This is why half of Vittles Paris, our six-part supplement on Parisian food culture, is dedicated to the food of the banlieues. In the south, Justinien Tribillon, the author of The Zone – a brilliant alternative history of the area surrounding the Périphérique – visits Rungis, the largest wholesale food market in Europe. Built on the scale of a city, Rungis keeps the restaurants of Paris afloat – from the vegetables of the ‘Carreau des producteurs’, where local farmers and growers sell directly to chefs, to the hundreds of tonnes of tails, brains, skins, livers, kidneys, testicles, tongues, hearts and lungs at the offal pavilion. In the east, photographer Wendy Huynh writes a love letter to the suburbs of the 77 through the Teochew-Vietnamese-Cambodian dish soupe Phnom Penh, whose history also tells the complex story of Paris’s east and south-east Asian immigrants. And in the north and centre of the city, Jack Franco celebrates the ‘restaurants universitaires’, the state-subsidised canteens that keep the vast student population of Paris fed, and which are open to any member of the public in need of a hot, cheap meal.

Given that Paris is the city where the restaurant was invented, we cannot talk about Parisian food without also talking about eating out (or without telling you where to eat). In a subject very close to my heart, Vadim Poulet writes about the slow death of French restaurant criticism, and why the cliché of the French food critic immortalised in Ratatouille – ‘severe, hard to please, gifted with absolute taste like some have absolute pitch’ – no longer exists. Vadim’s extraordinary essay covers the history of modern French restaurant writing, from its roots in the Nazi-aligned Vichy government up to the present day, where the last real restaurant critic operating in Paris today happens to also be a court reporter. As part of my ongoing Grand Paris series, I’ve also reviewed one of my favourite meals in Paris this year, at a brilliant Chinese restaurant in the 15e which refuses to do things in any way except their own – including beautiful courgette and egg dumplings and an outstanding tea service. And, of course, we have an Alternative Guide to Paris: a compilation of writing from Parisians and Londoners alike about the unique, strange and singular restaurants they believe make Paris one of the best places to eat in the world.

This is an exciting time to be a Parisian. Over the next decade, Paris will become Grand Paris just as London became Greater London. It will redefine who and what gets to call themselves Parisian – and it will redefine Parisian food too. We cannot think of a better time to cover Paris than now. JN

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The Vittles Alternative Guide to Paris

A map of 99 Parisian restaurants, bars, cafes and bakeries that couldn’t exist anywhere else

What we want to celebrate in this guide are the places we believe Paris does well: singular restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops and wine bars with strong (and often different!) ideas about what quality means to them. Our favourite quality of Paris’s food scene is how incubates eccentrics who refuse to do anything but in their own way; people who operate food businesses that not only couldn’t be anywhere else, but couldn’t be run by anyone else either. When I describe a restaurant as feeling ‘Parisian’, what we usually mean is that it’s tiny, open for three hours a day and run by a maniac.

Rungis: The Market and the City

A day at Europe’s largest fresh food market. Words by Justinien Tribillon. Photographs by Wendy Huynh.

To everyday Parisians, Rungis is a distant Cockaigne, a land of plenty that few have experienced firsthand. Most French people will only have a mediated knowledge of Rungis, often through TV, as journalists flock to it around Christmas to report on the deliveries of foie gras, smoked salmon, capon and truffled cheeses. Feeding 18 million individuals daily and supplying 60% of the Paris region’s fresh produce consumption, the market is a food behemoth like no other in Europe. But before it could reach its current levels of efficiency and become one of the foremost fresh markets in the world, it had to sever its centuries-old ties to central Paris, slaughtering the historical core of the capital in the process. In doing so, it has profoundly changed the relationship between Parisians and the food they consume.

The Last Critic In Paris

How French restaurant criticism (almost) killed itself. Words by Vadim Poulet. Illustration by Antoine Cossé.

It is perhaps a symptom of all this that Paris, the centre of French gastronomy, has never been in more need of a great restaurant critic. Today, the Parisian food media scene has become a never-ending circle of new restaurants hyped for a couple of weeks before the next ones come in, without anyone bothering to say if it is really worth the fuss – an attitude emblematic of a profession that has foregone negativity. If even the guides have stopped guiding us, then, the only thought leaders left are influencers. French restaurant criticism is almost dead, and the weirdest thing about it might be that, one court reporter aside, no one seems to care.

The Story of Soupe Phnom Penh

How the popularity of one noodle soup in the 77 tells the story of Paris’s east and south-east Asian immigrants. Words and photos by Wendy Huynh.

As a child of Lognes, I have a love/hate relationship with the Parisian suburbs. I hated being far from the cultural centre of the city and feeling dismissed. But in the last 10 years, while living in London, I have come to lean on those memories of the 77: the Sunday Chinese classes in Noisiel with the teacher whose breath smelled like tangerines; seeing my aunt making tong yuen in her kitchen in Lognes; giggling under the dining table with my cousin while being told off for knocking the nước mắm on to the carpet. One of the things I miss most about the 77 is a dish that I cannot find in London: a noodle soup called soupe Phnom Penh, named after the Cambodian capital. In my opinion, soupe Phnom Penh is best served in the 77, but getting Parisians to travel to the suburbs for any reason is difficult, let alone for noodle soup.

‘Welfare is a right, not a privilege’

Eating at the university canteens of Paris. Words and photos by Jack Franco.

Welfare in France is to feel the right to certain things, which includes the right to a thoughtful, enriching meal, set against a charming view, for a cheap price. Though not as ambitious as the Maoists in the 1960s calling for a student wage, there are still those, notably from leftist party France Unbowed, who are campaigning to recognise study as labour. One demand made by the party is for all canteen meals to be charged at the flat, symbolic €1 price currently reserved for students on means-tested bursaries – a policy that fell short by a single vote in 2023. The breadth of support for this idea – from the socialist left to the far right – is remarkable, but there is opposition from centrists and conservatives, who treat the Crous as another unsustainable treat for a swollen and predominantly middle-class student population.

Pourquoi Pas?

Grand Paris, Part 7. Jonathan Nunn encounters an exceptional Chinese restaurant in an undervalued part of Paris.

On a trip to Paris last year, I was stopped in my tracks by a blackboard in the window of a tiny, minimalist Chinese restaurant. On it was written the names of every single ingredient and their provenance used across the menu, next to a sheet of laminated paper that announced, not so much passive-aggressively but aggressively-aggressively, everything it didn’t do: no sushi, no lychees, no nems, no entrées, no desserts, no changing ingredients, no changing the proportion of ingredients. The only water on the menu was two obscure mineral waters priced at €10 a litre. This is my equivalent of love at first sight. I knew I had to go back.

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The following list of restaurants, cafes, bars and bakeries are old and new, span fine dining to fast food, are inside and outside the Peripherique, and serve everything from traditional French bistro food to the home cooking of Thai aunties. Put together, they add up to something more interesting than being comprehensive: a small portrait of the people and places that make Paris still the most exciting city to eat out in Europe.

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Contributors

JN – Jonathan Nunn, NB – Nick Bramham, TMS – Tomé Morrissy-Swan, VP – Vadim Poulet, RN – Rachel Naismith, JF – Jack Franco, ME – Mark Evans, PW – Peter Wyeth, CE – Charles Ebikeme, JT – Justinien Tribillon, JH – Joel Hart, PY – Peter Yeung, AA – Arthur Asseraf, LP – Lizzie Parle, FG – Feroz Gajia, MB – Mickaël Bandassak, EO – Engin Ozger

Categories

Coffee shops, cafés and creperies
For when you’re sick of French food
Wine bars and caves à manger
Fine dining
Bistros and casual dining
Sandwiches and things with bread
Bakeries
Patisseries
Bars
Canteens

You can find a map of all 67 recommendations, plus more 32 recommendations from the Grand Paris series, at the bottom of the article.

