Paris restaurants

Where is good these days? Going in 3-4 weeks and we want to go somewhere that's absolutely top quality, the equivalent of St John or Dinner or one of the really great places in London. But it's all a bit bewildering and the guides are full of obvious tourist trap picks or dubious statements.

Where do people recommend? Not enormously expensive would be nice but we don't mind pushing the boat out for something incredible.

chez l'ami jean was pretty amazing when we went, would definitely recommend

and it wasnt crazy expensive - it looks kind of like a standard bistro, but then when the food comes it out its just next level. we had the a la carte but then once we saw how good everything was we immediately regretted not getting the tasting menu

This is exactly the sort of thing I want to hear. We're there two nights, so probably going for one reasonably cheap one and something more extravagant.

yeah check it out - im sure theres some pics of it on numerous food blogs, i think its become a bit of a destination place

http://www.lespapillesparis.fr/EN_index.html

A wine bar, not a restaurant, but very good - http://www.yelp.com/biz/les-caves-de-prague-paris

bars and restaurants anyone? clubs? staying in the marais area this weekend, sat till monday night.

somewhere good to go out at night would be cool, not necessarily rave based, but a decent lively late night bar.

going to les crocs as mentioned here on sat night: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7bc76266-a0ea-11df-badd-00144feabdc0.html

i'm going @ end of march and would love some recs as well--midpriced interesting places for dinner and cool bars especially.

Le Dome du Marais is excellent, was there a few weeks ago. Also Chateaubriand is not too far. Frenchie was great too.

Le Taxi Jaune is a decent small midpriced restaurant, family run iirc.

I went to a wonderful place called Vivant in Paris -- I don't remember the neighborhood but it was GREAT.

will still rep for l'ami jean as i did up above

what's pantin like? rough?

going to P4K festival in nov and contemplating staying somewhere more central and travelling out. is the metro 24hr?

Chez L'Ami Jean was amazing, so glad I took the advice of this thread...

:) glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Gonna spend two night in Paris soon...any updates?

Updates needed, merci

where are you gonna be? & what are you looking for?

Forget exact location of hotel right now, but in Paris next week for 4 days. I am usually a cheap ethnic food type (wife is more willing to go more pricey contemporary gourmet), but could vary that upward for at least a meal or 2 of more "French" cuisine. Looking for a good Senegalese or Moroccan place.

Someone was touting me Japanese restuarant Guilo Guilo, but am not sure if I want that.

All food is "ethnic" food, I know.

am going to be in Paris a fair bit between now and Christmas so will be bookmarking this thread and will also try and bring some recommendations.

went to le gavroche on rue St Marc on a recommendation when I was there last - not a high end restaurant like its London namesake but an exceptionally good small restaurant that does fairly traditional bistro food with an excellent selection of wines. (I had herring and Sancerre, then an excellent steak frites with, um, a very nice red. and then some more of the red)

will try and get some non-french recommendations too, c.

jergins and i will be in paris december 15-17! if fizzles and/or others fancy some pints let us know on this thread!

le basilic was just about everything i hoped it would be. walking around the north end and stumbling on that place was a godsend.

bestrot paul bert (surprisingly on rue paul bert) is really excellent and pretty reasonable. id recommend pomze on boulevard hausmann p highly as well. also le petit prince in the 5th right by the sorbonne - it seems like it would be kinda corny but the food was excellent and they have the best creme brulee ive ever had

my fav Moroccan place in the city is Founti Agadir, at Censier-Daubenton in the 5th. was there a couple weeks ago. if that doesn't work then the Paris Mosque is a fun place to eat too.

for Ethiopian I always have a good time at Godjo, near the Panthéon.

close to Godjo, lunch at Louis Vins is a great deal. cash only.

those are all in the part of the city that I know best. and none are bank breakers.

obv L'As de Falafel is a cheap classic in the Marais. get it to go and eat in the Place des Vosges. pick up something sweet at Sacha Finkelstein while you're on the Rue des Rosiers.

oh and north of the Marais, Chez Nénesse is good. I've never gone for Thursday lunch but it's said that they have the best frites in Paris that day.

Pitzman is a good alternative to L'As de Falafel in the Marais - does a lot of good Kosher food, too.

there used to be a lot of terrific kosher North African restaurants in Belleville but they've been chased out by gentrification. I miss those places.

