I
Reservations & chef’s tables
NightlyThe seat that is not published: the pass, the kitchen counter, the room upstairs that holds eight. We ask on your behalf, in the language of the house, and we ask well in advance.
Nightly
A private table · By introduction
Your couvert,
already laid
We keep the reservations that are not offered, place chefs in private houses, build cellars a generation will drink from, and bring members to the growers and makers who deserve the journey.
- Paris
- Lyon
- San Sebastián
- Copenhagen
- Tokyo
- New York
- London
Première — The Table
What we see to
Four standing services, kept by the same people year after year, so that the asking is never the first time.
The cave is kept separately — read the full carte.
Deuxième — The Cave
Cellars, allocations and the houses behind them
We buy for the long table rather than the auction room: bottles chosen to be drunk, in the company they were made for, at the age they deserve.
Burgundy
Visits — May & NovemberCôte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune. Standing allocations with domaines that answer the telephone themselves.
Piedmont
Visits — OctoberBarolo and Barbaresco, the older houses and two younger ones worth watching. Tasted from cask before release.
Champagne
Visits — March & SeptemberRécoltant-manipulant growers and a handful of the great houses. Late-disgorged bottles set aside by request.
The Mosel
Visits — SeptemberSlate, Riesling and patience. Auction lots followed for members building verticals a child will one day open.
Members are told what a bottle cost the house and what the house was paid to find it. We take no commission from a producer, ever.
Troisième — The House
A small house, kept deliberately small
Grand Couvert began in a first-floor room on the rue de Miromesnil, with a card index, a telephone and the conviction that a good evening is not bought but made. Nearly four decades later the card index is a ledger and the telephone rings in two cities, but the method has not moved: we know the people who cook, and they know us.
We do not keep a list of restaurants. We keep relationships with chefs, sommeliers, growers, potters and the maîtres d’hôtel who actually decide who sits where — and we look after those relationships in the years when our members are not asking for anything. That is why the answer is usually yes, and why, when it is no, we will say so plainly the same day.
Discretion is not a policy here, it is a habit. No member is mentioned to another. No house is named in our correspondence to impress. What happens at your table is yours.
Officers of the house have cooked professionally, kept cellars, or run dining rooms. Several have done all three.
Quatrième — A Member’s Word
“My father was a member. I did not understand what that meant until the year I asked for a table in a town I had never been to, on a Sunday, in August — and was told which train to take.”