1 · Opening
Caviar Kaspia was founded on the Place de la Madeleine in 1927 by Russian émigrés, and has sold caviar downstairs and served it upstairs ever since. The signature is a baked potato.
2 · Why it matters
The Madeleine is where Parisian luxury food organised itself, and Kaspia is its most singular survivor: a shop and a small dining room above it, unchanged in principle for a century, open late enough to have collected the fashion world as a clientele.
The baked potato with caviar is one of the great luxury inventions of the twentieth century precisely because it is a joke that works: the most humble vehicle possible for the most expensive ingredient, served without irony in a room of gilded panelling.
Its recent expansion into other cities ⚑ tests whether a house whose charm is a specific Parisian staircase can exist elsewhere.
3 · Signature & ritual
The baked potato; the shop below; a first-floor room that fills after midnight during the collections.
4 · What this house does not solve
Caviar supply is a regulated, volatile and reputationally complicated trade ⚑, and a house named for it cannot distance itself from the questions.
A room of that size cannot grow, so growth must be new cities — which is exactly what a hundred-year-old Parisian staircase cannot be.
And the clientele that made it is a fashion-week clientele: reliable twice a year, and elsewhere the rest of the time.
5 · LHL connections
- LHL-S-044Maison de la TruffeThe other single-ingredient house of the same square.
- LHL-S-093FauchonThe neighbour that chose breadth.
- LHL-S-071Harry's Bar, VeniceThe Cipriani origin house.
6 · Timeline
- 1927Caviar Kaspia is founded on the Place de la Madeleine.
- 20th centuryThe upstairs dining room becomes a Paris institution.
- 2010s–2020sLocations in other cities ⚑.
7 · LHL story
“A Potato, Properly Dressed” — The greatest luxury invention on the Place de la Madeleine is a baked potato — served, without a trace of irony, under a great deal of caviar and a hundred years of gilding.
Source framework
- House history; Parisian press.
- ⚑ Ownership, locations and caviar sourcing require two sources.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.