Both in terms of its cooking and its interior design, Hexagone, chef Mathieu Pacaud’s elegant restaurant, which was just awarded one Michelin star, is intended to plot a new course for haute cuisine in Paris. Light-years from the Renaissance richness of his father Bernard’s three-star restaurant, L’Ambroisie, in the Place des Vosges, Pacaud’s place was designed in a modern lounge-style by interior architects Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier. The fine restaurant features luxury lighting design and tongue-in-cheek wall coverings and other graphics that were inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

CAFÉ DE L’HOMME

After a complete makeover by Gilles & Boissier, the mythic Café de l’Homme in the Palais de Chaillot has become one of the most luxury restaurants in Paris. The design team respected the Art Deco decor of the 1937 building with views of the Eiffel Tower, the Champ de Mars, and the Jardins du Trocadéro, but made it warmer with sand-color cedar walls and ash-and-marble dining tables. Perhaps the key element of this design success, however, is the brilliant work of lighting designer Alain Guilhot; his subtle illuminations make the lofty room intimate and majestic at the same time.

From antique mantel clocks to ormolu-framed mirrors to plush brocades in jewel tones, the elegant Grande Siècle decor of the luxury dining rooms at the new Le Clarence is owned by Prince Robert of Luxembourg, president of Domaine Clarence Dillon, the Bordeaux wine company. While Le Clarence is meant to showcase Domaine’s wines, its look is intended to convey the tasteful opulence of traditional 18th- and 19th-century Bordelais design, which also serves as a racy foil to the inventive modern French cooking of chef Christophe Pelé. One of the most luxury restaurants in France.

LE GABRIEL

Tucked inside the 1854 Haussmann-style mansion that was occupied by the Duc de Morny until his death in 1988 which is now a hotel called La Reserve, the sumptuously elegant restaurant still has the embossed Cordoba leather walls original to the residence’s salon. Though respecting the vintage character of the room, decorator Jacques Garcia made it slightly more contemporary with bone-color leather banquettes and black lacquered dining chairs that riff. Chef Jérome Banctel has just been awarded two Michelin stars for his superb contemporary French cooking.

One of the chicest new luxury restaurants in Paris opened last Jun and occupies a suite of 18th-century salons overlooking the Seine on the first floor of the Monnaie de Paris (Paris Mint), a magnificent neoclassical limestone building by architect Jean-Denis Antoine. The understated look is the work of Paris-based designer Jean-Michel Wilmotte, but Guy Savoy himself bought the striking 1950s luxury chandelier by Italian designer Gino Sarfatti from a New York dealer. Additionally, much of the contemporary art on display comes from Savoy’s private collection or was borrowed from his friend and customer François-Henri Pinault, the owner of the Kering group.

The bold but elegant modern design of young chef Jean-Francois Piège’s Le Grand Restaurant, which was just awarded two Michelin stars, is the work of Icelandic-born, L.A.–based interior designer Gulla Jónsdóttir. Upending the gilded looks often associated with serious luxury restaurants in Paris, her design begins with the striking white marble-lined open kitchen. The modern dining room features gray cement walls, Baccarat sconces, thick gray honeycomb-pattern carpeting, and a dramatic skylight that looks like it was inspired by Czech Cubism or salt crystals.

DAVID TOUTAIN

Chef David Toutain is a rapidly rising star in Paris, and he’s also seriously interested in modern design. This explains the minimalist decor of his ryokan-like Left Bank restaurant with teal-blue walls and custom-made oak dining tables with ceramic insert centerpieces. “The look of the restaurant is as much a part of the story I tell as the dishes I serve,” says Toutain, who selected all of the tableware, including recycled knives from an atelier outside of Brussels and bisque serving dishes from Belgian ceramist Pieter Stockmans. Not all luxury restaurants are full of diamonds.

SEPTIME

“I wanted to liberate good French food from expensive hotel dining rooms,” young chef Bertrand Grébaut, whose vintage restaurant Septime is one of the most luxury restaurants in Paris. This explains the bohemian look he created in a former furniture workshop in eastern Paris. The twin dining rooms have polished anthracite-color cement floors, sleek Danish-modern dining chairs, and dining tables made from rough gray recycled wood.

When deciding to launch a meat-free menu at his glamorous restaurant in the Hotel Plaza Athénée he named for himself, Alain Ducasse knew the place would need a new look. To mark the dramatic change in the kitchen, Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku centered the luxury dining room on a deconstructed crystal chandelier, in which each piece of cut crystal is suspended from an invisible wire. The duo equipped the room with a fleet of flying-saucer-style chrome banquettes and an oversize hooded loveseat. Clean, daring, and handsome, the new space has a certain 1960s retro-Futurist charm.

CAFFE STERN

Tucked away in the Passage des Panoramas, an atmospheric glass-roofed arcade in the heart of Paris built-in 1830, this charming Italian restaurant with a witty toys-in-the-attic quality by Philippe Starck was once home to engraver and printer company Sterns, which moved to a new address several years ago. The elegant front windows of the café, a listed French historical monument, are today occupied by two stuffed animals—a wolf and a lynx—with rhinestone collars. One of the most luxury restaurants in Paris.