A Guide to Paris Restaurants
Enjoying high quality French cuisine should be high on the list of priorities for anyone visiting Paris.
However, like in any popular tourist destination, there are lots of bad and overpriced eateries. So, to help you get the best food for your money, I’ve created this Paris Restaurant Guide.
What is typical French food?
You can't have a Paris food guide without first talking about what the Parisians actually eat.
These days it's not so much frogs legs and escargot (snails), like most major cities the locals have embraced Asian and Mediterranean food and there are even raw food restaurants in Paris.
However, the French fondness for meat is still to the fore and beef, chicken and ham are still found in the most popular foods in Paris.
Tips for choosing a Paris restaurant
If there's one guide to dining well in Paris, it's "don't dine within site of a of a famous monument". Restaurants in tourist areas tend to serve second rate cuisine at inflated prices.
(so, at dinner time, stay away from the Champs Elysees, Sacre Coeur and Saint Michel)
It's better to eat where the Parisians eat.
How do you find these places? Go down some backstreets off the main streets and look for a restaurant that's unusually busy. That's always a good sign.
Two Restaurants To Try
Like any good guide, I'll give a couple of Paris restaurant reviews:
The first is "Le Sept" in the Rue De Grenelle in the 7th arrondissement. You can find this restaurant on a map of Paris if you go 3 blocks south of the Eiffel Tower and one block east (it joins onto Avenue Charles Risler that crosses the Champs De Mars).
It serves delicious and very reasonably priced Mediterranean food and is an ideal place to have lunch if you've just worked up an appetite climbing the stairs of the Eiffel Tower.
My second recommendation is Chez Marianne in Rue Des Rosiers (in the Marais district, by the St Paul metro station).
The Cafe Culture
Although this is a Paris restaurant guide, I should talk about cafes.
One of the great pleasures in the world is people-watching at a Paris café. So, you should ignore the backstreets and pick a location where there are plenty of passers-by. Two of my favourite locations for this are St Michel and Chatalet, but you can find good spots all around town.