Le Village Tomohiro (the cheapest ⭐ in France), Marly-le-Roi, June 2025

I finished visiting Versailles in the late afternoon, found this restaurant, and went after I got a same-day reservation. This is the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in France… probably. I can’t imagine many other places have a “6-course” menu for €80. FYI, it’s not really 6 “courses,” but instead 3, along with amuse-bouche, a palate cleanser, and mignardises.

Bread: By French standards, pretty bad. All the bread seemed to be quite old, and the smoked butter was way too smoky.

Amuse-Bouche: All the bites tasted pretty much the same, which is to say, not good at all. The lobster ice cream was terrible.

Tartare: This was a tartare of a French white fish that was served slightly warm, which I didn’t like at all. The sauces/foams, besides the smoked and salted egg yolk dots around the plate, were flavorless and added nothing to the dish. The white asparagus had a very strange texture.

Palate Cleaser: This has to be one of the worst things I’ve ever eaten. It was a cilantro granité with a flavorless crisp. The granité tasted beyond awful, was way too icy and cold, and the crisp was far too hard.

Limousin Veal: The veal was cooked perfectly, but completely unseasoned. The jus-vanilla sauce was sickening due to the vanilla. The asparagus was just grilled asparagus. The artichoke purée dots were flavorless. The onion with veal in the middle and a soy sauce reduction wasn’t bad, though.

Dessert: The theme of this dessert was a particular salt thechef likes, and this dessert tasted as bad as it sounded. The combination of salt and sweetness mixed with fruit, in this particular dessert, was sickening.

Mignardises: Quantity over quality. Everything was either flavorless or too sweet.

Overall, a horrendous experience, paired with pretty poor service. My waiter took 20 minutes to get me the bill after clearly seeing I was done, on top of me waving to him. As of right now, I can’t say I’ve ever had such a bad experience at a starred place ever before.