Paris - Places to Eat

I don't want to make this a competition, but if it was, Italy won the eating part of the contest. There are a lot of amazing places to eat in Paris, but they are becoming harder to come by and quite expensive. Gone are the days you can drop in to one of the main street cafes or brassieres and get a great meal. You need to do your homework and a little advance planning if you want to eat well every meal. I would also advise staying away from the big travel sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp as they seem to cater to a pretty mainstream palate. Your first stop should be Paris by Mouth: http://parisbymouth.com. Not only do they have great reviews, they also offer up tours, neighborhood guides, and very helpful notes like: how to avoid tourist trap restaurants near the tourist traps, and restaurants open on Sundays.

Speaking of which Paris is pretty much closed down on Sundays. We found a very nice little bakery right by the house which we enjoyed breakfast all week, until the Saturday, when we found it closed for the weekend. There was also a note on the door saying she'd be closed all of August, another watchout if you plan to come here in the summer. All the Parisians leave for holiday in August, which on some levels is nice, except when they run a restaurant or store you might want to go to.

As I said earlier, we are staying in the Martparnesse area of Paris which is very close to a lot of restaurants in Saint Germain, or the chocolate capitol of Paris. The Left Bank is not super trendy right now, but there are still plenty of good places to eat.  

A must visit is Le Relais de l'Entrecôte: http://www.relaisentrecote.fr, 101 Bd de Montparnasse.  They only have one thing on the menu - Steak-Frites, and they do them the old fashioned way with shoestring frites, and sliced steak. Both are all you can eat for a fixed price. They have a short wine list and several good deserts, but we were not sure exactly what we were ordering as the waitress did not speak english. That said, we were all happy with what showed up.

A dinner cruise on the Seine is also a good idea, the one we did was expensive as it was Bastille Day, but there are much more reasonable alternatives. I saw some smaller boats with what looked like private dinners, I bet those could be great if you get the right chef.

The highlight of our eating trip in Paris was dinner at Le Chateaubriand, 129 ave Parmentier, 75011 Paris. It has been rated as one of the top 50 restaurants in the world for the last few years and it lived up to the billing. I lost count of the number of courses we were served, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10. We also got the wine paring which was a fun adventure. It's hard to tell you what you are going to get, because the menu changes every night, but there will be several appetizers, our most memorable was the cold tomato soup, deep fried veal in tandoori powder, and a shot of ceviche.  For the mains we got two fish dishes, one was tuna on peach which was excellent, and a meat dish which was lamb and eggplant, my least favorite. Then there were two deserts, one was fresh cherries with raw almonds and fermented milk ice cream and the other was their signature desert a caramelized egg yolk on a meringue. The restaurant is small and you need to book three weeks in advance if you want a table in the first seating from 7:30-10 pm., otherwise you can stand in line for the second seating. The menu is set and the price is 70 euros per person for dinner and another 65 if you want the wine pairing. If not, there is a long and very distinguished wine list.

On Sunday when all the restaurants are closed you can hit the markets. This is where Parisians stock up for the week. We luckily had a great one, Marché Biologique Raspail, very close by on the Boulevard Raspail, between the Rue Cherche-Midi and Rue de Rennes. Start out with an onion galettes — shredded onion, potato and cheese (2.50 euros) — frying at one of the dozens of stands then you can load up on bread, cheese, jams and other treats for your picnic in the close by Luxembourg Gardens.

Here some other places we went that were good or interesting:

Cuisine de Bar, 8 rue du Cherche Midi, 75006, a great place for a quick, light lunch. For 15 euros you get soup/salad, a hot or cold tartines – open faced sandwich – on their famous bread, and a glass of wine. 

Pâtisserie / Boulangerie: Gerard Mulot, http://www.gerard-mulot.com/, 76 rue de Seine, Croissants-cakes-lots of good food you can buy for your apartment -salads-quiches- etc.

Les deux Magots, www.lesdeuxmagots.com, 6 Place St Germain des Prés, great old Parisian Brasserie, that is a little touristy now but used to be a very important literally cafe.

Le Dome Cafe - 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 75014 Paris, this is an interesting place that is past it's prime, the service is bad, but the food is still good. It is just so old school Paris that you have to love it, the ghosts of Hemingway and other literary giants are all around you.