Ginko

Vegetables take the first decision

Vegetables take the first decision before the fish arrives. Valentina Giacobbe leads the kitchen at Ginko in Lille, and her modern French cooking gives the plant course real weight rather than a supporting role. The restaurant opened in September 2023 on Rue de l'Hôpital Militaire, opposite Église Saint-Etienne, with a kitchen built around seasonal produce, fermentation, and Japanese and Italian accents. Giacobbe came to it from the sous-chef station at Rozo, and before that from Pierre Gagnaire's Gaya, where she met Julien Ingaud-Jaubert, who now shapes the sweet side from a pastry background at Clarance. That training shows in a room where green peas, nettles, wild garlic, salsify, and beetroot carry as much consequence as cod. Ginko holds one Michelin star in the 2025 Guide France and received the Michelin Young Chef Award 2025, a quick rise for a restaurant that had only begun service in autumn 2023. The point is not speed. It is that the bench found its grammar early.

Fermentation beside wild garlic

The craft at Ginko sits in the meeting of French sauce work and vegetable pressure. Cod can arrive with wild garlic hollandaise and salsify; green peas can be paired with nettles; a full vegetarian tasting menu is treated as part of the main program, not an accommodation placed beside it. The kitchen uses fermentation as a seasoning tool, bringing acidity and depth into a menu that favors texture over weight. Italian and Asian touches appear as accents, not as costume: a sauce sharpened here, a garnish pulled toward bitterness or umami there, a vegetable asked to hold the center of the plate. Ingaud-Jaubert closes the sequence in the same register, with a rice pudding built on barley caramel, quince compote and almond crisp. The wine program follows that structure with pairings and natural wine, including named bottles such as Sur le Bois from Maranges, Strate from the Hérault, and Mosaïque from the Rhône. The glass is there to lengthen the vegetable, not drown it.

Oak, walnut, brick, low light

The room keeps close to Lille without making a set of it. Red-brick walls nod to the city; oak parquet, walnut tables, and soft fabrics bring the room down to hand scale. The lighting is deliberately dark and intimate, more cellar than showroom, and the table d'hôte looks toward the kitchen so the meal can keep some bench-side contact. The former Le Vinci site has been refitted into a contemporary dining room with a subdued surface, the kind of room where a small brigade can work without theatrical interruption. Sound can reflect in the space, and some guests notice the acoustics, but the prevailing register is conversational. That matters for this cooking. A vegetable-led menu loses force if the room asks for spectacle. Ginko gives it shadow, wood, brick, and the pace of a kitchen working course by course.

A young Lille grammar

Ginko matters most as a young restaurant that has already given Lille a clear new syntax for fine dining: local sourcing, vegetable dominance, fermentation, and sauces that still remember the French canon. The 2025 Michelin star belongs to Ginko, not to an inherited address, and the Young Chef Award marks the same moment of arrival. The measure is on the plate: cod with wild garlic hollandaise, salsify, green peas with nettles, and the Menu Végétal that keeps Giacobbe's bench honest.