What Paris really eats.

What Paris actually tastes like

Paris is not a city of one cuisine. It is a city that has spent two centuries absorbing the cooking of every French region and, more recently, of North and West Africa, the Levant, Vietnam, China and Japan, and then holding all of it to a set of standards about bread, butter, cheese and time that are unusually strict and almost entirely unspoken.

The base layer is regional French: the braises and stocks of classical bourgeois cooking, butter from Normandy, charcuterie from the south-west, cheeses from everywhere. On top of that sits a genuinely Parisian everyday food, the ham-and-butter sandwich on a proper baguette, the egg mayonnaise, the steak with a pile of fries, the endive salad with walnuts, the roast chicken bought already cooked on a Sunday morning with potatoes that have spent the morning under it.

Then there are the cuisines that have been Parisian for two or three generations. North African cooking is not a novelty here; couscous and tagine are weeknight food in a great many Parisian households. The Chinese and Vietnamese communities of Belleville and the 13th arrondissement made rice noodles, bo bun and steamed dumplings ordinary. West African cooking around Barbès and Château Rouge brought mafé, yassa and thieboudienne. None of that is a footnote to Paris food. It is Paris food.

The thing that ties it together is an insistence on the quality of a few raw materials. A Parisian will accept a modest dish made from an excellent ingredient and be genuinely offended by an ambitious dish made from a poor one. Learn that hierarchy and the city makes sense.

How the city shops

The Paris food-shopping week is still organised around specialists rather than a single trolley. Bread comes from a bakery, often twice a day, in quantities meant to be eaten before it stales, a real baguette is stale within hours, which is the reason the errand repeats. Cheese comes from a cheesemonger who will ask when you plan to eat it and choose the piece accordingly. Meat comes from a butcher who cuts to order and who expects to be asked what is good this week.

Around that sit the open-air markets, which set up on the street on fixed days, usually two mornings a week per neighbourhood, plus permanent covered markets and pedestrian market streets that trade most days. The vocabulary is worth knowing before you get there: producteur means the person grew it, revendeur means they bought it wholesale, and both are legitimate but priced differently. Prices are per kilo. You do not touch the produce; you say what you want it for and let the stallholder pick.

The rhythm of an eating day

Parisian eating hours are narrower than most visitors expect, and most bad meals in this city are really scheduling errors.

• Breakfast is small and sweet. Coffee and something from a bakery. The savoury cooked breakfast is not a French tradition, and looking for one at eight in the morning mostly finds food built for tourists.
• Lunch is the serious meal, roughly noon to two. The weekday formule, a set two or three courses, is the single best-value eating in the city, and it is often the same kitchen doing the same cooking it does at night.
• The afternoon is a gap. Between about half past two and seven, most kitchens are shut. Bakeries, market stalls and cafés carry you through; this is what a pastry at four in the afternoon is for.
• Apéro starts around seven. A drink and something salty to eat, an hour of it, treated as a distinct event rather than a waiting room for dinner.
• Dinner runs late, from eight. Sitting down at half past seven puts you in an empty room; half past eight is normal and nine is unremarkable.

Sunday has its own shape. Markets run in the morning and are at their busiest; many food shops close Sunday afternoon and again on Monday, which catches people out. Lunch on Sunday is long and family-shaped, and the roast chicken bought from a rotisserie is a genuine institution rather than a shortcut.

What to eat, by season

French markets still enforce a calendar. Knowing it is the difference between eating the best version of something and the imported version of it.

Two fixed points anchor the year: oysters are at their best in the cold months, and the cheese counter changes with the seasons too, since milk from spring pasture makes a different cheese from winter hay. A cheesemonger will tell you which is at its peak if you ask; that question is the whole trick.

The dishes worth learning to cook

The most portable thing about Parisian food is that a lot of it is technique with a very short ingredient list. These are the ones worth taking home.

A vinaigrette you make by feel

Mustard, vinegar, salt, then oil whisked in slowly until it thickens. Roughly one part acid to three parts oil, adjusted by tasting rather than measuring. A green salad dressed properly and eaten after the main course is the most French thing you can do at your own table, and it costs nothing.

Something braised, slowly, in one pot

Brown the meat properly, soften aromatics in the fat, deglaze, then leave it alone for two or three hours below a simmer. Blanquette, daube, coq au vin and pot-au-feu are all the same argument about time. Our recipe guides cover why browning and resting matter more than the specific cut.

An omelette, and an egg mayonnaise

Two dishes with nowhere to hide. A French omelette is soft, barely coloured and rolled; an œuf mayonnaise is a hard-boiled egg and a mayonnaise you made yourself, and it is the cheapest way to find out whether your mayonnaise is any good.

Bread, treated as an ingredient

Not baking it, buying it well and using it properly. Yesterday's baguette becomes pain perdu, croutons or the base of an onion soup. Nothing in a Parisian kitchen throws away bread.

What Foodies shows you here

Open the app in Paris and Nearby shows you posts, not places. Somebody's Sunday chicken, a market haul photographed on a kitchen table, a tart that worked, a tart that did not. Posts can carry an approximate location, snapped to a grid of about a kilometre before it is stored, so what the server holds is a square of the city rather than an address.

There is no venue map, no rating and no booking in Foodies, in Paris or anywhere else. What the local feed is good for is the ingredient calendar above: seeing what people around you are actually cooking in the second week of June tells you what is good at the market right now, faster than any list would. If you would rather steer by people than by place, the community guide covers finding cooks worth following, and the creators page covers posting well if you are the one cooking.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

---

More: all city guides · London food · New York food · recipe guides · about Foodies