Food and drink in Paris

French food and drink are famously delicious and don’t have to be expensive. If you’re excited by food, you’ll be in your element in Paris, where food is taken seriously (have you seen the film Ratatouille? ). If you’re not that interested in food, or nervous about having to eat snails, fear not! Paris has all sorts of different eating establishments - and food shops – to offer. For a start, one of the first places we saw, as we emerged from the Gare du Nord, was Subway. You’ll also (inevitably) find McDonald’s and there’s also a Hard Rock Café.

In addition to the local cuisine and American(-style) chains, there is a wide variety of nationalities’ food available in Paris, including Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Mexican and a lot of North African, particularly Moroccan. You’ll find great places to eat and drink whatever your taste and budget.

Restaurants in Paris

Restaurants in Paris range from the suave to the rustic but, as long as the place is not designed specifically for tourists, you are likely to have a good experience in any of them. You can find a lot of websites giving reviews of Paris restaurants but a particularly useful one is Eat in Paris, used by both French and British diners for locating a restaurant of the type and price, and in the area, they want.

Somewhere I would recommend if you’re hungry and like meat is Hippopotamus. It’s a French chain of restaurants, which look and feel American but serve excellent American/French food – burgers, kebabs, steak and so on, done to perfection, French onion soup for a starter and crème brulée for pudding. It’s not cheap but it’s certainly not overpriced and it’ll really fill you up. We went to the one on the place de la Bastille, which is close to both Le Double Fond (see below as well as on the Paris magic! page) and Le Musée de Magie.

If your budget is really tight, go for the ethnic restaurants. We had a delicious lunch at what was really an Asian cooked-food shop with tables in it, somewhere between Dupleix and the Swiss Village (a bizarre legacy of the 1900 Expo), after visiting Magic Dream. We chose what we wanted at the counter and then ate it at one of the three long tables. It cost about 16 euros total for a serious plateful each.

For more of a ‘dining experience’ but still cheaply, you can try out one of the myriad couscous restaurants. Just remember that, if you’re in a Muslim-run establishment, it’s unlikely to serve alcohol. In compensation, at the end of your meal, you’ll have sweet mint tea. As well as the couscous, you’ll probably see tagine/tajine (you can spell it either way) on the menu. I have to admit that neither Iain not I knew what this was but he bravely ordered it anyway, to find out. It was revealed to be a kind of stew of meat and vegetables, with a slightly fruity flavour to it, served in a bowl in a basket (see photo) and arriving with a conical lid on it. This is traditional Moroccan fare and we liked it very much.

As mentioned on the General Paris info page, a service charge of 15% will be included in your bill and you are not expected to leave any more. If you wish to leave a few euros to reward exceptional service, however, nobody is going to mind!

Cafés and bars in Paris

The café culture in Paris is strong and, if you’re the type who enjoys visiting the Starbucks in the Borders bookshop at home, buying a book and then reading it while drinking a large latte, you will fit in well in Paris. It’s different (there is Starbucks but I’d recommend going to the French places while you’re in Paris) but just as satisfying – in fact, more so because you’re doing it in Paris and it’s interesting to soak up the atmosphere and to watch the locals as they go about their café business.

Because the French have a different attitude to drinking from the British, there isn’t the same distinction between bars, cafés and restaurants as there is in Britain. Of course, most restaurants are clearly restaurants but the cafés and bars are usually café-bars and they will always serve some sort of food.

If you’re counting the cents, it’s worth knowing that many places have a tiered pricing structure, depending on where you sit. Up at the bar is cheapest, then inside seats, then terrace seats.

If what you really want is a cup of tea, you’ll need to go not to a café but to a salon de thé (tearoom). There is a surprising number of these around the city and you’ll be able to scoff some lovely French pastries along with your cuppa.

Again with the proviso that you avoid the places geared to tourists, almost wherever you go you’re likely to find a good atmosphere.

This being the Paris Magic website, the café that I’m going to recommend is the magic café & theatre Le Double Fond. You can read more about it on the Paris magic! page but let me tell you here that it’s a great little café regardless of the magic. You can sit either inside or outside, though inside is small and gets a bit tight. The décor inside is cool and the square outside is beautiful.

The staff are friendly and speak English (if you want them to) and the drinks are excellent, if pricey. Iain and I ordered two glasses of apricot juice and were shocked by the bill for 12€! The price issue is balanced out when you buy a ticket for a show in the theatre underneath because included in that is a drink at the interval. I had Kir and Iain had beer and, while those drinks are much cheaper in France than in England, we felt we’d got a really good deal there. The show tickets are not cheap but we would certainly have paid what we paid just for the show, so the drinks were a nice bonus. (See the Paris magic! page for more info about the show.) We didn’t try their famous cocktails but only because we were too focused on magic to think of it.

Takeaway food in Paris

If you decide you’d like a takeaway, you’ll find similar types of food on offer to what we have in the UK – and of very good quality. On our first evening in Paris, Iain and I were too tired to make the effort to go to a restaurant so we got kebab and chips (well, fries, obviously) from a Turkish place near the Gare du Nord. It was excellent and felt a degree more sophisticated than it would have at home, though perhaps that was simply ‘being in Paris’.

Another approach is to buy bread, cheese and so on from their respective shops, or a supermarket, and have a picnic, either where you’re staying or outside somewhere - around the Eiffel Tower, for example.

Supermarkets in Paris

The huge super/hypermarkets such as Carrefour and Auchan tend to be restricted to the outskirts of Paris. What you’ll find more centrally is lots of smaller supermarkets, which vary in quality and price. Leader Price (or, anyway, the one we went to) is pretty downmarket and not particularly well stocked but is cheap. The supermarket I liked best was Monop’, a subsidiary of the Monoprix chain. It was clean, well organised and amazingly well stocked with all sorts of interesting and useful things.

In terms of food, most Parisians don’t buy it from a supermarket but frequent all the separate shops: the boulangerie, the fromagerie, the charcuterie and so on. Fruit and veg from the open-air markets is fresh and definitely recommended if you’re self-catering.

By the way, you’ll see written over many food establishments the word traiteur. I couldn’t work out what this meant and my little dictionary didn’t have it but I have since consulted a larger tome. To preempt your wondering, it means ‘caterer’. It seems a lot of food shops and restaurants offer outside catering services.

Coffee in Paris

I’ve read on the internet many complaints about the quality of coffee in Paris. Not being a connoisseuse myself - although I drink a lot of the stuff – all I can tell you is that I enjoyed it in most places.

Just be aware that, as in Italy, if you ask for un café, you will get an espresso. If, like me, you prefer the sort of thing we in Britain call latte, ask for café crème.

Wine in Paris

You’ll have the chance to try out lots of wonderful French wines while you’re in Paris. Even at the most touristy bar we went to, we were surprised how reasonable the price was for a glass of good wine.

If you’re interested in learning more about French wines, you can read about wine tasting in Paris on the What to see and do in Paris page.