Ultraviolet Rises to Three Michelin Stars in Shanghai

Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet was promoted to three Michelin stars in the 2018 edition of the Michelin Guide Shanghai, announced in September 2017. It joined T’ang Court, which kept the three stars it had received in the first edition a year earlier. The guide listed 30 starred restaurants in all, with eight at two stars and four new one-star entries: Bo Shanghai, Jean-Georges, Yongfu and Wujie on the Bund.

One table, ten seats

Ultraviolet opened in May 2012 after more than fifteen years of planning by Pairet, a French chef who had worked in Paris, Sydney, Jakarta and Istanbul before settling in Shanghai in 2005. It had a single table for ten guests and one sitting each evening, from Tuesday to Saturday.

Guests met at Mr & Mrs Bund, Pairet’s restaurant in the Bund 18 building, and were driven to an unmarked address in an old industrial district north of Suzhou Creek. The dining room was a bare, windowless box. Its walls were projection screens, and each of the twenty courses came with its own images, music, lighting and scent, all controlled from a room next door. A dish built around the sea was served to the sound of waves and the smell of salt air; a reworking of fish and chips came with rain on the windows and the Beatles. Pairet called the idea psycho-taste: that what surrounds a dish changes how it is perceived.

The dinner cost between 4,000 and 6,000 yuan, depending on the menu, and seats were sold months ahead through the restaurant’s website. A team of about 25 served the ten guests.

Why the stars mattered

The promotion settled a debate. Some had regarded Ultraviolet as theatre with food attached. Michelin’s inspectors judged that the cooking stood by itself: precise, witty, technically ambitious and consistent over many visits. It was also the first time a restaurant of this experimental kind, anywhere, had reached the guide’s top rating, and it gave Shanghai a restaurant that travellers would fly in for.

In the same years Ultraviolet stood in the top ten of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants.

Afterwards

Ultraviolet kept its three stars in every later edition. It closed in 2025, when Pairet announced that the restaurant would stop service after thirteen years. No direct successor has taken its place, and the immersive dining rooms that have since opened across Asia owe it an evident debt. Shanghai’s top Michelin rating is now held by Taian Table alone, as the 2026 regional guide confirmed.