Coffee shops, cafés and creperies

Substance Coffee

A coffee shop run by Joachim Morceau comprising a horseshoe bar of a dozen seats, bookable only by appointment. Morceau is the kind of eccentric that only the French seem to produce, who treats coffee the same way Jean-Philippe Toussaint treats Zidane: as a matter no less important than life and death. In an hour-long tasting session, during which I tried a €20 filter and had the best macchiato of my life, Morceau said things only a Frenchman could get away with saying (“This is the only coffee that has made me cry”, “Coffee judges can rate coffee on many things, but the one thing they can’t account for is EMOTION”). You will come away from the experience thinking that the British just can’t compete. JN 30 rue Dussoubs, 75002

Early Bird

The Marché Beauvau, one of Paris’s oldest markets, opened in the 18th century to feed working-class Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Today it’s overseen by Joseph Loughney, an Irishman who also runs Early Bird, a coffee roastery inside a glass greenhouse at the market’s centre. His roaster takes up most of the space, leaving just a bench outside; most people stand with china cups and saucers, chatting to him. He talks about his coffee the way the vegetable vendors discuss their produce, obsessive about what’s in season and how each harvest tastes. Alongside coffee, he sells Irish whiskey and stonking bacon and egg rolls at breakfast. RN Marché Beauvau, Pl. d’Aligre, 75012

Le Goéland d’Aligre

Crêpes in Paris are often underwhelming: they’re Nutella vehicles for six-year-olds or limp tourist attraction rip-offs. Le Goéland d’Aligre, a sunny, yellow-fronted shop on the edge of the Marché d'Aligre in the 12ème, offers something more enticing. It’s run by Julien, whose Palestinian grandmother fled Jaffa for Beirut, and Marie, a crêpière from Brittany, who together make galettes from nutty buckwheat flour that fall somewhere between Breton tradition and Lebanese saj, filled with labneh and makanek sausages. The ‘breizh man’ouché’ is just olive oil and za’atar on a galette, but it’s very tasty. Perch on a stool on the Place d’Aligre with a glass of Lebanese cider or take your galette to go and wander around the market. RN 10 Pl. d'Aligre, 75012

Creperie Le Petit Josselin

It’s probably not worth arguing about which crêperie is the best in the rue du Montparnasse. The Breton neighbourhood, near the train station that joins Brittany with Paris, is full of them. But Le Petit Josselin holds that spot for me, even though they prefer a well-cooked egg to a runny one. Nothing fancy or surprising here, just simple, traditional and very buttery buckwheat galettes that are full of the comforting familiarity that more experimental places like Breizh Café lack when what you really want is just a taste of the good old stuff. VP 67, Rue du Montparnasse, 75014

Au Petit Bar

If authenticity exists, you’ll find it at Au Petit Bar, Paris’s best gatekept secret and a dream for Bourdain fetishists (if they actually asked binmen where they hang out). This small café, where the mother cooks an eternal weekly menu while her sons run the room, has not changed since 1966: there’s no 4G, no card reader (it’s cash only) and the price of coffee has gone up once in 20 years. The homey cafeteria food is uneven, but who cares? It’s the only place among the luxury hotels that offers a haven for workers, bankers and minor cultural celebrities alike. VP 7 Rue du Mont Thabor, 75001

For when you’re sick of French food

Le Café de Lognes

This charming Chinese-Vietnamese canteen is hidden, typically, in the back of a bar Tabac in Lognes, one of the eastern suburbs of Paris. It was recommended to me by photographer Wendy Huynh, who suggested I try the fried offal and the hủ tiếu Nam Vang (often called ‘soupe Phnom Penh’ in Paris), a soup of prawn, pork, liver and lucid broth. The soup is seasoned with a huge hit of white pepper that needs no additional condiments, although once, when I was ill, I had it with a glass of milky pastis. As a breakfast, it is simply perfect, no notes. JN 6 Cr des Lacs, Lognes, 77185

Chez Zeyna

The formidable matriarch Zeyna Mbengue behind this quintessential boui-boui joint insists that her restaurant, which opened in 2013, serves exactly what you would eat in an average Senegalese home. The thick, peanut-y mafé, smoky dibi grilled meats and yassa poulet draped in caramelised onions are all excellent. But Mbengue, who grew up in a coastal town north of Dakar, draws the masses for her take on Senegal’s national dish, thieboudienne, a one-pot meal of fluffed broken rice, tender vegetables and fish. All the other components for a great Senegalese meal are there, too: bottles of Maggi seasoning, pots of homemade fiery red chilli sauce, hibiscus, ginger and baobab juice, the peppery Café Touba coffee and dégué, a sweet, yoghurty, millet-based pudding. PY 10 Rue Doudeauville, 75018

Chez Abda

Abdallah Judor’s North African restaurant in Le Perreux-sur-Marne has become a huge hit with sportspeople, who come here for the couscous, which is not golden but yellow-white, the colour of fresh cream, steaming like wheat-scented linen fresh out of the dryer. It is paddled into soft drifts at the table, and when it comes into contact with a tagine or a gravy, each grain dissolves into the broth. The thing to order it with is the méchoui, Abda’s speciality, which would traditionally be a whole lamb cooked in the embers of a spit, but here is a slow-roasted shoulder with a shawl of creamy fat and crispy skin. JN 77 Av. Pierre Brossolette, Le Perreux-sur-Marne, 94170

Gourmand Dz

Zohir Berdouk learned to cook doubara soup from his grandmother while growing up in a village beside Djebel Chélia, Algeria’s second largest peak. In 2023, decades later, he opened Gourmand Dz – a pun referencing Dzayer, a local name for Algeria – in the Goutte d’Or, a neighbourhood in northern Paris renowned for wine production until the 19th century but today a stigmatised home to mostly North African communities. Berdouk’s tender, life-giving stew of chickpeas, tomatoes and broad beans infused with cumin and garlic, jolted with a slice of lemon and green chillies, and doused in a good slug of olive oil, is a chalkboard highlight. PY 10 Rue de Chartres, 75018

Bonchon

Paris is the last place you'd expect for a new chain to arrive into Europe, especially if it’s not American. Bonchon is a Korean fried chicken chain from Busan, South Korea, which has expanded into neighbouring territories in Asia, as well as the US. It’s still on the cards for the UK, but who knows when? The fried rice, bulgogi and sides are nice, but for those who have tried Bonchon, it’s the incredible shattering crust on its chicken alongside the balanced glazes that are etched in my memory. It’s easy to see why Dave Chang was ‘inspired’ by Bonchon when his restaurant famously put cold fried chicken on the Momofuku Ko bar menu. FG 240 Rue St Denis, 75002

Thida Phaya Lae

My unchecked bias about Thai food in Paris prevented me from entering Thida Phaya Lae for a long time. But then one day, at lunchtime, I saw a lady stocking up plastic containers from her friend that reminded me of all those Sunday afternoons where all my aunties and my mum would bring stuff they had made, potluck style. The vanity products, the bold and curly Thai fonts, the smell of lingering fish sauce – I felt like I was at my grandma’s.

