Paris for foodies

Best restaurants

Paris does not lack for restaurants, and that is precisely the problem. Within a ten-minute walk of the Hôtel de Ville you can eat badly at fifty places and remembered-for-years at a dozen, and the twelve below are the dozen. They cluster across the 75001, 75003, and 75004 postal codes: the streets around Rue des Archives, Rue des Lombards, and Rue Saint-Martin, where the Marais meets Châtelet and the kitchens run late. This is a list for a visitor who has one week, is tired of guessing, and wants to eat like the people who live upstairs. There is Italian cooked by people who mean it, Breton crêpes made to order, a Portuguese counter that never lets its custard cool, Vietnamese from a proper cantine, and a Lebanese kitchen that stays open past 23:00. No stars are chased here; no reservations are impossible. What each of these places has is a specific reason to be at its address: a cuisine done stubbornly well, an hour the neighbourhood keeps, a door that has been open longer than most bistros stay in business.