Your guide to how to lunch like a local and avoid tourist traps
You’ve come to Paris, mainly to study French in France at ACCORD Language School but also to soak up France’s culture in its capital city. A huge part of the French heritage is its gastronomy, its cuisine, its signature dishes that grace menus all over the world and appear on dining tables across the globe. Moules frites, entrecôte, bœuf bourguignon, coq au vin, escargots, cuisses de grenouilles, cassoulet… a few of these classics will be on your list of must-tries whilst you’re in town. But how do you know where to go and where to avoid? Here’s our little guide to help you eat like a Parisian!
How to avoid tourist traps
Here are a few red flags to look out for as you potter around Paris looking for somewhere to sate your appetite. Once you’ve got a feel for what to avoid, it will make it much easier for you to find traditional eateries in the city.
- Pushy hosts: if there’s a host standing in the street with a handful of menus, pushing them onto passersby and telling them to go in the restaurant for something to eat, keep walking. Visit rue de la Huchette in the Quartier Latin or the area immediately around Place du Tertre in Montmartre to get a sense of the kind of vibe you want to avoid.
- Picture menus: if you’re handed a chunky menu translated (badly) into every language known to man with pictures of the dishes, move onto somewhere else. A lot of restaurants do provide an English translation of their menus, but you can’t expect quality food from a place that’s spent its money printing off reams and reams of Google translated menus with pictures in case the descriptions aren’t up to par.
- Judge a book by its cover: this ties into the pushy hosts in the street trying to lure you in. Lots of fake flowers or an over-the-top exterior are more than likely there to distract you from the exorbitant prices and lacklustre food.
- World cuisine: Paris has lots of fantastic restaurants serving dishes from all over the world, but a single restaurant can never be an expert in every single country’s cuisine. When you’re browsing the menu, avoid anywhere that serves everything from pizza, sushi, spaghetti, burgers to traditional French dishes all in the same place. You can expect frozen or industrial, and your stomach won’t thank you for it.
- Location, location, location: you come to Paris and have visions of tucking into a plateau de fruits de mer with a glass of white wine right next to the Eiffel Tower. Very Insta-worthy. We get it, who doesn’t want to feast their eyes on Paris’s beautiful landmarks whilst wrestling with a shell-on prawn? The problem is, you’re going to pay a premium for the view to help cover the eatery’s rent. The closer you are to a tourist attraction like the Louvre for example, the higher the price. That doesn’t necessarily mean the food will be bad though, just that you’re going to pay through the nose for it.
What to look out for instead:
- Walk past the eatery and listen to the people sitting en terrace. Are they mainly tourists or are they speaking French? If they’re French, they could well be locals, which is always a good sign. Take a look at the food too whilst you’re there. Does it look appetising? Do the diners seem to be enjoying themselves? What are they saying about the food?
- The menu should be displayed on a blackboard outside the restaurant or in a glass display stand. You shouldn’t have to be coaxed into the restaurant before you get to look at the menu, after all, how can you know if it serves what you fancy before you go in? The menu should all be written in French, possibly with an English translation alongside it, but this is your chance to practise the language you’ve come here to perfect, so stick to the French (also, unfortunately most restaurants use machine translations for their menus so the original versions will make more sense).
- Once you’ve had your fill of the Arc de Triomphe, work up an appetite and walk a few streets away from it. That’s where you’ll find the traditional little bistros and budget-friendly set menus you’ve been wanting to unearth. The area around the biggest attractions tends to be full of tourist traps, but you don’t need to venture all that far away from them for lunch at a fab French eatery.
- Look out for blackboards displaying la suggestion du chef, menu du jour, plat du jour or formule déjeuner. These are all classic ways for the chef to use up any surplus ingredients and create their own signature dish or rustle up an iconic French stew. What do you get out of it? The knowledge that your lunch has been made fresh that day by a chef who knows their stuff without having to break the bank to fill your stomach with quality food.
- Ask a local. The staff at the ACCORD French Language School live and work in Paris, so they know their stuff when it comes to eating out. Feel free to go to the School’s Reception after your morning class to ask where to grab a hearty bite to eat before your afternoon class, or where to go for a slap-up meal to end your stay in Paris on a high.
Where to lunch like a local
Food is a serious business in France and the French like to enjoy their meals, no matter how much or how little time they have. If you’re pushed for time, avoid McDo like the plague! The local boulangeries have a wide array of delicious freshly made sandwiches to choose from or you can pick up a classic jambon beurre on practically every street in Paris. If you’d like to have a quick bite but want to sit down at a restaurant, look out for a “formule express”, meaning you just have a couple of dishes to choose from but they’re served nice and quick so you can have a sit-down meal without worrying you’re going to miss class. Here are a few options for when you have a little more time on your hands to savour your lunch or dinner:
- Bouillon Chartier: there are three of these restaurants in the city and they provide a non-stop service between 11.30am and midnight. Usually, those would be two red flags right away, but Bouillon Chartier is the exception to the rule. The food tastes good, the prices are affordable, the wait staff dress the part and the atmosphere in the dining room is electric. A lot of people agree it’s a unique experience, if anything just to see the waiters write your bill on the paper tablecloths as you order.
- Le Bouquet de Grenelle: another bistro serving from 6am right through until 2am, another exception to the rule. This one is handy for any student at ACCORD Paris who has an afternoon off lessons, as it’s a stone’s throw from the school. It has a real Parisian feel, making it ideal for practising your listening skills as you earwig over your neighbours’ conversations (and maybe even get involved!). The classic dishes of the day are all written up on the blackboard and the smartly dressed wait staff make you feel like a regular.
- Café Dupleix: another handy eatery if you’re studying French at ACCORD Paris and another one serving “de l’expresso à l’apéro”! Settle into the sleek tan leather banquettes surrounded by burgundy tiles and red brick walls before you tuck into traditional French cuisine including snails, onion soup, steak tartare, bavette, croque monsieur, croque madame and so much more.
- La Gauloise: this traditional brasserie has held onto its retro ambience and is a hop, skip and a jump from ACCORD Paris. The classic woodwork, red velvet seating, white tablecloths, muted lighting and ceiling designs whisk you back to the early 1900s, when the brasserie first opened. This is the place to go for a unique experience, a typical Parisian brasserie with friendly and professional staff and the dishes are out of this world.
Recommendations from the team at ACCORD Paris
Local knowledge is a goldmine when it comes to unearthing hidden gems, whether that be shops, museums, galleries, or in this case, restaurants. The team at ACCORD Paris live and work in the French capital, so they know their stuff when it comes to the best places to grab a quick bite, pick up the best croque monsieur, or impress your friends with a hole in the wall. Just go and speak to them when you are at ACCORD School…