Thida Phaya Lae sells all the things you cannot get from the general Parisian Asian stores: creamy durian, dried fish, an assortment of fermented sausages, food and novelty items, packed lovingly by immigrant moms, aunties and grandmothers. Grab a bag of kab moo (แคบหมู) from the shelf and if they happen to have the chicken version, my favourite, by all means grab both. Then, order the som tam sua (with rice vermicelli) and get the Lao version with fermented crab. Complete your meal with Kuay Teow Reua: a Thai boat noodle soup with lettuce leaf floating on top (mandatory, but never necessary). MB 16 Rue de Cotte, 75012

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. For the next two weeks, we will be sending out individual articles from our supplement Vittles Paris. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

The Vittles Alternative Guide to Paris
The Last Critic in Paris, by Vadim Poulet
The Story of Soupe Phnom Penh, by Wendy Huynh
‘Welfare is a right, not a privilege’, by Jack Franco
Pourquoi pas?, by Jonathan Nunn

Articles from Vittles Paris are paywalled — to view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

The international market of Rungis, the largest fresh food market in Europe, is located close to Orly airport, south of Paris — about an hour’s drive from the city centre during the day, but just 20 minutes in the dead of night when those who feed Paris are already awake and hard at work. On your way there you will notice that nearly all early-morning encounters are connected to food: bakeries are lit up, with the smell of fresh bread already floating in the air, while supermarket employees wait for duty managers outside their shops’ closed shutters. Three hours before sunrise, some restaurants in the suburbs are already busy serving food to patrons; when I visit in late March, we are in the last days of Ramadan, and Muslim workers who are at the end of their shifts, or about to start them, enjoy suhur before fasting begins at 5.33am.

At 4am in Rungis, it feels like the entire city is awake and roaring. And it is a city – around 13,000 people work here across 234 hectares, getting on for twice the size of London’s Hyde Park. Not only is it the size of a small city, it is hustling like one: across a series of hangars that stretch as far as the eye can see, there are hundreds of lorries manoeuvring, forklift trucks going in all directions, cries and boisterous laughs, the odd trader on his plastic chair drinking instant coffee before hitting the road, with the entire uncanny landscape illuminated by floodlights. So much of what Paris eats emanates from these hangars: the bavette sold by your local butcher, the fish grilled in a Michelin-starred restaurant, the piece of Comté cheese you’ll purchase at your favourite cheesemongers.

My guide today is Marc-Antoine Surand, the owner of Bistro Quedubon in the 19e arrondissement of Paris, and a Rungis veteran. He was introduced to the market in 2018 by Gilles Bénard, the previous owner of the restaurant, and has continued the tradition of coming to Rungis every Tuesday morning to source the produce that chef Ollie Clarke will work with for the week. I am not alone in shadowing Surand today: chef Justine Audoin one of the rising stars of the Parisian culinary scene, formerly at Ajar, and about to open her own as-yet-unnamed restaurant as co-chef with Marie-Victorine Manoa this September – is also here today for her initiation to the market. As we walk around, Surand debunks a myth: “There are not many restaurateurs who come to Rungis themselves to source their produce,” he tells me. There is often a lack of compatibility between the lives of chefs, the schedules of restaurants that open six or seven days a week, and the remoteness and operating hours of Rungis. Surand usually arrives just before 5am, and by 7.15am he is back on the road, in order to reach Quedubon by 8am). ‘You can’t do a dinner shift the day before, then be in Rungis at 4am before moving on for another full day of cooking’, explains Audoin. Surand agrees, and confesses that he almost dropped the tradition after he fell asleep at the wheel on his way back from the market a couple of years ago.

To everyday Parisians, Rungis is a distant Cockaigne, a land of plenty that few have experienced firsthand. This is a business-to-business market – you need a professional membership to sell and buy – and even though the extension of line 14 of the métro in 2024 made Rungis much more accessible, there isn’t much reason to come here to browse produce you cannot purchase anyway. Most French people will only have a mediated knowledge of Rungis, often through TV, as journalists flock to it around Christmas to report on the deliveries of foie gras, smoked salmon, capon and truffled cheeses. Feeding 18 million individuals daily and supplying 60% of the Paris region’s fresh produce consumption, the market is a food behemoth like no other in Europe. But before it could reach its current levels of efficiency and become one of the foremost fresh markets in the world, it had to sever its centuries-old ties to central Paris, slaughtering the historical core of the capital in the process. In doing so, it has profoundly changed the relationship between Parisians and the food they consume. And all in the name of the modern city.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today’s article by Vadim Poulet is the last in our supplement Vittles Paris. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

The Vittles Alternative Guide to Paris
Rungis: The Market and the City, by Justinien Tribillon
The Story of Soupe Phnom Penh, by Wendy Huynh
‘Welfare is a right, not a privilege’, by Jack Franco
Pourquoi pas?, by Jonathan Nunn

To read the entire series, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

In a summer free of major criminal trials, the crime journalist Stéphane Durand-Souffland recently busied himself doing what he likes best: writing brutally honest reviews of French restaurants. Durand-Souffland has been a court reporter at Le Figaro for 25 years, where he has covered every notable case in the country: from the serial killer Guy Georges to the (mostly invented) paedophile ring in the Outreau case. Today, however, Durand-Souffland has become a murderer himself of Michelin-starred restaurants. His victims? Thierry Marx, the chef and former Top Chef judge, whose restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental he wrote up as ‘dishes just ticking over, confusing combinations, a lack of acidity and lightness, no discernible work on bitterness, not a single green vegetable, not a single dessert featuring citrus fruits or seasonal fruits’. Then there’s chef Guillaume Sanchez, whom Durand-Souffland accused, in response to an aggressively flavoured meal at Neso, of running an ‘S&M dungeon’. As for Alain Passard, legendary owner of the three-starred L’Arpege? Durand-Souffland compared him, after being served a litany of repetitive plates featuring the same vegetables, to ‘a director who has all the roles in a blockbuster played by four friends who are recognisable at every turn despite their false moustaches and wigs’.

Durand-Souffland started his parallel career in 2012, when the legendary restaurant critic François Simon – reputedly the inspiration behind Ratatouille’s Anton Ego – asked him to fill in on the food section while he was away. The two Le Figaro writers often went to restaurants together, and Simon had noticed that his colleague shared his love for food and strong opinions. Durand-Souffland found the exercise stimulating, and continued to act as a back-up, even after Simon’s departure in 2013. Since then, Durand-Souffland has interspersed his reporting on criminal and political trials with reviews of restaurants, and has become one of the most precise critics writing in French about the architecture of a dish and its taste. When I called him recently to talk about food, he was passionate about his side job and its particular challenges, telling me that a sausage is ‘harder to describe than a murderer’.

For lovers of bitter and scathing reviews, Durand-Souffland is the one lonely critic left in Paris doing his part, part-time. The epitome of the French food critic immortalised in Ratatouille – severe, hard to please, gifted with absolute taste like some have absolute pitch – no longer exists. With the exception of Le Figaro, France’s main conservative paper, there are no restaurant critics in the dailies. François-Régis Gaudry, a self-described ‘petit con’ who loved to bite the ankles of egotistical chefs when he was a food critic for weekly news magazine L’Express, now has his own radio show and TV show, and has done stints on Top Chef – his career has made it untenable to keep criticising chefs while also being friendly with them. At Le Figaro, Emmanuel Rubin is reduced to penning listicles, only exercising his sharp pen on easy targets and irrelevant restaurants. Libération, the French version of The Guardian, favours trend pieces on food. At Time Out Paris, the anonymity of each of its critics is proclaimed next to their picture, while their best-known reviewer also works as an MC at food festivals and goes on trips with chefs he also reviews. As for François Simon, since he left M Le magazine du Monde in 2018, his former restaurant column changed its format from restaurant criticism to pieces on ‘memorable dishes’ and ‘remarkable kitchen tools’. Promoting his new book, Will I Go Back? (titled after his poetic Instagram reels), Simon told France Inter of his yearning for ‘a time when criticism raised the bar’ with ‘good, well-argued reviews, often a bit vicious’. In another interview, he observed that ‘there is no great food critic anymore’.