I'm a huge fan of Sunday oysters at Le Baron Rouge, just a few steps into the 12th, next to a great flea market.

highly recommend bistroy les papilles which is linked upthread

and also yeah you have to go to l'as du felafel even if it's v. obvious

In Bellevile La Cantine is good for cheap, delicious but unflashy meals (entree and plate for 12 euro)
Renee and Gabin is a great Kosher Tunisian also in Belleville

Restaurant Bouillon Chartier on the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre is reasonably priced classic French food. Lovely, huge space. Old school. Gets crowded and
there's often a wait to get in so early dining is prob your best bet if you want to avoid the queue.

I think René et Gabin is closed?

Can't figure it out from google yet.

Thanks all for the great ideas.

Does anyone know Le Porokhane (3, Rue Moret) or Chez Aida (48, Rue Polonceau -Metro Barbes or Chateau Rouge)? they are both Senegalese

No, I don't know either. I've been to Moussa l'Africain, near the Cité des Sciences up in the 19th, which is sort of a pan-sub-Saharan African restaurant. I thought it was great (the lemon crème brûlée and banana tarte tatin were fabulous) but I see that it gets kinda panned by reviews, so I dunno.

Kamukera is a good Afro-Antillaise place on the rue du Chevaleret, close to the BNF. I've eaten there several times, you can get some standard Cameroonian dishes but also some West Indian stuff. cheap too!

also in that area: I dearly love Auberge Etchegorry, a Basque restaurant near Les Gobelins. oh man I want to head up there since it's getting on dinner time! start with the rillettes; their spin on cassoulet is epic; but it's the gateau basque that I really love.

& I've eaten next to it, at La Touraine, more times than I can count, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it. mostly I go there for offal. good times, but nothing extravagant.

no René et Gabin was open last week when I was there!

Nice!

in a dresseur brasserie in grim Porte de Versailles right now. Liverpool v RM on tho which is creating an enjoyable atmosphere. ordered lamb and gratin dauphinois.

lxy - v possibly be around for pints. will post here.

that's dreadful rather than dresseur as it happens.

obv L'As de Falafel is a cheap classic in the Marais

this was my husband's favourite place to eat when he lived in paris years and years ago - it just so happened that the apartment we stayed at when we went back this year was practically around the corner, and it was the first place we ate at. i don't really like falafel but even i thought it was really good.

i don't really have any good recs though bc we ended up going to a lot of random places that were terrible.

(sic) and I were there last year and really enjoyed the eats we got at Le Marché des Enfants Rouges. It's a semi-open market with lotsa food vendors. He stood in line to get us Moroccan food while I went off to procure a bottle of wine. The family that owned the stall then escorted us to a table and poured the wine.

hi fizzles. let us know if you want to meet up! we will be in paris monday-tuesday-wednesday.

bollocks - wd've been good but I haven't been keeping up with ilx recently and missed this. got drunk with french office colleagues on Monday at a murky bar in the 15th a. just under the peripherique and had a dismal Vietnamese on Tuesday.

hope you had a good time!

one more night in paris tomorrow (friday jan 2) if you're around still/again

anyone got any recent tips for places to eat, or just things to do? going for the weekend - mainly going to just relax pre-christmas but any recommendations for things to see or unusual sites of interest would be good. i've been to the big main things over the years.

i'm staying near pigalle metro.

Next time I go to Paris I'm going to visit the Church of Notre Dame de Raincy - 20s modernist concrete, looks incredible.

Our household is on a bit of a Bauhaus kick at the moment and would definitely be heading for the show at the Musee d'Arts Decoratifs which looks vg.

From Bauhaus to steak house

Good advice.

haha, indeed.

South Pigalle is a popular neighborhood right now. Have you been to the Musée Gustave Moreau? If you like À Rebours then this is relevant to your interests. It's in south Pigalle.

ah I've never read that - I probably should!

Actually it's not Fresh Noodles. It's a tiny noodle place next to Poulet Champion on the Rue au Maire in Marais. Seems newish - don't know the name but ate there twice. Always someone at the window making noodles.

somehow never posted this here but amarante near bastille is prob my fave restaurant, anywhere. great wine list and a lot of traditional offal and other similar dishes. also just this beautiful peaceful room despite being five mins from bastille's madness.

just has an iconic, perfect feeling to it any time i've gone.

If you’re still in Paris and you want great oysters, go to Le Baron Rouge around the corner from Ledru-Rollin Metro and Aligre market tomorrow around 11/12 - they have cheese and charcuterie to go with the oysters as well as good inexpensive house wines - I’m guessing 5 oysters and a glass of wine would be around €12. The oyster shucker drives up from Bretagne each weekend with seriously precious cargo.

thanks suzy!

Yes! to Baron Rouge

Amazing you went to Amarante! I get too into these things but somehow during the pandemic I read about it, then read their website which is even funnier now than it was then: https://www.amarante.paris/

I finally got to go when things opened up and I was telling the waiter this as he was very friendly - this is circa 2022 I guess.

