Shanghai · Gastronomy
In 2025, the general manager of Capella Shanghai relays a request from Pierre Gagnaire: he would like the music at Le Comptoir to reflect his own tastes more closely.
A few weeks later, we meet him at his Paris restaurant on rue Balzac, in the 8th arrondissement. Pierre Gagnaire talks to us about music, of course, returning several times to the playlist he keeps on his phone, the one that travels with him.Éric watches the tracks scroll past on the screen.
The brand
Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li
Our story with Capella Shanghai began in 2017, when the hotel opened in the shikumen houses of Jian Ye Li. These 1930s homes still carry the long-standing dialogue between Shanghai and the West; restored in the heart of Xuhui, they preserve their memory while belonging fully to the present. Since the opening, Music Eye View has shaped the music across the hotel’s spaces, including Le Comptoir de Pierre Gagnaire.
The request made in 2025 changes the nature of our listening. Knowing the place is no longer enough: the music must now reflect more closely the personality whose name it bears.
We already knew Pierre Gagnaire’s cuisine. On rue Balzac, we discover a man of remarkable gentleness, whose humanism is felt without ever needing to be stated. He listens closely, lets the words come, welcomes the turns the conversation takes; there is a glint in his eye, humour surfaces, one anecdote opens into another. Pierre Gagnaire speaks about cuisine poetically, but poetry, for him, reaches far beyond the kitchen: it lives in the way he talks about a song, a meeting, a memory, sometimes almost nothing at all.
His cuisine reflects him. It carries the same taste for surprise and the same freedom to shift what we thought we knew ever so slightly, without ever forcing anything.
This is the presence the music at Le Comptoir must make audible in Shanghai.
What memory holds
© Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li
The project
Le Comptoir de Pierre Gagnaire
Pierre Gagnaire’s phone passes back and forth between us. His playlist reads almost like one of Prévert’s inventories: works from different periods and places, those he carries with him, those to which time has given a particular place and which, piece by piece, form a deeply personal memory.
As they appear, we begin to hear a sensibility: a taste for melody, for close voices, for a light melancholy that still knows how to remain luminous.
Éric listens with the particular pleasure that comes at the start of the most rewarding musical searches: imagining the piece Pierre Gagnaire does not yet know, the one that might enter his landscape naturally without disturbing anything already there.
The idea is simple: to enrich his personal playlist, to introduce him to artists and melodies he might want to keep close; then to let that same musicality leave his phone, cross the distance and find its place among the guests seated at Le Comptoir.
For nearly two months, we exchange ideas and playlists. Pierre Gagnaire listens, replies, comments. Some works stay, others send us searching again. The conversation continues through music.
The pleasure of sharing discoveries becomes our compass
© Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li
Sound identity
Towards new horizons
We begin with Pierre Gagnaire’s personal playlist, with our conversations, with what his choices reveal beyond the decades they come from. The aim is not to reproduce its contours, but to extend its sensibility.
French film music of the 1970s opens a natural path. Philippe Sarde finds his place there: his scores hold restraint and lyricism, memory and unease together, with an elegance that travels across time.
Around this material, Airelle Besson, Birds on a Wire and a younger generation of Francophone artists begin to appear. Generations cease to be merely dates; they answer one another through timbre, inflection, ways of inhabiting a melody or allowing a musical phrase to breathe.
Several of these works are new to Pierre Gagnaire, and he simply likes them. A new melody finds its place beside music loved for years, with such ease that discovery feels almost like recognition.
The territory that emerges remains deeply connected to his sensibility, yet capable of taking on a life far from him.
In Shanghai.
From Paris to Shanghai
© Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li
Programming
Variations and nuances
The day at Le Comptoir unfolds in two musical colours. In the morning, from 6 am to 11 am, then at tea time, from 2 pm to 6 pm, French-language songs accompany the lighter hours. At lunch, from 11 am to 2 pm, and again at dinner, from 6 pm to 10 pm, the signature programme born from our conversations with Pierre Gagnaire takes its place.
Breakfast
Alex Beaupain, François Atlas and Barbara Carlotti bring a luminous strain of French chanson to the first hours of the day, where the words seem to arrive with the light.
Lunch
Birds on a Wire, Chilly Gonzales and Ibrahim Maalouf let melody travel between voice, piano and brass, without losing the intimacy of Le Comptoir.
Tea Time
With Alexia Gredy, Barbagallo and Cascadeur, the afternoon takes a more dreamlike turn; the music shifts slightly, just enough to change the light.
Dinner
By evening, Jay-Jay Johanson, Kza and Philippe Sarde bring in a more nocturnal elegance; cinema is never far away, nor is melody.
As the listening unfolds, references matter less than the continuity of feeling that links them: choosing a work for what it carries, placing it beside another because they share a kinship that can be difficult to name, yet is immediately felt.
From a table at Le Comptoir, we want this sequence to retain a sense of intimacy, as though Pierre Gagnaire himself had chosen the records. You can almost imagine him taking a record, placing it carefully on the turntable, letting the music enter the room before reaching for the next.
This image is ours alone; the feeling it carries is exactly what the programming seeks to preserve.
Pairing enriches
© Capella Shanghai, Jian Ye Li
Governance
The journey continues
Pierre Gagnaire is delighted with the programming, and it finds its place in Shanghai too.
We are simply glad.
To thank us, Pierre Gagnaire invites us to lunch at his restaurant on rue Balzac. The meal has the same finesse as his conversation: precision, gentleness, a freedom that never seeks effect and gives emotion time to arrive.
Music returns naturally. Pierre Gagnaire tells us about encounters with famous musicians, memories and anecdotes gathered over the years; the conversation wanders, circles back, takes another turn, and we find again the very personal poetry that had marked our first conversation.
The Shanghai programme already exists. There is nothing left to decide. Music can remain, between us too, what it is: a shared pleasure, a way of letting works and stories circulate, of keeping a conversation going.
Beginning in Shanghai in 2017, this story leads us, in 2025, to the playlist Pierre Gagnaire keeps on his phone; from that playlist to new works; from Paris all the way to Shanghai.
In the evening, in Shanghai, as the tracks in the playlist follow one another, their sequence may still carry a trace of the original gesture: choosing a work for a person, with the simple hope that it will give them pleasure.
The conversation goes on …
“In cooking, as in music, the desire is to stir emotion.”
Pierre Gagnaire