It is perhaps a symptom of all this that Paris, the centre of French gastronomy, has never been in more need of a great restaurant critic. Today, the Parisian food media scene has become a never-ending circle of new restaurants hyped for a couple of weeks before the next ones come in, without anyone bothering to say if it is really worth the fuss – an attitude emblematic of a profession that has foregone negativity. If even the guides have stopped guiding us, then, the only thought leaders left are influencers. French restaurant criticism is almost dead, and the weirdest thing about it might be that, one court reporter aside, no one seems to care.

Read more

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. For the next two weeks, we will be sending out individual articles from our supplement Vittles Paris. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

The Vittles Alternative Guide to Paris
Rungis: The Market and the City, by Justinien Tribillon
The Last Critic in Paris, by Vadim Poulet
‘Welfare is a right, not a privilege’, by Jack Franco
Pourquoi pas?, by Jonathan Nunn

Articles from Vittles Paris are paywalled — to view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

Subscribe now

Last copies of Issue 1

From time to time, I come across someone else of Asian heritage from a different part of the world who has a family member living in Lognes, one of the eastern suburbs of Paris that makes up the area known as the 77. When I do, I can bet that they are also immigrants of Chinese-Vietnamese heritage who arrived in Paris following the Vietnam War in the late 70s. Like me, they would also remember the park and lake by the station, waiting endlessly for their parents in the carpark of the Asian supermarket Tang Frères, and chaotic family gatherings at the local Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants.

As a child of Lognes, I have a love/hate relationship with the Parisian suburbs. I hated being far from the cultural centre of the city and feeling dismissed. But in the last 10 years, while living in London, I have come to lean on those memories of the 77: the Sunday Chinese classes in Noisiel with the teacher whose breath smelled like tangerines; seeing my aunt making tong yuen in her kitchen in Lognes; giggling under the dining table with my cousin while being told off for knocking the nước mắm on to the carpet.

One of the things I miss most about the 77 is a dish that I cannot find in London, and that has no special resonance for most Parisians: a noodle soup called soupe Phnom Penh, named after the Cambodian capital. In my opinion, soupe Phnom Penh is best served in the 77, but getting Parisians to travel to the suburbs for any reason is difficult, let alone for noodle soup.

Soupe Phnom Penh can be eaten with the noodles mixed in the soup, or ‘dry’ – meaning the noodles and broth are served separately. The latter is my favourite way: the noodles are mixed with a sweet and savoury soy sauce and sesame oil, while the broth is made from reducing pork bones, dried shrimp and squid; if the noodles are too dry, you can add a spoonful or two of soup. What I love most is the process of finding the toppings mixed in with the noodles: sliced cooked pork, pork liver, sautéed ground pork, pork sausage, prawns and squid. On some lucky days, – depending on the restaurant and the chef’s mood – the soup might be served with a pork bone that still has some juicy, tender meat on it.

My favourite place to eat soupe Phnom Penh is Café de Lognes, a small restaurant tucked away in the back of a tabac. My family and I have been going here for more than 15 years, and now that I’m away from it I realise that, really, what I loved most about the soup is the ritual it became. Going for soupe Phnom Penh meant going for a meal out, an occasion to connect with my parents and siblings.

A few years ago, I asked a Chinese-Cambodian friend from Paris if her mum cooked soupe Phnom Penh, and she told me she didn’t know about it. It left me wondering whether I was calling it by its right name, or whether it even is a Cambodian dish. I asked my parents about it, and got even more confused about its origins.

“It’s the Chinese in Vietnam who used to eat this.”

“We didn’t eat this growing up in Saigon, it was not a thing.”

“It’s the Cambodians who came to Vietnam who used to sell this.”

“Actually, the first time we had this soup was in France, it was not a thing in Vietnam.”

They also told me to fact-check everything they were saying, as clearly they didn’t really know.

What they could tell me with certainty was that the first place they had the soup was the Tricotin, a restaurant in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. Back in the late 70s, that’s where you would find the whole of the Teochew community, when immigrants from south-east Asia came to Paris. According to my parents, the Tricotin was probably one of the first places in Paris to serve the soup.

After some sleuthing, I came to an answer of sorts: the soup originated from the Chinese diaspora in Cambodia – more precisely, from the Teochew people of the Guangdong province in China, who later emigrated to Vietnam, and then to France. The soup is actually called called Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang in Vietnamese, and Kuy Teav in Cambodian. People often say ‘You are what you eat’, but I didn’t realise how closely the story of the soup mirrors my family’s migration story. My ancestors, including my grandparents, came from Shantou in Guangdong, then emigrated to Saigon in Vietnam, where my parents were born and grew up. After the fall of Saigon, in the late 70s, my parents came to Paris. It was behind the Tricotin, near the high towers of Les Olympiades, that my mother was reunited with her own mother, sister and brothers. I could not believe that, after almost 30 years of eating soupe Phnom Penh, I had never understood the historical and migratory story it carried.

The soup is Teochew, just like my family and me. And like us, it is a dish that has moved from the 13th arrondissement to the suburbs of the 77. Soupe Phnom Penh has followed me throughout every stage of my life so far – in moments of celebration, in moments of grief, in solitude and daily routine. I imagine the soup thriving in the Chinatown of Saigon, and then with those who took the chance and the risk of travelling to France. Some by air, some by water. With those who made it, and those who didn’t.

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Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today’s article by Jack Franco is from our supplement Vittles Paris. To read the rest of the series, please click below:

The Vittles Alternative Guide to Paris
Rungis: The Market and the City, by Justinien Tribillon
The Last Critic in Paris, by Vadim Poulet
The Story of Soupe Phnom Penh, by Wendy Huynh
Pourquoi pas?, by Jonathan Nunn

To read the entire series, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.

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La restauration collective, or collective catering, is a special source of culinary pride in a land with no shortage of it. In France, canteen trade bodies run annual competitions that award chefs in large institutions, such as care homes, schools and hospitals, who source ingredients locally and sustainably, and turn them into healthy, cheap and flavoursome meals. No canteens represent this tradition in the French collective imagination more than the restaurants universitaires, or Resto Us. These are the 500 university canteens run by the Centre Régional d’Œuvres Universitaires et Scolaires, or Crous, a mammoth governmental body that plays a major role in students’ lives. Today, Paris alone counts around 20 restaurants universitaires, which are vital for the city’s student population of over half a million; although tuition is virtually free for many students in France, financial support is less generous, leaving a lot of students precarious when it comes to food. At a restaurant universitaire, a healthy, varied meal costs €6.60, but the state subsidises it by half, meaning €3.30 gets students bread, a salad or entrée, a generous main and a dessert. Students with a bursary pay a symbolic single euro.

Since I moved two years ago from London to study, I’ve started to appreciate the city through the menus of its canteens. Having grown up in the UK, I admire the restaurants universitaires for their idealistic yet utilitarian spirit: serving the greatest number of people as well as possible, while building creativity into the formulaic. You order according to a French-style, points-based buffet system; a total of six points is available – four for a main, one for sides and desserts, with every point over six accruing a 50¢ surcharge. Though the French might characterise the food as perfectly run-of-the-mill, to an outsider the selection of dishes can serve as an introduction to the cooking of the wider Francophone world. It was in a Lyon canteen that I discovered fish quenelles before I’d set foot in a bouchon, and tried a sausage rougail stew from Réunion Island, a creole cuisine so often omitted from France’s gastronomic story.