At the end of my meal, which was as good as I'd hoped, he suggested I meet the chef/owner. The guy is an actor as well as running the restaurant and sort of archetypally French. Like large bearded man with a thicket of curly hair. If you asked someone to draw a cartoon of a french man who is a chef and an actor they wouldn't go too far wrong. I was brought back to the kitchen and he was sitting there sombrely shelling peas into a huge bucket, shook my hand and said very little.

I've been two or three times since and if anything the food has improved steadily, tho I loved it the first time. My most recent visit in June was maybe the best meal I've had there, but it's been great every time.

The wine list is also just seriously brilliant. Like technically "natural wine" but not unusual or experimental just interesting producers and some slightly less popular grapes among the pinots and gamays.

And they quite militantly chill the red wine. My first visit I ordered a bottle and the waiter was like "you can have this wine - but you must allow us to chill it" - when I said yes he then came over with another glass of wine and said "since you are patient this is on the house".

I love France, lol.
.

it’s my favourite sort of cooking. french provincial cooked with a high degree of skill. the white with the blinis and trout was natural and perfect with it, slightly smoky. the red with the lamb and the pearl barley was classic and i can’t remember the last time i had as good a wine - it was good by itself, with the lamb it was exceptional. still thinking about it. obv lol.

Ah very nice. I had lamb there once done with carrots, was great. The whole sweetbread is amazing also.

i will be going back for sure

I booked a table at Amarante for a few weeks' time, looking forward to it.

Aso I like the fact host website is very internet 1.0, lobbing up a list of things you like is an excellent plan. I therefore made a map of things Chef Christophe Philippe recommends, here it is: (restaurants blue, cafes brown, shops maroon): https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1zsUstFnC104YaJRubbJNIE7oNHPONmI&usp=sharing

hilariously, i have now also been to amarante. i loved it even though i was nursing a migraine. no music, nice old tables, very little attempt at “ambience”. i like how straightforward the dishes are, while at the same time there are unexpected choices. fizzles i tried the trout, which was great, but my favourite part of it was the unusually thick buckwheat cake that came along with it, cooked absolutely perfectly, a little sweet, unctous on the inside, a tiny hint of crispiness on the outside.

large portions, be forewarned! wish i could have tried everything. it’s a really nice sweet spot between unpretentious classic french “gourmand” cooking and something more clean and modern - you don’t have the oversaucing you’d get in a brasserie

if i hadn’t had my headache i might have checked out the nightclub opposite.. supersonic records. there was an honest to god live band in there

I've gone to a few of his recommended places, he didn't put me wrong on any of them.

The wine list is indeed great. I had a Robinot Pineau D'Aunis the last time which was as good as it gets really.

okay fuck it I'll book for there too. a procession of nerdy anglophones

“for the main i’ll have what LocalGarda had and to start i’ll have whatever Fizzles had”

you book it on whatsapp? i have cobbled together a scary message in my best french

I did, like an hour and a half before, I got lucky I guess

all is confirmed. we're staying in the 11th so this is perfect really

hilariously, i have now also been to amarante. i loved it even though i was nursing a migraine. no music, nice old tables, very little attempt at “ambience”. i like how straightforward the dishes are, while at the same time there are unexpected choices. fizzles i tried the trout, which was great, but my favourite part of it was the unusually thick buckwheat cake that came along with it, cooked absolutely perfectly, a little sweet, unctous on the inside, a tiny hint of crispiness on the outside.

one qn for you all btw - in this and other Paris restaurants, if you make at least a fumbling essay at French will they be nice to you, I have found this to be so in Strasbourg and Wallonia but Paris feels like a brusquer proposition potentially. look at me using all these French-origin words like a real arriviste

Most likely they'll just speak English to you, these days. I have okay French but quite often they'll just speak English warmly and so you don't get to use it. I do like when they allow me to speak French tho as good practice.

I think Paris' reputation for unfriendliness is exaggerated. London's probably worse.

I like the politeness of shopping in Paris; you have to say hello when you walk in.

suzy otm, and certainly in Amarante, they'll speak English if you want - there were other international diners there when I was there. We switched about halfway through as I was running out of ways to say how nice it was. My French is barely passable tbh.

