break: a corner café with a tabac licence, open all day, aimed at the people who live on the street. He describes the attachment plainly, as a preference for the informal end of Paris dining, and Le Poisson Volant extends it into the night.
Yin came to cooking sideways, from front of house. He is from Qingdao, on the Shandong coast; he travelled through China, took to street food, then trained in Xi’an and in Lanzhou. Those two cities are the spine of north-western Chinese noodle cooking: Xi’an for hand-stretched biangbiang noodles and the cumin-and-chilli register of Shaanxi, Lanzhou for hand-pulled lamian and the beef noodle soup the city has exported to the rest of the country. Noodles, dumplings and Peking duck are the skills he names. He has been in France for roughly twenty years, and says what he took from French kitchens is the sauce work.
What to eat at Le Poisson Volant: potstickers, pig’s trotter wontons, ray meunière
The carte runs two columns that are not ranked against each other. Pork and chive potstickers; steamed aubergine salad with chilli and fresh herbs. Then the dishes the two chefs built together, and the ones that are audibly Chauveau’s: wontons filled with pig’s trotter, served with langoustine tartare; chicken braised with Vin Jaune and black mushrooms; ray meunière with miso and sake beurre blanc. Jura wine, beurre blanc, meunière — French method, Asian larder, in that order.
The bar is built the same way. Classics on one side, house drinks on the other: a Fancy Old Fashioned, a Dirty Lychee Martini, a Yuzu Margarita.
Claves: an interior that works at 8pm and at 1am
Claves was founded in 2022 by Laure Gravier and Soizic Fougeront, who both worked for the interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch before setting up. Le Cornichon was their first restaurant and the job that got them noticed outside France: speckled mosaic floor, lacquered wave ceiling, neon-green bar lights, bordeaux and bottle green, a frieze of painted smoke.
Here they have put in a new frame of columns and beams taken from brutalist architecture. It does the zoning. The ground floor turns on a large oval counter in patinated metal, with banquettes set into it and a smoking room off it. Mirrors pick up the lines of the structure and repeat the sightlines, so the edges of the room stop being locatable. The palette is tight: patinated metal, browns, purples, carpet with Chinese-derived motifs, mirrors with hand-painted patterns.
Four references are declared — brutalism, the decorative arts, the cinema of the filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, and the aquarium installations of the artist Pierre Huyghe. The first two are in the structure and the finishes. Wong Kar-wai accounts for the browns and purples and for a room read through mirrors and doorframes. Huyghe accounts for the tank, and his Zoodram pieces are the ones to have in mind: a closed aquarium running on its own time, a hermit crab wearing a cast of a Brancusi head.
Shuo Hao’s diptych, the staircase and the basement aquarium
The staircase carries the project. It is where the venue changes register, and it holds a large diptych by Shuo Hao, commissioned for the address; her work deals with memory and storytelling across several cultural registers. Downstairs sits the DJ booth. Behind an aquarium planted with mineral compositions there is a private room available for hire.
Matière Noire’s lighting is built into the architecture as large ceiling panels: open and diffuse over dinner, tighter and more directional later. FLEiK’s sound design is scaled to move with it.
China Chalet and Formosa Café: the restaurants that became clubs
The project names two North American precedents, both Chinese-American restaurants that acquired a nightlife over decades without planning one.
China Chalet operated at 47 Broadway, in the Financial District, from 1975 to 2020. By day it was a dim sum banquet hall seating more than 800, filling with the offices around it. From the mid-2000s it rented the room at night, and over fifteen years it became one of the venues downtown New York was organised around; Calvin Klein and Prada showed there. It closed in 2020 with no public explanation, during the pandemic shutdown.
Formosa Café, at 7156 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, opened in 1925 as The Red Post Cafe, built around a retired Pacific Electric Red Car trolley that worked as the luncheon counter. It was renamed in 1945. The 1933 Group took over the lease in 2017 and reopened it in June 2019 after two years of rehabilitation; West Hollywood designated it a local cultural resource in 2019, and it took a Los Angeles Conservancy preservation award the following year.
Both venues took thirty years to become what they are now remembered as. Le Poisson Volant compresses the move into a single evening, on a timetable, with the lighting and the sound cued to it.
Le Poisson Volant: address and opening hours
5–7 rue Marguerite Moret, 75011 Paris. Tuesday and Wednesday 7pm–2am, Thursday to Saturday 7pm–4am. lepoissonvolant.paris
