Ultraviolet, Shanghai’s Three-Star Restaurant, Serves Its Last Dinner

Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet held its last service on 29 March 2025. The restaurant had been open in Shanghai for thirteen years and had held three Michelin stars since 2017. On 20 November 2024, the day after it received its eighth consecutive three-star award, Pairet announced that it would be put on hold indefinitely during 2025 because of construction work around its premises.

What it was

Ultraviolet opened in May 2012. It was the project of Paul Pairet, a French chef already known in the city for the brasserie Mr & Mrs Bund, and it was financed by the VOL Group, a local restaurant company.

There was one table, and it seated ten. The dinner was a fixed menu of more than twenty courses, and for each one the room changed. Projection, sound and scent were synchronised with the food, so that every dish arrived in an atmosphere made for it. Pairet described the technology as a way of reaching the mind as well as the palate. Over the years the restaurant presented four menus, the last of them introduced in 2022.

Its standing

In 2014 Ultraviolet became the first restaurant in China admitted to Les Grandes Tables du Monde. When the Michelin Guide came to Shanghai it received two stars in the first edition and three in the second, in September 2017, and kept them every year afterwards. It was placed as high as sixth in Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants and twenty-fourth in the world list.

What follows

The restaurant said in 2024 that it was pausing and not closing for good, and that the concept would return in another form. No date or place has been given; any news of a return would appear on the restaurant’s official channels. Pairet continues to run Mr & Mrs Bund, Polux and Charbon in Shanghai.

The city’s leading table is now Taian Table, the only three-star restaurant in the combined Michelin Guide for Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.