Haha that sounds like what I'll look to do. Mine is probably similar to yours, but worse than that, it annoys my gf who doesn't speak a word

Agree that Paris is friendlier. But also more brusque. Not a contradiction I don’t think; eg Glasgow

Felt a real sense of achievement this time that only a couple of people ever switched into English for me. One of them was a Japanese guy at a sushi restaurant. I had literally said one word to him, “un”, holding up a finger, when he asked a table for how many. I’m like jeez okay. I guess it’s possible his English was better than his French? Though he spoke it with a heavy French accent

One time in a French-Japanese restaurant in Kanazawa I thanked the French-Japanese waiter and said goodnight in French, and he nodded approvingly and said "you're better than me!" also in French, but also my wife had to translate because I had no fuckin idea what he was saying

Not that his French was the problem there of course

Yes, well I have to be the Canadian in our merry band of two

I've had some practice at Crouch End's own Les Associes, where after speaking in French the first time, the (Parisian) owner decided he liked me enough to permit English on our three (four?) subsequent visits. Also my favourite London restaurant for a number of reasons (impeccably shabby 80s interior, one-man band playing the hits with generosity and flair), and hopefully a good preview of what Paris is capable of...

Oh and he's grumpy in a good way yknow

I'm in this fuckin place rn. it owns

liveblog please

that trout and buckwheat pancake starter is not of this earth. how to follow that up

aaagh death impends and yet beforehand

Okay, that was fantastic, of course. The trout and pancake starter was impossible to follow up ofc but the tripe and puddings strove with a rich and terrible power nonetheless. My partner said her guineafowl was one of the best dishes she's ever been served.

However, last night, for me at least, might have it beaten? We stumbled into a nice-but-unassuming place called L'Attache on Rue Basfroi near where we're staying. It was really expensive and we kept getting served stuff we hadn't ordered, based on what the chef, working right before our eyes, had just knocked up. The wine dude chose for us too. Everything was freakishly brilliant and incomprehensibly simple. The carrot and girolles. The stuffed cabbage. The lamb and mash. Written down it looks so basic but trust me, there was some magic in our fully neck-tattooed chef's fingers. He just kept...giving us things. We ordered cheese, he gave us scallops. The carrot thing we'd never have thought to order but it was as if he was telling us 'no, seriously. You want these carrots'. Sit at the bar if you can, watch it all unfold. The wines (by the glass) were incredible too.

Earlier we'd had another fantastic dining experience for lunch at Les Deux Stations near the Parc des Princes (we'd gone for Le Corbusier, not PSG or Stade Francais, whose stadium is actually amazing tbf). There were plenty of PSG fans there, gearing up for the evening fixture. Might have seemed like a local-specific bistrot from the outside but it was a lovely space with great service and spectacular food. The boudin noir!! I feel the English may need to renounce their claims to blood sausage (if not newsy-wewsies...)

Anyway. We're on the hunt for something tonight now. Somewhere south of the Pantheon. If you don't hear from me send help

was staying in batignolles (which i liked a lot) near place de clichy and and went to a place called Coretta (next to Martin Luther King Park and named after Coretta Scott King). potato and parmesan gnocchi given a toothsome finish in roast veal juices, and then an excellent ris de veau with parsnip. a rather sharp yuzu sorbet i could have probably done without but probably the best part was the excellent and enthusiastic service - happy to have a conversation about the food and the wine. v pleasant atmosphere as well.

was back there this weekend and wandering around walked into a random restaurant - Comme Chez Maman - which serendipitously turned out to be excellent. i preferred it to Coretta around the corner.

This contemporary bistro near a green square in the heart of the Batignolles neighbourhood is a real home from home. The Belgian chef, Wim Van Gorp, makes lovely contemporary dishes that he peppers with creative touches, and some of which pay delicious tribute to his Flemish roots.

had wild mushroom soup, and red mullet with ravioli cooked in smoked paprika butter.

I was there on Sunday! Paris that is

I will be there in just over a month. I plan to wander around Batignolles; perhaps I can work in Comme Chez Maman!

trying and failing to find a still from The Bear of Richie washing forks

gonna be there easter weekend after a week in burgundy.

a week submerged in it

Just booked Amarante because apparently that is what ilxors do when in Paris!

I requested a 13:00h lunch; chef/owner wrote back and proposed 12:55h

that extra five minutes will allow you to have an excellent kir royale before you even think of starting. hope you have a lovely time!

otm

The process for booking is sort of bemusing. I have often asked for 8pm and been given half seven, though I guess that's their sittings, which I forget. The five minute difference is amusing for lunch.

Hope it's a great lunch, Quincie!

Gonna be in Paris for a couple of nights this July, and of course I'm going to try for Amarante! I think we'll be staying in the heart of it, "Notre-Dame-des-Champs neighbourhood in Paris' 6th arrondissement," which means Amarante isn't the most convenient, so in the meantime, do any of you have any other restaurant suggestions? I haven't been to the city in close to 30 years.