The Vittles Alternative Guide to Paris
A map of 99 restaurants, cafes, bars and bakeries that make Paris Europe's greatest food city
As a London publication, we cannot hope to do justice to the breadth and depth of the Parisian food scene. To put together a comprehensive list of the best restaurants in Paris would require years of eating and the ability to afford whatever a meal at L’Arpege costs nowadays. However, 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.
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.
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