Shang Palace

A fixed point for Cantonese discipline

The duck reaches the table in two services, skin first, then the breast worked hot from the wok. Samuel Lee Sum, Chef at Shang Palace in 16th Arr., Paris, France, keeps that sequence inside a Cantonese kitchen built on timing, clarity, and restraint. Born in Hong Kong, he has held the Executive Chef role here since 2015, bringing the cadence of traditional Cantonese cooking into a Paris dining room inside Shangri-La Paris.

His lineage, as the house states it, is not a list of named masters but a discipline: authentic traditional Cantonese cooking, seasonal ingredients, and the refusal to blur the style for effect. That matters in a room where luxury could easily pull the food toward decoration. Lee Sum’s work holds the opposite line. The plate stays composed; the flavor stays legible. In 2019, he created Sweet Cheese, a dessert project built around cheese, adding a sweet course to a body of work known first for savory Cantonese technique.

The masters at the stations

The kitchen’s structure rests on four specialist masters: wok, barbecue, chopping, and dim sum. Each station carries a different kind of pressure. The wok asks for heat and sequence; the barbecue station asks for lacquer, rest, and skin; the chopping station determines how texture arrives at the table; the dim sum bench turns dough, filling, steam, fry, and bake into small measures of judgment.

Peking duck and dim sum are the signatures most closely associated with the restaurant, and both reveal why the station system matters. The duck appears as skin with pancakes, then wok-fried minced breast in lettuce, a service built on cut, temperature, and pacing. The dim sum program moves across steamed, fried, and baked forms, with fillings kept clear rather than crowded. Around them, the menu reaches beyond the obvious markers of Cantonese dining: steamed lobster ravioli, snow salad with sesame sauce, sweet-and-sour foie gras, blue lobster gong bao, steamed turbot from Brittany with ginger and coriander, Normandy beef fillet with pepper, and broccolini with smoked black bean sauce. The house also offers à la carte and tasting menu formats, but the craft is at the station, not in the format.

The quiet room around the pass

The room at Shang Palace is formal without noise. Light sits low on polished surfaces, the decor leans Asian in its references, and the pace gives the hands space to matter. In a quiet service, the pass can read almost like a sequence of signals: a duck carved with control, a steamer opened at the right moment, a plate leaving before garnish becomes ornament.

The restaurant opened in 2011 as the first Shang Palace outpost in Europe, and it holds one Michelin star. What matters at the table is how little the cooking seems to strain toward its awards. Cantonese cuisine rewards exactness more than volume. Here, a sheet of lacquered skin, a basket of dim sum, and Samuel Lee Sum’s Sweet Cheese.