Claudine

The Restaurant

Claudine opened in December 2024 inside a small storefront at 225 Weybosset Street in downtown Providence, taking over a former retail space three blocks from the Providence Performing Arts Center and converting it into a 26-seat tasting-menu restaurant that operates only Thursday through Sunday. The chef-owners are Josh Finger and Maggie McConnell, a husband-and-wife team who met as line cooks at chef Thomas Keller's Per Se in New York and spent the better part of a decade across Per Se, The French Laundry, and a series of high-end New York kitchens before returning to McConnell's home state to open their first independent restaurant. The room itself is small but considered: white-clothed tables widely spaced across two rows, a long banquette along one wall, deliberately low lighting, a small open kitchen visible at the back of the room, hand-thrown ceramics on every table. The 2026 James Beard Best New Restaurant semifinalist nomination came less than a year after opening and was the most prestigious national recognition any Providence room received this year.

The menu is a single eight-course chef's tasting menu priced at $165 per person with an optional wine pairing at $115, and it changes meaningfully every two to three weeks as Northeast seasonal product rotates. The cooking is unambiguously rooted in classical French technique - the sauce work, the mise-en-place discipline, the plate construction - but the ingredient orientation is firmly Northeast: Narragansett Bay sea scallops with brown butter and capers, slow-poached Atlantic halibut with a beurre blanc built on local cider vinegar, a foie-gras-stuffed Long Island duck breast with seasonal stone fruit, sweetbreads with morels in spring, a venison course in winter sourced from a small Vermont supplier. The bread service - a brioche brioche pulled to order from the small wood-fired oven at the back of the kitchen - signals the level of attention the kitchen brings to every component of the meal. Service is run by Finger himself, who works the room as captain on the most nights, with two additional servers handling table-side work.

The wine programme is the room's quietly serious second pillar: roughly 180 references with deep verticals in Burgundy, Champagne, and the Loire, plus a careful selection of natural and biodynamic producers from across France, Germany, and the Northeast (notably Tessier from the Connecticut River Valley and several Champagnes from grower-producers that are difficult to find anywhere else in the state). McConnell oversees the wine programme directly and a sommelier-trained service team handles tableside pours. For a Providence evening that needs to be uncompromised at every variable - the room, the kitchen, the wine, the staff - Claudine is now the unambiguous first call, and the four-to-six-week booking horizon for weekend tables reflects that reality.