Paris Dining Club

Malone keeps the French line close

Jamie Malone builds Paris Brest around chicken liver at Paris Dining Club in Minneapolis, where she leads the restaurant as chef and founder. The gesture fits the room’s French bistro register without treating classic form as fixed. A ring of choux becomes a place for liver, fat, salt, and sweetness; the pastry keeps its architecture, while the filling moves it toward the pass.

Jamie Malone arrived at this work by a long route. After high school she moved through Hong Kong, Beijing, Vietnam, and Europe, absorbing markets, street food, and open-air stalls as working material rather than souvenir. Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts gave that appetite for place a stricter frame. From 2013, as Head Chef at Sea Change in Minneapolis, she sharpened a kitchen language around seafood, restraint, and timing. Since 2019, she has held Minneapolis roles as chef and owner of Grand Cafe and chef at Eastside, while also leading Paris Dining Club. Here, the throughline settles into modern French cooking with local sourcing, a curated wine program, and the kind of polish that comes from repetition at the station.

Choux, foie, ballotine, and the home table

The menu’s named dishes give the clearest view of the method. Chicken Liver Filled Paris Brest asks for pastry structure and filling discipline in the same bite. Foie Gras Royale sits in a more custard-like register, where temperature and texture decide whether richness reads cleanly. Chicken Ballotine belongs to the older work of boning, rolling, seasoning, and holding a shape through the cook. None of those forms need ornament to carry the point.

Paris Dining Club also extends Malone’s French-inspired cooking through monthly meal kits and catering, bringing the restaurant’s technique into homes and events without pretending the table is the same as the pass. That movement suits a chef whose early vocabulary came from places where food was bought, sold, carried, and eaten in motion. The work still depends on control. Fish, sourcing, and timing remain central to Malone’s practice, especially the chain of handling that has to stay intact before a cook can make an ingredient legible on the plate.

A quiet room for reworked classics

The room is small, quiet, and intimate, with a Parisian warmth that supports the cooking rather than performing around it. The counter and the pass have the feel of an upscale casual restaurant built for attention: elegant enough for foie gras, close enough for the handwork in a ballotine to matter. Modern French bistro can become a costume if the kitchen lets it. Malone’s version stays nearer to the bench.

The wine program is curated, which is the useful word here: not a cellar presented as spectacle, but a set of choices meant to sit beside liver, pastry, poultry, and custard. In that setting, the food’s beauty comes from decisions made before the plate reaches the table, including the local sourcing that frames the room’s sense of place.

The dish that holds the room

Malone’s public recognition includes Food & Wine Best New Chef in 2013, but Paris Dining Club is better understood through the current work than through a laurel earned along the way. The next measure is the same one the kitchen sets for itself each service: whether a familiar French form can carry a Minneapolis hand without losing its line. At Paris Dining Club, that question sits inside the Chicken Liver Filled Paris Brest.