Wanting to see how the city’s restaurants universitaires change from area to area, depending on where and who they’re serving, I decided to keep a diary over a four-day week in spring detailing meals at canteens in different parts of the city. Although their existence highlights societal gaps caused by increasing inequality, the restaurants universitaires also represent necessary and feasible remedies to food insecurity and a growing lack of truly public spaces. These canteens stand for the idea that welfare – or in its literal French equivalent, bien-être, or well-being – is a right, not a privilege.

Day One: Restaurant Universitaire Mabillon, Rue Mabillon, 6^th arrondissement

Menu du jour: red cabbage, cucumber and potato salad bowl – chicken yassa, spinach and rice – cherry crumble

The 6^th arrondissement is postcard Paris: the Senate, Jardin du Luxembourg and overpriced cafes living off long-dead reputations. It also has the Restaurant Universitaire Mabillon, the oldest university canteen in France. Founded in 1952, Mabillon is the Crous’ most emblematic canteen, spread across three floors and 660 seats. During the 1960s, it served 5,000 meals a day; though more canteens have since opened nearby, more than 1,600 meals still come out of Mabillon’s kitchen daily. Today, my tangy poulet yassa has let the onions do the work, as it should, although it’s a shame it has to share a plate with two ounces of overcooked spinach.

Mabillon is unmissable for one reason above all: its looks. As a small display case in the cafe dedicated to Crous history informs me, ‘Mabillon represents the nouvelle image of university catering’. On each of the three floors, strip mirrors line the walls. If you sit on one of the red wire chairs, your mate can take the diner-style couches in red leather. Soft light from the linear wall lights complements an already luminous place. This is one place where I prefer to eat alone, where I can look outside, peering over the tiled roof of the redeveloped market to catch a glimpse of Saint-Sulpice’s bell tower and apse.

Welfare in France is to feel the right to certain things, which includes the right to a thoughtful, enriching meal, set against a charming view, for a cheap price. Though not as ambitious as the Maoists in the 1960s calling for a student wage, there are still those, notably from leftist party France Unbowed, who are campaigning to recognise study as labour. One demand made by the party is for all canteen meals to be charged at the flat, symbolic €1 price currently reserved for students on means-tested bursaries – a policy that fell short by a single vote in 2023. The breadth of support for this idea – from the socialist left to the far right – is remarkable, but there is opposition from centrists and conservatives, who treat the Crous as another unsustainable treat for a swollen and predominantly middle-class student population. During my first stay in France in 2021, the €1 meal was implemented as a national Covid measure. What students eat and how much they pay affects how they study. After a meal in the Resto U, I am a well-oiled machine.

Day Two: Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers, Seine-Saint-Denis

Menu du jour: brie & bread – honey and rosemary turkey, green beans, carrot duo – yoghurt

Since 2018, the mammoth Campus Condorcet has brought 11 universities’ social sciences departments and 50 libraries into one shiny, €600m development, a stone’s throw away from the Stade de France north of Paris. The historically industrial and immigrant area of Aubervilliers has been clinically redrawn: the relics of warehouses and terraced housing surrounding the Campus are scheduled for demolition. But it also houses what I think is Paris’s best restaurant universitaire. A friend describes it as the ‘gourmet’ branch, with slightly more variation and creativity in the menu than other Crous canteens. All my favourite meals last year were here: a plate of butternut squash rice and baked salmon for lunch one day, duck leg and chips for Christmas dinner. Today, the main – honey and rosemary turkey – is delicious, despite my apprehension about eating turkey at any time of the year. The honey and rosemary sauce seeps among the yellow and orange carrots. A sprig of rosemary, curiously unbroken, sits atop my serving.

As the menu changes from day to day, lunch often includes a moment of suspense. Yenifer, a Colombian master’s student, tells me: ‘This is probably the best canteen I go to, but it’s cool to try something new in each one. When I did an internship in Bayonne, I got to try Basque cooking.’ She sings the praises of the Basque city’s veal axoa, while recognising that the reliable culinary offer of the Crous often papers over structural cracks such as insecure student housing, the high cost of living and underinvestment in higher education. She promises to send me pictures she had enthusiastically taken of her Basque meal.

L overhears us and gets involved. A history student from the south of France, he laments the lack of creativity in the canteens’ veggie menus. He thinks many students learn what they like to eat from the canteen, and then try to cook it. ‘If all we see is pasta with chickpea stew, we’ll get lazy and end up not eating properly,’ he tells me. He’s right, and by the same token, canteens can show us how to cook well, and thoughtfully, too. Some of the cooks bring personal recipes, Francophone or otherwise. I was intrigued when I saw arroz com amêndoas on the menu, then the chef spoke back to the student queuing in front of me in Portuguese.

Canteens exist on their own scale of inclusivity. Close to the Campus Condorcet in Aubervilliers is Taf & Mafé, a long-standing charitable canteen that helps newly arrived African migrants with culinary experience to cook professionally. They serve 600 meals daily from a mostly north and west African menu, from couscous and merguez to thiéboudienne, gombo and mafé. The canteen is on the ground floor of a building that provides social housing to vulnerable people, who can eat a generous meal for €3. The non-resident price is €4.50, and people from across the area make the journey: residents, men of religion, campus workers, librarians and a handful of students. The food is excellent – better than at the Crous.

For all the diversity of the restaurants universitaires, the security guards who check my bag at the Campus Condorcet opt to eat at Taf & Mafé instead. The Crous might be a tangible form of solidarity for lots of students, but its arrival in megacampus form exists alongside hundreds of bonds already at work against food insecurity and social exclusion (85% of households in Seine-Saint-Denis live in a district at risk of food insecurity). In Aubervilliers, it’s through the exclusion of local, often marginalised and racialised, communities that students appear to benefit from vast spaces, state-of-the-art kitchens and subsidised rates.

Day Three: La Barge du Crous, River Seine, Quai François Mauriac, 13^th arrondissement

Menu du jour: endive, blue cheese and walnut salad, beetroot and mâche – cordon bleu, chips and green bean, white asparagus and aubergine medley – fruit salad

The easternmost part of the 13^th arrondissement hugs the River Seine, just across from Bercy coach station. Here, too, aggressive redevelopment has changed the face of the area. It began in the 1980s with the arrival of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, pet project of socialist president François Mitterrand, whose name adorns the library. Further south is the new campus of Paris-Cité University, on a former factory site, Grands Moulins. Here, a faux-English pub, the Frog and British Library, welcomes drinkers.

In 2013, the Crous bought and renovated a three-floor barge. It was inaugurated in 2015 by another socialist president, François Hollande. The deck has outside seating looking on to the river, and Le Rooftop, a bar that is open until late. I have seen all sorts come here to photosynthesise in a genuinely public space in an otherwise corporate postcode. I imagine cooking on a river has its limitations, but the food is decent. Today, it is a bistro classic and presidential favourite: cordon bleu. Alongside, an endive, walnut and blue cheese salad fit for a bouillon lifts an otherwise merely effective meal.

I ask the people sitting next to me a few questions, which are met with a sideways glance. I rapidly explain, without realising how odd I must’ve sounded, that the canteens here were all I ever wished for across the Channel. Maxime and Julie are students at Paris 1’s Tolbiac campus, around 20 minutes away on foot. They reply matter-of-factly that their favourite dish is indeed the cordon bleu. ‘Most of all, we come for the choice. Every canteen has its own variety, especially at Paris-Cité just down the embankment.’ I ask why they come here instead. Maxime responds with a shrug and gestures to the river.

Day Four: Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Boulevard Jourdan, 14^th arrondissement

Menu du jour: chickpea, tomato and cheese salad, bread – coley with sauce bordelaise, spaghetti and courgettes – fromage blanc

During the interwar period, 34 hectares of Parisian land were given over to the construction of housing for students from around the world. Intended as a peace project, this now makes up the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. Like many other foreign students arriving in Paris, my first port of call was the Cité, which is like a small town in demeanour and sheer size, with its 12,000 residents.

