Impérial Choisy

The 13th Arrondissement and the Question of Register

Paris's 13th arrondissement along Avenue de Choisy is one of the few places in Western Europe where a diner can walk a single street and encounter the full range of Chinese regional cooking, Cantonese roast meats hanging in windows, hand-pulled noodle shops, Wenzhou-style dumplings, Sichuan hotpot parlours, all within a few hundred metres. The question for any serious table in this neighbourhood is not whether the cooking is authentic. It is whether the kitchen has a point of view about which register it occupies and whether the technique matches the ambition.

Impérial Choisy, at 32 Avenue de Choisy, answers that question with consecutive Michelin Bib Gourmand awards in 2024 and 2025. In Michelin's own framework, the Bib Gourmand signals good cooking at a price the guide defines as accessible, roughly €€ territory in Paris terms. Two consecutive recognitions in the same category confirm a kitchen operating with consistency rather than a single strong season. In a street dense with competition, that signal matters.

Heat, Numbness, and the Ma-La Spectrum

Sichuan peppercorn's particular effect, the numbing, citrusy tingle that sits underneath chilli heat rather than competing with it, is the defining technical challenge separating kitchens that understand Chinese spicing from those performing an approximation of it. The compound sensation is achieved through the fat-soluble alkaloids in peppercorn reacting with chilli oil's capsaicin, and the balance is notoriously easy to collapse in either direction: too much peppercorn produces an anaesthetic flatness; too little reduces the dish to direct chilli heat without the layered resonance that Sichuan cooking at its most precise delivers.

European Chinese restaurants have historically softened this spectrum for local palates. The more interesting shift in cities like Paris, Berlin, and San Francisco over the past decade has been a cluster of kitchens choosing not to. Restaurant Tim Raue in Berlin built a Michelin-starred reputation partly on an insistence on that kind of technical precision with Asian spicing. Mister Jiu's in San Francisco approaches the same question from a Cantonese-American angle. Impérial Choisy sits in the Paris version of this conversation, at a price point that makes the cooking accessible without flattening the register.

Chef Jeremy Cheminade leads the kitchen. The Bib Gourmand, which rewards cooking quality relative to price rather than ambition for its own sake, fits a kitchen where the emphasis is on execution within a defined style rather than on spectacle. What Michelin is validating here is a standard of craft, controlled heat, balanced seasoning, consistent kitchen output, that the street's volume operators do not always maintain.

Where Impérial Choisy Sits in the Paris Chinese Tier

Paris's Chinese restaurant market splits roughly into three tiers. At the leading, restaurants like LiLi, Madame FAN, and Imperial Treasure operate at €€€ or above, with formal service, wine programs, and the kind of room investment that comes with hotel backing or a dedicated fine-dining investor. Taokan occupies a similar register on the more central Right Bank. These restaurants compete on a different axis from the 13th arrondissement entirely.

Below that tier, the 13th's Avenue de Choisy and the adjacent streets around the Tang Frères supermarket anchor a neighbourhood market that operates on volume, speed, and price. The cooking at the summit of these tables can be technically precise, but the rooms are functional and the experience is self-service in its logic, if not always in practice.

The restaurant sits between these two poles. The Bib Gourmand bracket positions it above the pure volume operators without the investment or pricing structure of the formal tier. That middle ground is exactly where the Bib Gourmand designation has editorial weight, it identifies kitchens where a diner can eat at the level of the neighbourhood's serious cooking without paying for the formal infrastructure of the higher tier. For comparison, the €€€€ tables at the Paris three-star level, restaurants like Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen, operate in a category defined by room, service, and price as much as by the plate. The restaurant's argument is that the plate can justify the visit independently.

The 13th as Context

The 13th arrondissement's Chinese quarter developed through successive waves of immigration, primarily from Southeast Asia and southern China in the late 1970s and 1980s, and more recently from mainland Chinese communities in the 1990s and 2000s. The result is a neighbourhood where the cooking represents genuine regional diversity rather than a homogenised Cantonese-French compromise. The area around the Olympiades towers and Avenue de Choisy has been compared to New York's Flushing or London's Gerrard Street in terms of density, though the Paris version skews towards Cantonese and Vietnamese alongside the newer Sichuan and Wenzhou presences.

For a visitor approaching from the more formally serviced parts of Paris dining, the neighbourhood operates on different logic. Reservations at many tables are minimal or informal. The rooms are rarely designed. The service is functional. What the neighbourhood offers, at its better tables, is cooking that has not been adapted for a tourist register. The restaurant's Bib Gourmand recognitions mark it as one of the tables where that standard is reliably maintained.

Flocons de Sel in Megève, Mirazur in Menton, Troisgros in Ouches, Auberge de l'Ill in Illhaeusern, Bras in Laguiole, and Paul Bocuse in Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or.

Planning Your Visit

The restaurant is located at 32 Av. de Choisy, 75013 Paris, France. It is walk-in friendly and open daily from 12 to 11 PM.