Le Grill

The grill before the room fills

The rack of lamb reaches the pass before service settles at Le Grill in Monte Carlo, a rooftop kitchen built around fire, sea air, and restraint. The restaurant sits on the eighth floor of the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo, where the craft has to hold its line against a room with a view. Executive Chef Dominique Lory heads the hotel kitchens, including this one, and works a sun-soaked Riviera register that raises the barbecue tradition rather than dressing it up, with San Remo gamberoni marinated briny and the rack of lamb sent savoury. Chef Julien Lasseaux partners with him at Le Grill, and between them the ode is to wood-fired grillades and seafood. Lory states his own terms plainly enough: love of product, sharing, and respect for the environment, with bonds kept to regional fishermen and farmers. The discipline that follows is product first, gesture kept clean, no flourish allowed to blur the plate. The house also carries the work of a larger hotel kitchen, with Riviera produce, wood fire, and formal service pressed into one program. Le Grill holds 1 Michelin star in the 2025 Guide, but the star is not the method. The method is the timing of scallops, the heat held under lobster, the soufflé sent before its lift begins to fall.

Fire, citrus, and seven hundred references

The program here stays close to the grill. Wood-fired rotisserie and broche cooking give the kitchen its center of gravity, from grilled lobster and pan-seared scallops to rack of lamb with savory, pigeon, whole turbot, and filet de bœuf. The Mediterranean register is specific rather than decorative: San Remo gamberoni, Menton citrus, Provençal herbs, black truffles from Provence, products that can take smoke, salt, acid, or butter without losing their outline. The Grand Marnier soufflé remains the house’s sweet signature, a test of timing as much as appetite. A soufflé does not forgive a distracted pass. The wine program works at similar scale, drawing on 700 references from the Hôtel de Paris cellar, with Provence, Piedmont, and Tuscany given particular weight for seafood, pasta, and meat from the fire. That range matters because the food moves between marine delicacy and charred structure; a glass has to meet both without flattening either.

Under the sliding roof

The room was redesigned in 2017 with blue tones and a nautical line that nods to Monaco without turning the dining room into scenery. The retractable glass roof changes the service without changing the station: sun at lunch, night air at dinner, the same plates moving from the pass to the table. From the eighth floor, the Mediterranean and the Italian coastline sit close enough to become part of the rhythm of the meal, but the better tables are still the ones where a guest can see the grill doing its work. Formal service gives the room its pace. It is quiet enough for the small sounds to register: a knife against silver, a sauce spoon set down, the first cut into lobster.

A house dish with a narrow margin

Le Grill reopened in 2017 just before the 75th Monaco Grand Prix, with an expanded terrace and the sliding roof restored to the restaurant’s sense of occasion. The place matters because it asks an old Riviera idea to keep earning its place: seafood, meat, flame, wine, and a room above the Principality. At Le Grill, the Grand Marnier soufflé leaves the kitchen.