Today, the Cité boasts 7,000 rooms in 47 ‘houses’, each representing a foreign country. Sixty per cent of residents in each house are nationals of the house’s country (Italians live in the Italian House, and so on), and the remainder is a mix of all other nationalities. If your country hasn’t yet got its own exclave – for reasons as varied as diplomatic spats, corruption or lack of space – with a bit of luck, you will be welcomed by another. (I was placed in the Le Corbusier-designed Swiss house for a year.) Some of the houses have their own commercial restaurants that are open to the public (Korean House has the best reputation, with the Germans not far behind), with slightly cheaper rates for residents, but most students eat lunch and dinner at the central canteen, or cook where possible.

The Crous won the tender to run the Cité’s central canteen in 2018, renovating it to the tune of €1.5m. It’s a remarkable operation, with almost 500 seats. The greater choice that this canteen offers is both a blessing and a curse. To the left is a chef baking pizzas, setting his peel down to serve the vegetarian meal. There is a generous display of charcuterie, a mix of terrine, prosciutto, chorizo or rosette, unfailingly accompanied by a single cornichon. The crown jewel of the set-up is the grill. At every service, there will be grilled meat or fish (with chips, the much-memed Crous staple) cooked as you wait.

Today I go for the fish and courgettes with spaghetti. Having lived here for a year, I know what to expect of the ‘sauce bordelaise’ (which is more of a puttanesca, olives and capers giving the game away) that coats the fish. I keep it simple: tomatoes, chickpeas and cheese as my side, and to finish, some fromage blanc (which, today, is missing its chestnut cream topping). I enjoy my meal, though I can always do without the spaghetti. The sauce is sharp, the coley is fleshy and sustainable (so I am told), and so today, again, I cannot complain. I empty my tray and complete my lap of the cafeteria, after picking up an espresso, for 60¢.

I sit down next to an older man called Mustapha who was just in front of me in the queue for coffee. He tells me that, as an engineering student in the 70s, he lived in the Cité for four years: three in Lebanon House, the country of his birth, and one in Japan House. Mustapha is a discerning diner: he prefers the Mabillon canteen, but comes to the Cité’s since he lives nearby. He eats in the German House when the Cité has its veggie-only days. But he continues to be a regular here because of its cadre agréable – its pleasant setting, with students chatting and bustling past the high windows overlooking the park – and its honest fare. As a non-student, Mustapha pays €8.80, and he is all too happy to: ‘I come here at least once a week, when I’m in a hurry and can’t go to a local restaurant.’ I want to understand if the food itself, more than the convenience, atmosphere and nostalgia that come with it, is really what keeps him coming back to this restaurant universitaire. I ask him what he makes of the cooking: ‘Pas mal.’

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Grand Paris is a column about the changing relationship between Paris and its suburbs, told through the food of its various diaspora communities and neighbourhoods. You can read the previous entries here:

Grand Paris Part 1: Les Olympiades
Grand Paris Part 2: Lognes and Torcy
Grand Paris Part 3: Saint-Denis
Grand Paris Part 4: Le Perreux-sur-Marne
Grand Paris Part 5: The Enabling Constraint
Grand Paris Part 6: An Englishman in Paris

A map of 99 places to eat and drink in Paris taken from this column and our Alternative Guide to Paris, can be found at the end of this review.

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‘Le quinzième? Pourquoi?’

I was discussing the dire state of French restaurant criticism while sitting in Lissit, a bar in the 11e that serves natural wine so tart it could restore a cast iron pan (complimentary), when I started making my excuses to leave. ‘Stay,’ the waiter said to my companion Vadim, ‘the food here is very good.’ Vadim explained that this may well be the case but I was off to eat across town in the 15e, which is when the waiter expressed his disbelief. The 15th? Why? Paris’s 15th arrondissement is both geographically and spiritually the opposite of the 11th; south-west and not north-east, frou-frou shops and middle-of-the-road brasseries in place of caves à vins and tiny stores selling fresh soba noodles. I was trying to think of a London equivalent that would make someone say the same thing. Sitting in an arch on the edge of London Fields and suddenly announcing ‘I’m going for dinner in Parsons Green’? It’s not that there aren’t good restaurants in the 15e but if you are an 11e person, then it’s a valid question: why bother?

My answer, now and always, is that Paris incubates eccentric restaurateurs everywhere. I once went to an Iranian restaurant in the 15e that served lousy food but where every table was waited on by the charming owner, a man who grew up on Elgin Avenue in West London and who, before the dishes of the day had been announced, would spend a good 15 minutes giving you his entire life story in whichever language you speak. ‘Ah Indians, a great people,’ he told me, after hearing my own origin story. ‘That’s because they’re originally Iranian.’ Nearby, on a trip to Paris last year, I was stopped in my tracks by a blackboard in the window of a tiny, minimalist Chinese restaurant. On it was written the names of every single ingredient and their provenance used across the menu, next to a sheet of laminated paper that announced, not so much passive-aggressively but aggressively-aggressively, everything it didn’t do: no sushi (it’s Paris, after all), no lychees, no nems, no entrées, no desserts, no changing ingredients, no changing the proportion of ingredients. The only water on the menu was two obscure mineral waters priced at €10 a litre. This is my equivalent of love at first sight. I knew I had to go back.

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Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants.

Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read all the previous reviews here.

For previous Paris coverage on Vittles, see Grand Paris:

Grand Paris Part 1: Les Olympiades
Grand Paris Part 2: Lognes and Torcy
Grand Paris Part 3: Saint-Denis
Grand Paris Part 4: Le Perreux-sur-Marne
Grand Paris Part 5: The Enabling Constraint

An updated map of over fifty places eaten at during this series can be found after the paywall.

Vittles Reviews: An Englishman in Paris

A Parisian fantasy, Quedubon and the sanctity of a truly great bistrot, by Jonathan Nunn

One of the aims of a certain type of restaurant and travel writing is to sort the ‘real’ from the ‘fantasy’, the authentic from the counterfeit. The subtitle of Counter Intelligence, Jonathan Gold’s 2000 collection of early restaurant reviews, positions it as a native guide of ‘where to eat in the real Los Angeles’, in opposition to the supposed fake one made up of Beverly Hills hotels, snake-oil health drinks and apologetic salads. In Creation Lake, the latest novel by American writer Rachel Kushner, the narrator describes the divide between the ‘real Europe’ and the fantasy of what tourists think it is, using Parisian food as an example (‘shrink-wrapped palettes [sic] of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik’ vs ‘a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate’). When a snippet of this paragraph was recently posted online, the reaction veered from surprise that an American ‘gets’ Europe to amusement that this observation, which could really be about anywhere in the world, might be mistaken for insight.

But there is no real Paris, just a set of competing fantasies that prop each other up. On Rue du Plateau, a side street in the 19e arrondissement, you might even find the Paris of the tourist imagination made corporeal. The street leads up to the talon-shaped Parc des Buttes-Chaumont – the most beautiful green space in the city – where you can take a walk around the lake and pretend you’re in a Rohmer film (if you’ve seen The Aviator's Wife, this is the park where François and Lucie aimlessly flirt and take pictures of American tourists). There is a hyped bakery, Boulangerie Milligramme, with constant lines outside. There is a nothing-looking bar on the corner, Le Bar Fleuri, that serves poulet frites on red and white chequered tablecloths for three hours at lunchtime for less than the price of a McDonald’s meal; a perfect mix of chicken-that-tastes-intensely-of-chicken, bronzed frites, a brown, giblet-y reduction and a tiny jar of atomic mustard. It’s the kind of Parisian lunch a visitor might expect to find everywhere but is actually so rare that it’s become a TikTok spot. 

