Impérial Choisy

Roast meats set the station

The duck skin has to leave the pass crisp, with the meat still carrying its juice. Jeremy Cheminade, chef at Impérial Choisy in Chinatown, Paris, works inside that narrow discipline: Cantonese cooking measured by heat, timing, and the clean decision not to overwork a plate. His current role gives a different form to a career that included the Head Chef post at Jiwan in Doha from 2019 to 2021, but the frame here is not biography. It is repetition at volume, in a room that has served Paris’s 13th arrondissement since 1981.

Cheminade’s station sits within a house known less for authored flourishes than for the steadiness of a Cantonese canteen. The kitchen’s signatures are named plainly: crispy roast duck, char siu BBQ pork, dim sum. Each asks for control before personality. Duck skin must crackle without drying the flesh; char siu needs lacquer, sweetness, smoke, and a cut that keeps the pork tender; dumplings need steam and closure, not decoration. The chef’s work here is to hold those lines while the orders keep coming.

A Cantonese program built on heat

The menu moves by category rather than ceremony: dim sum, soups, roasts, pork, tofu, vegetables, fish. That breadth matters because the method changes from station to station. Shrimp and bamboo dumplings go to steam; salt and pepper squid depends on a crisp fry and quick seasoning; mapo tofu holds heat differently from roast pork belly. A whole sea bass with ginger and chive asks for the gentler end of the kitchen, where steam carries fragrance without burying the fish.

The rotisserie remains the anchor. Crispy roast duck and char siu are the dishes that have made the address a habit for regulars, and their success rests on visible things: skin, glaze, cut, pace. The wine program stays minimal, which leaves the table to the food and the sauces. House chili sauce, noodle broth, roast meat juices, and the sheen on lacquered pork do more of the talking than any pairing script could. It is a traditional program in the practical sense, one built to feed tables, not to explain itself.

The room keeps its own tempo

The room is close-set and loud, with the pressure of a Hong Kong-style canteen rather than the hush of a dining room arranged for ceremony. Tables turn, plates land quickly, and the counter rhythm carries into the floor. The atmosphere is lively because the work is constant: roast meats leaving the kitchen, noodle soups moving through the room, dim sum arriving in small clusters, families and regulars ordering as if they already know the shape of the meal.

Impérial Choisy’s address on Avenue de Choisy places it inside the everyday Chinatown of the 13th arrondissement, not apart from it. The place has held that role for decades by keeping its craft legible. The duck has skin crisp, meat juicy, and the plate moves from Cheminade’s pass into the Impérial Choisy room.