Stepping into the Musée Carnavalet's courtyard to dine at Fabula is a feast for the eyes. The temporary restaurant, open in summer, is surrounded by the impressive 16th-century facades of Parisian mansions, covered in ivy and bathed in a twilight orange-red light. We licked our lips at the prospect of trying out the cuisine of chef Julien Dumas, who has already worked culinary miracles at his restaurant in the 16th arrondissement, Saint James. Expectations were even higher as the press release promised a "delicate ode to the vegetable." In fact, it was so delicate you couldn't taste it. The Île-de-France peas in a gazpacho had no flavor. The rest of the menu was generally bland, including the bottarga, which was the last straw, considering the usual boldness of this fish roe. Everything was served in very expensive, minimalist portions (three tiny bites of mullet, €22) and cold.
The reasons for this fiasco? The kitchen faces severe constraints: The restaurant has no extraction system and is reduced to assembling (combining pre-prepared or fresh food), with no cooking options. Dumas, who designed the menu, is rarely present and cannot effectively oversee the teams.
Over the past 20 years, French museums have introduced restaurants, following the example of their British and American counterparts. Curators, who had long snubbed them to focus on their collections, saw them as a way to offset the drop in subsidies and cater to an audience that now wanted to eat on-site. There are no major museum institutions today that don't have one or more eateries, typically managed by catering professionals through multi-year concessions.
This new playground quickly became a windfall. Laurent de Gourcuff, founder of Paris Society (which owns Monsieur Bleu at the Palais de Tokyo, Girafe at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine and Coco at the Palais Garnier, among others), acknowledged that before the Covid lockdown, all his restaurants were generating around €10 million in annual sales. Earlier this year, the group opened a new cash cow, Dar Mima, inaugurated by Jamel Debbouze, on the roof of the Institut du Monde Arabe.
The most prestigious museums are now partnering with renowned figures in the culinary world. In 2017, multi-starred chef Alain Ducasse even created a specific entity, Musiam (a contraction of musée, "museum" and miam, "yum"), which manages a dozen outlets between the Château de Versailles, the Louvre, the Orangerie, the Quai Branly and the Musée d'Orsay. The offering ranges from croque-monsieur (€17 at Bistrot Benoît in the Louvre) to charcoal-grilled blue lobster (Les Ombres, at Quai Branly, on the €188 Floraison menu) and is very inconsistent.
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