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Grand Paris is a column about the changing relationship between Paris and its suburbs, told through architecture and the food of its various diaspora communities and neighbourhoods. You can read the previous entries here:

Grand Paris Part 1: Les Olympiades
Grand Paris Part 2: Lognes and Torcy
Grand Paris Part 3: Saint-Denis
Grand Paris Part 4: Le Perreux-sur-Marne

A Google Map of over fifty places eaten at during this series can be found after the paywall.

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Grand Paris Part 5: The Enabling Constraint

Fourteen Japanese and Japanese-inspired small businesses in Paris, by Jonathan Nunn

“Enabling constraint!” shouts Jessica Yang, suddenly remembering. We’re standing outside Le Rigmarole, the restaurant in Paris’s 11e arrondissement that she co-runs with her partner Robert Compagnon. The meal I’ve just eaten less resembled lunch than a sleight of hand: a dozen precisely prepared dishes – raw scallop, grilled chicken aortas, tsukune with chicken-fat paratha – distinct from any food sent to other tables, made and served by just three people all without breaking a sweat. I have been to Le Rigmarole three times in my life: once for dinner, once in its post-pandemic incarnation as a pizzeria and once for lunch late last year, and each time I feel like a dupe getting fooled by a huckster performing three-card monte. I still can’t quite work out how it’s done, although the free role given to their kitchen porter Moshu Noor Amin, both a cook and pot wash behind the scenes, is key to the prestige. None of this trickery is actually necessary. The cooking is good enough that it could rest on its laurels – as a tasting menu restaurant, or a buzzy wine bar serving individual small plates, like every other place in the 11e. Instead, it does something that is there purely to give delight to the diner. Or so it seems.

Le Rigmarole is perhaps the best example of the French-Japanese axis of cooking which has become the dominant cuisine in Paris over the last decade. Sometimes it is Japan-infatuated French chefs, but also Japanese chefs who have come to Paris to challenge themselves; for every place like Le Rigmarole perfecting yakitori, you will find a Japanese patissier, like Mori Yoshida in the 7th arrondissement, turning out exquisite Paris-Brests. On the face of it, this seems strange – French cuisine tends to transform ingredients, while Japanese cuisine tends to preserve them – but there are also key synergies: the shared love for aestheticising food; the nouvelle cuisine created in the 1960s by French chefs finding a delicacy in Japanese cuisine that had been lacking in their own; a monomaniacal appreciation for buckwheat. But what makes this a uniquely Parisian infatuation is the shared understanding of what social theorists Erin Manning and Brian Massumi call the “enabling constraint”, something that has influenced Le Rigmarole’s development and made the centre of Paris the most exciting place outside Japan to eat Japanese food. 

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Grand Paris is a column by Jonathan Nunn about the changing relationship between Paris and its suburbs, told through architecture and the food of its various diaspora communities and neighbourhoods.

You can read Part 1: Les Olympiades here, and Part 2: Torcy and Lognes here

Part 3: 129 and the sandwiches of Saint-Denis

Thierry Henry: Technically… be careful. The stadium is in Saint-Denis.

Kate Abdo: Sorry, what?

TH: The stadium is in Saint-Denis. Not in Paris.

KA: Which is a suburb of Paris?

TH: It’s not Paris.

KA: Is it near Paris, Thierry: yes or no?

TH: Yes, it’s very near. But trust me: you don’t want to be in Saint-Denis. It’s not the same as Paris.

The Stade de France in the city of Saint-Denis rests 1.5 miles north from the periphery of the city of Paris; around a half-hour walk or the same distance between the centres of the Cities of London and Westminster. Whole worlds are contained in that distance. Lenin once said there are ‘decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks in which decades happen’ – these are the kind of distances where miles happen in millimetres.

The city of Saint-Denis is a city apart and has been from its inception, a discrete billiard ball that kisses Paris but refuses to be incorporated into the city proper. Due to its distance from the centre of the city, it is famous for containing the necropolis of most of the kings and queens of France whose bodies weren’t disposed of in the most disrespectful way possible (and the entrails of some of the ones who were). More recently, it has become a source of anxiety among people who feel alienated from a France composed of black and beur faces (such as far-right politician Éric Zemmour, who called Saint-Denis ‘no longer France’)

But when Thierry Henry – a child of the Parisian banlieue – asserted that Saint-Denis was not Paris, I interpreted it a little differently. Rather, I see it as the right of those in the suburbs to define themselves as separate, those who have internalised the city’s rejection and transformed it into a tough pride in their apartness. The inscription on the bridge over the Canal Saint-Denis memorialising the Paris massacre of 1961, where hundreds of protesting Algerians were killed by the police, understands this. It is perhaps the most powerful statement of contempt ever made by the suburbs against Paris. The plaque reads (in translation):

On October 17, 1961, during the Algerian War, thirty thousand Algerian men and women of the Paris region peacefully demonstrated against the curfew that was imposed on them. This movement was brutally suppressed on the order of the Prefect of Paris. Demonstrators were killed by bullets, hundreds of men and women were thrown into the Seine River and thousands were beaten and imprisoned. Dead bodies were found in the Canal Saint-Denis.

In her 2008 dissertation French Like Us? Municipal Policies and North African Migrants In the Parisian Banlieues 1945-1975, Melissa K. Byrnes argues that Saint-Denis’ strong sense of municipal identity (charmingly, inhabitants refer to themselves as Dionysiens) was an anomaly among Paris’s own ‘Red Wall’ of the 93 – the code used for the Seine-Saint-Denis department – welcoming the wave of immigration that came in the aftermath of World War II and the Algerian War as something that could bolster rather than dilute Dionysien culture (Saint-Denis’s current mayor, responding to Henry, said the city isn’t Paris but it is a place “in which 150 different nationalities live together, bringing to life the richness of their multiple cultures.”) Because of this Saint-Denis has become Paris’s negative image, a no-go-zone, hellhole full of ‘thieves and looters’ according to Zemmour and ‘scum’ according to Le Pen. It’s not just not-Paris, it’s not even France.

Yet as the academic Todd Shepherd has noted, ‘what we know as France has Algeria written all over it’. I’d like to rewrite this: ‘What we know as French fast food has 129 written all over it.’

129 – or, to give it its overly-optimistic official name, Restaurant le 129 – is a sandwich shop. But this is like saying that the Louvre is a museum or that Serge Gainsbourg is a horny singer: technically true, but underselling it. 129 is a sandwich shop; it is also a meeting place, a creche, a nightclub, a gym, a myth, a meme, a happening, a place of rest, a place of worship, a symbol of Dionysien identity. It is the best Parisian sandwich shop not in Paris. 

I first encountered 129 on Twitter, while searching for Paris’s best ‘grec’, a French word for a type of sandwich wrap made in flatbread and usually filled with a shaved meat of some kind – basically a kebab. (To the irritation of Turks everywhere, it translates as a ‘Greek’.) The name ‘129’ kept cropping up, but in a way that I recognised as deadpan suburban humour, the kind that gleefully makes myths of things that everyone else ignores. 129 is ‘la capitale gastronomique de la France’ says one user. You need a bulletproof vest to enter 129, says another. There is a memetic quality to 129 stanning that revolves around football: Dionysiens know the gap between the lives of the ultra-rich football players who visit the Stade de France and their true banlieue desires. A sighting of Jesus Navas in a high-end steakhouse provokes rumours that Sergio Ramos is going to order the Triple Steak at 129. Someone jokes that Salah and Mane are going to be spotted drowning their sorrows at 129 when they lose the Champions League final to Real Madrid. When Gini Wijnaldum asks for recommendations of what to do in Paris, more than several people suggest going to 129 to have the ‘red chicken’. There are repeated photos of Messi dining in places which are clearly not 129 but labelled 129. 

