The SeaLa Marée
Driven straight from the port before dawn: blue lobster, oysters and the day's line fish. We look them in the eye before writing the courses.
Notre Histoire
Our Story
VESPER is Latin for the evening star. Twenty minutes after sunset the sky is at its deepest blue and the first star appears — this restaurant was built for those twenty minutes.
LE CHEF
Du Yi
Du Yi's kitchen years began in Lyon: twelve hours a day at the stove, nights spent with produce journals. Four years on the Left Bank of Paris followed, rising from the fish station to sous chef of a two-star house — where the most important lesson wasn't technique but discipline: a sauce half a degree off is poured away and begun again. Back in China in 2021, he spent two years walking the coastline, from fishing ports to farms, to confirm a single belief: the bones of French cooking can carry the flesh of an Eastern coast. In 2024, VESPER lit its first candle at the blue hour.
- 2012Lyon — apprenticeship
- 2015Two-star house on the Left Bank of Paris, fish station to sous chef
- 2021Returned to China; two years along the coast, ports and farms
- 2024Founded VESPER
LES SOURCES
Ingredients before the menu
The menu is rewritten nightly because the ingredients arrive first. Three supply lines — sea, garden, cellar — draw the radius of VESPER's taste.
The GardenLe Jardin
Two partner farms outside the city sow to our planting calendar. When the peas are at their sweetest, the menu obeys.
The CellarLa Cave
A cellar built on Burgundy, its by-the-glass pours rotating weekly. Our sommelier only recommends what he'd drink tonight himself.
LA BRIGADE
Two brigades, one hour
The floor remembers where you sat last time, and which wine you had reached. The ideal service is never noticed — only remembered.
The kitchen starts at three in the afternoon, preparing for twenty minutes of dusk. Eight courses; each gets one chance.
LA SALLE
Keep the lights low, let the night stay
The design does one thing: it presses the light down to table height. The walls recede into deep blue, one hairline of brass the only ornament — the brightest thing in view is always the face across your table.
