The 38 Best Restaurants in Paris, France

Paris has changed a lot since Eater started rounding up its essential restaurants in 2016. The city’s entrenched food pyramid — a top tier of haute-cuisine restaurants representing the peak of Gallic gastronomy, followed by dressed-up bourgeois French restaurants, and finally a broad base of bistros and brasseries — has flattened out. Today, you can find outstanding contemporary French cooking at a variety of simple, friendly restaurants with reasonable prices all over Paris.

As the French capital’s dining scene has become more casual, cosmopolitan, and inventive, vegetarian and vegan options, such as the acclaimed Faubourg Daimant, have proliferated. Across the board, menus are tending toward seafood and vegetables, with meat playing a supporting role to local, seasonal, organic produce from sustainable producers.

Even as they embrace the new, many Parisians remain rooted in rock-of-ages French comfort food, which is available at a wave of traditional bistros, like the very popular Bistrot des Tournelles in the Marais, and thriving stalwarts like Le Petit Vendôme. Tasting menus also remain popular. “[Tasting menus] help to cut down on food waste and allow for some spontaneous creativity and playfulness,” says Manon Fleury, the chef at Datil. Fleury is also part of a class of talented female chefs who have taken Paris by storm, including Eugénie Béziat at Espadon at the Hotel Ritz and Soda Thiam at Janine.

Paris has never been a more exciting city for food-lovers than it is today.

Updated, November 2024:

Parisians continue their new love affair with traditional French comfort food, which is why Le Cornichon replaces the still very good Magma. Kitchens that tell a personal story remain popular, too, so Oktobre makes way for Aldehyde, where chef Youssef Marzouk recounts his French Tunisian heritage with a menu of inventive dishes. Asian ingredients and techniques also continue to have a major impact on modern French cooking, as seen at the very popular Le Dandelion that replaces Le 6 Paul Bert.

Eater updates this list quarterly to make sure it reflects the ever-changing Paris dining scene. The guide is organized by arrondissement, spiraling out from the 1st.

Alexander Lobrano is a well-known Paris restaurant expert and author of Hungry for Paris, Hungry for France, and his gastronomic coming-of-age story My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris. He writes often for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications, and is a writer-at-large for Airmail News.

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