La Réserve Paris

Le Gabriel has fewer than ten tables. For a dining room with three Michelin stars that is almost nothing, and on Saturdays and Sundays there are none at all: the restaurant closes and its team goes home. In most hotels a detail like that belongs in the small print. At La Réserve it explains the whole house.

The other palaces of Paris compete on what they can show you: a garden, a rooftop pool, the river, a lobby worth crossing. La Réserve competes on a number none of them prints, which is how many people share each thing with you. There are forty keys here, most of them suites, against seventy-two at Cheval Blanc and about a hundred and ninety at Le Bristol. Every room comes with a butler, and when the hotel opened the staff outnumbered the keys by more than three to one. There is no lobby to linger in. The library, with its fire and its shelves of old books, is the house's living room: residents have it to themselves in the morning, and outsiders come in only for lunch and tea.

The house has a second loyalty, to a vineyard. Its owner also has a château in Saint-Estèphe, Cos d'Estournel, whose founder chased buyers as far as India and crowned his cellars with pagodas. Hence the name of the second restaurant, La Pagode, and of the bar, Le Gaspard, where the estate's wines are poured. It is a wine estate's idea of hospitality: a few guests at a time, known by name, and poured the house's own wine.

The rooms are where the small scale pays off. Jacques Garcia dressed the mansion in silk, velvet and tooled leather; in a hotel of three hundred rooms it would read as décor, here it reads as somebody's flat. Even the smallest room is forty square metres. The red is heavy for some tastes, and the views are uneven: some suites have balconies that look to the Eiffel Tower or the glass roof of the Grand Palais, others look across the avenue into the trees, and the hotel's room pages do not say which.

What the arithmetic cannot buy is a scene. There is no great room to watch Paris from, no garden for the whole house, and at the weekend the best kitchen in the building is dark. Anyone coming to Paris to be seen in it will find more of an occasion at Le Bristol or the Ritz. Anyone who knows the city already, and wants to come back at night to a house shared with very few others, should book it midweek, with the table first.