I feel at home in Saint-Denis: the wet markets, the shambolic vibe, the shops selling brightly coloured perfume by the millilitre like aromatic shots, the detritus left over from selling and consumption. It feels like Wood Green if someone put a basilica there instead of a shopping centre. I spot 129 immediately because of the volume of people going in and out. It’s one of those shops which serves as an extension of the street; people pass through it as easily as breathing, as if the door isn’t there, entering stage right and becoming part of the chorus. It’s full, even at 4pm, which should reasonably be considered downtime. I count about 40 people in there – this is, I need to remind you, the equivalent of a chicken shop – and it looks like a Front National nightmare, a coalition of Arab-African-Algerian men, in Paris St. Germain shirts, in La Haine hoodies, biceps on display, occasionally with a reluctant girlfriend in tow. The atmosphere is very masculine, and everyone is hench: I suspect that collectively they could bench-press the whole shop.

There are seven named sandwiches on the 129 menu and ‘red chicken’ (weirdly, in English) is No. 1. The biggest opportunity for amendments are the sauces: ketchup, barbecue, mayo, harissa, sauce Algerienne and sauce samurai. I order a No.1 with fries and sauce samurai. Behind the counter, there is a frenzy of motion: trays being set up in advance with sauces as identifiers, like a condiment-based Myers-Briggs test. Some people have ordered chopped olives and chillies – I note this for next time.

When the sandwich comes it’s like a long-awaited miracle. The bread is clearly homemade, not too fluffy and heavy like some pitas, but not thin and crispy. The fries are fresh, dry and better than McDonald’s. The sandwich is – and I’m not even exaggerating – 90% chicken, and the shape, colour and size of the Eye of Sauron. It is red, and is covered in an iris of lurid yellow cheese that makes it look even more red. You could describe it as a chicken tandoori but this would be inaccurate. It doesn’t taste like tandoori: it tastes red. I look over at two men who are eating the same sandwich. One is at 150 degrees in post-prandial recline, the other is hunching at an acute angle in that way that men do when they eat a big sandwich, like they’re about to read War and Peace. He takes a bite and, with his mouth full, makes a universal sign gesture, his thumb and forefinger together, shaking his hand slowly up and down to signal: ‘This sandwich is so good and I cannot believe how good it is.’

The next day, I come during the evening to see what 129 and Saint-Denis looks like at its most chaotic. This time the queue snakes out the door, like Berghain with no white people. I order sandwich No. 7, the Triple Steak, a beast of a sandwich which involves three burgers, akin to Algerian steak haché, stacked on top of each other and steamed on the grill, bound with melted cheese, egg and turkey bacon, then chopped in half to fill the bread. When I bite in, this time it’s me who can’t quite believe how good it is. It combines the qualities of two of my favourite fast food sandwiches: the Sausage McMuffin and the Burger King Bacon Double Cheeseburger.

There is something about 129 that makes it so much more than a place that sells sandwiches. The closest London comparison, in its fame, its fast moving parts and the pride taken in its food, is Falafel & Shawarma in Camberwell – a shop that is beloved for doing everything a little bit better than it needs to be, and just generally having very good vibes. But 129 is more than even this. It’s something that gives structure and form to living in Saint-Denis – for some at least. The city has a very different vibe at night. By day, women are the most visible, in headdresses, in hijabs, moving from shop to shop; by night, the city is mainly filled with men, hanging out, wandering aimlessly because there isn’t really much to do. There is no late night restaurant culture here, which means you either go to a bench, the street, or to 129. 

I meet up with my friend P, who has, coincidentally, moved around the corner from 129. Her friend K is Dionysien through and through in the old sense – a leftist attracted to Saint-Denis for its radical history and cheap rents. When she tells Parisians she lives in Saint-Denis, most react with apathy. Some ask about whether it’s safe, but she says that even though the atmosphere at night is obviously male, she’s received more harassment within the Paris borders than in Saint-Denis. She says that although she sees more newcomers moving in, gentrification has mostly been kept at bay; there is no sense in Paris that moving to the suburbs could be considered cool in the same way Londoners might romanticise living in Peckham or Hackney. Although when she tells me about the food co-op, one of the largest in Europe and run out of an anarchist bookshop in one of the cités, she says they’ve just started stocking kombucha. 

129 is a kebab shop, not utopia – and it’s not a socialist food co-op or even a community centre – but there’s something here that feels like resistance to the architecture of neglect that surrounds the Parisian suburbs. I feel this neglect one night, coming back from Saint-Denis, waiting for an RER that never comes, then being trapped on another one in a tunnel for ninety minutes without an update. Paris just doesn’t care. 129 however, is a place where immigrants and Dionysians can call their own, a place to make jokes and memes about rich people eating there, where they are free to take pleasure. It’s the kind of place that every politician who needed to court Dionysien votes would have to be seen eating at; even Zemmour might have done better if he had been spotted in 129. 

But ultimately I think I love 129 because this is the food the French are ashamed of, that they pretend they don’t eat, made by people that they are ashamed of and pretend are not French. Not all of it is good, of course. I can’t necessarily recommend that you ever have a Parisian French taco or a cheese naan. But you should have a sandwich at 129. After Thierry Henry was proven right about the Champions League final, some people may not want to come here for football anymore. But trust me, if you want to have a the best red chicken of your life, or see the tombstone of a king called Dagobert: you want to be in Saint-Denis. It’s not the same as Paris.

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Addendum

I did some more eating on this trip outside of 129 — I had a particularly good time at the re-opening of Folderol, the ice-cream shop/bar (a combo Londoners should learn from) opened by the Rigmarole team, as well as superb rabbit cacciatore by the new chef at Mokoloco and Sichuan spiced pigeon at Cuisine. You can find a map of all places featured or researched for Grand Paris here. It is updated as the column progresses.

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Grand Paris is a new column about the changing relationship between Paris and its suburbs, told through architecture and the food of its various diaspora communities and neighbourhoods.

You can read Part 1: Les Olympiades here.

Grand Paris, Part 2: Soup in the 77

The fundamental difference between London and Paris is not in its food, or the number of bakeries where it’s possible to get a passable croissant. It is not in the beauty of its buildings, or the rudeness of its inhabitants – which are roughly the same despite the protestations of both. No, the fundamental difference between London and Paris, the thing which makes each city feel so alien to the other, is in how and where they decide to house their working-class.

I first became aware of this years ago when talking to my Parisian friend Cecile, who told me that her French friends would react in horror when she described her daily walks through council housing estates in Camden and Marylebone. For them, the idea was not just unusual but wrong. ‘How could you put yourself in danger in that way?’ I was fascinated to hear their reasoning, this Parisian mentality of treating the housing estates as not a part of the walkable city even though they share the same space.

For Cecile, these walks were just the easiest way of getting between two points because, in London, estates are everywhere. The indiscriminate spread of post-war council housing in London has much to thank the equally indiscriminate Luftwaffe for, as they provided bombed out tabulae rasae for architects to impose their vision around the centres of London. The working class stayed in the centre, while suburbia and Metroland were for the aspirational middle-classes linked to the centre by the tube; eventually Greater London was instituted to include the suburban boroughs within the concept of London. 

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In case you missed it, London Feeds Itself, my first book as an editor and writer, will be out this September with Open City. Although not a Vittles project, it continues and extends many of the themes explored in Vittles over the last two years — from Burgess Park barbecues to Jewish food in Hampstead Garden Suburb, from Kurdish warehouses to Syrian li…

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