best places to eat in paris
best places to eat in paris
Paris, the capital of France, is a city that has so many attractions that a single visit may not be enough to explore it all. Paris is also the home to some of the best restaurants and restaurants in the world with all sorts of food types available for any visitor. You can have a classic Parisian meal at renowned restaurants or indulge in some new flavors by trying the unique cuisine options Paris has to offer. What are the best restaurants in Paris? Where should you have dinner? It’s Paris, so you know the place will be nice. But where exactly you should dine is the critical question here. After all, you’ve only got one night in this city of lights – and we don’t want you to regret your choice.
Paris is one of the most culinary-savvy cities in the world, so you’ll find no shortage of delicious restaurants to try during your visit. Here are our top picks for the best places to eat in Paris:
Le Comptoir du Relais
This is a great place for a casual meal or afternoon tea. The restaurant’s menu features French classics like steak frites and duck confit, but also has some modern touches like fish tacos and truffle fries. The atmosphere is relaxed and lively—perfect for a date night or girls’ night out!
Bistrot Paul Bert
Bistrot Paul Bert serves up traditional French dishes with a modern twist. The menu offers everything from classic steak tartare to braised pork shoulder with boiled potatoes and vegetables. This restaurant has been around since 1864, so you know it’s doing something right!
L’Avenue
For those looking for something more upscale than Bistrot Paul Bert but still keeping things casual, L’Avenue is an excellent choice. The menu offers everything from pasta dishes to steaks, as well as an extensive wine list so you can pair your meal perfectly with your favorite bottle of vino!
Paris is one of the most popular places to visit in Europe. It’s a city that has been around for centuries, and because of that, it’s no surprise that there are so many great restaurants. If you’re planning a trip to Paris, here are some of the best places to eat:
1) Cafe de Flore
Cafe de Flore is located near Notre Dame Cathedral in the Latin Quarter. It has been open since 1896, so it’s definitely a place where history meets delicious food! This restaurant is also known for its ambiance—it features beautiful chandeliers and cozy booths with red velvet seats. The menu features classic French cuisine like escargot and duck confit.
2) Le Grand Vefour
Le Grand Vefour is another restaurant located near Notre Dame Cathedral in the Latin Quarter area of Paris. It has been serving up delicious French food since 1868! This restaurant is well known for its elegant decor and ambiance as well as its delicious food—the menu includes foie gras on brioche with black truffles and lobster ravioli with black truffle butter sauce.
3) La Gare du Nord
La Gare du Nord is located on Rue St-Martin in
top restaurants in paris
Comice
The bulk of Paris’s famed haute cuisine is fiscally out of reach for many. However Michelin-starred Comice, headed by Canadian chef Noam Gedalof and sommelier Etheliya Hananova (the two are married), is an indulgence that won’t completely melt your credit card. The look strikes a similar balance: elegant but relaxed, with striking arrangements from a renowned local florist. Hananova’s wine list — which features lesser-known wines from around the world — is terrific, as is Gedalof’s light, inventive contemporary French cooking. Try the duck foie gras with hazelnuts, strawberries, balsamic, and black pepper, or the roast chicken with polenta, wild mushrooms, and a salad of wild herbs.
Le Bistrot Flaubert
Originally founded in the 1980s by chef Michel Rostang, this cozy bistro with flea market decor has been taken over by chef Nicolas Baumann and one of the most innovative restaurateurs in Paris right now, financier Stéphane Manigold. Korean-born chef Sukwon Yong, who used to work with Rostang, leads the kitchen, and his Asian spin on French bistro cooking has made this one of the most interesting and satisfying restaurants in western Paris. Expect dishes like Korean beef tartare with avocado mousse and puffed rice, and lumache (snail-shaped pasta) with rabbit confit, red curry, and kimchi. The prix fixe lunch is a real bargain in an expensive part of Paris.
Restaurant Arnaud Nicolas
With excellent handmade pates, sausages, and terrines, award-winning charcutier and chef Arnaud Nicolas has revived an ancient branch of French gastronomy. The space, on a leafy avenue in the silk-stocking Seventh Arrondissement, is decorated with exposed stone walls, a beamed ceiling, and battleship-gray moldings. Roasts and meat pies, Gallic pleasures that date back at least to the Middle Ages, figure as first courses, before an evolving menu filled with seasonal produce. Nicolas shows off his style with turbot cooked with cep mushrooms, salmon koulibiak for two, beef cheek braised with carrots in red wine, veal sweetbreads with girolles mushrooms, and a luscious chocolate souffle.
Jean Imbert au Plaza Athénée
After the bombshell news in June 2021 that chef Jean Imbert would replace chef Alain Ducasse in the kitchens of the Hotel Plaza Athénée, the upstart cook made skeptical Parisians swoon when he unveiled his menu of classic French dishes at his new eponymous restaurant last September. “I believe in the great traditions of French gastronomy,” says Imbert, who eschews the headstrong creativity of some of his young peers. Imbert subtly tweaks and revises classic dishes to make them elegantly modern, as seen in a signature dish like a deconstructed vol au vent (usually a pastry case filled with crayfish, veal sweetbreads, and mushrooms in cream sauce), which comes to the table with the plated ingredients hidden under a round golden pane of fragile puff pastry. Don’t miss the whole poached turbot stuffed with asparagus or the spectacular multi-course dessert. This restaurant is by no means cheap, but it offers better value for the money than most other tables at this gastronomic altitude.
La Scene
Chef Stéphanie Le Quellec’s glamorous subterranean dining room feels like a luxury railroad car, with the chef working in a theater-like open kitchen at the head of the room. It’s fun and amusing, which is the point. Le Quellec has reinvented French haute cuisine for the 21st century, offering diners a good time instead of another long stuffy experience. Her cooking is light, lucid, and precise, with touches of gastronomic wit. Poached langoustines come with buckwheat and a quenelle of blanc-manger and claw meat. Scottish grouse with morels is cooked with smoked tea. Veal sweetbreads arrive with roasted cauliflower and harissa. And a ganache, featuring Criollo chocolate from Venezuela, is made with olive oil. La Scene is one of the rare Paris restaurants that works as well for a romantic tete a tete as it does for a business meal.
unique eats in paris
L’Arpège
Okay, it costs a freaking fortune, but the vegetarian dishes cooked by three-Michelin-starred chef Alain Passard often come as close to nirvana as Paris can deliver for vegetarians. They’re so good that accompanying non-vegetarians will be tempted, although fish and meat are also on the menu. Passard’s vegetables come from his own organic farm, and what you’ll get depends on what’s available at the time. A sample of Passard’s talent with the bounty of the garden includes dishes like ratatouille-stuffed ravioli with an infusion of purple basil and a vol au vent (puff pastry) filled with baby peas, turnips, and snow peas in a sauce spiked with Cote du Jura wine. It’s worth pointing out that people have strong feelings about L’Arpège — the restaurant has its share of critics, including Eater’s own Ryan Sutton.
Le Grand Restaurant
The French have a genius for offal cooking, especially veal sweetbreads. Maybe you love them already, but if not, there’s no better souvenir to take home from Paris than a newly discovered favorite dish. The place to make this happen is Jean-François Piège’s Le Grand Restaurant. He cooks the sweetbreads on walnut shells in a hot box and serves them with walnut mousseline and morels.
Joséphine Chez Dumonet
With its lace curtains, cut-glass room dividers, and bentwood chairs, this century-old bistro is why you put up with all those terrible hours in economy class to get to Paris. The boeuf bourguignon is the best in the city. The dish is a testament to Gallic genius, calling for slowly simmering meat to create a flavor-rich sauce from the juices. You must book in advance, and don’t miss the Grand Marnier souffle for dessert either.
Mosuke
In a year of lockdowns, young chef Mory Sacko was one of the stars of 2020 for the originality of his intriguing Afro-Franco-Japanese cooking in Montparnasse. The son of Malian immigrants to France, he grew up in the suburbs eating African dishes made by his mother and American fast food for an occasional treat. At a job at a big Paris luxury hotel, he discovered his fascination with cooking, and went on to work with two-Michelin-star chef Thierry Marx, a Japanophile who taught Sacko to love Japanese ingredients and techniques. Expect dishes like lobster in miso sauce with smoked pepper and lacto-fermented tomato, sole seasoned with togarashi shichimi, and lovage cooked inside of a banana leaf and served with a side of attieke, a couscous-like preparation of dried fermented cassava pulp. The name of the restaurant derives from the names of the chef and one of his heroes, Yasuke, the first and only African samurai, an emancipated Mozambican slave who lived in 16th-century Kyoto.
