The Best Places in France

Double is a twelve-seat Italian-Japanese tasting counter in Montmartre where one chef cooks an eight-course prix fixe while half the room watches from the open kitchen. The small plates are built for splitting, but the pastas are not, so bring someone you trust with a fork. It's a date-night kind of spot, the sort of dinner where you book ahead and everyone else's elbow is part of the experience.

This is a grand old French dining room on the Seine, a maze of staircases and little private salons where Hugo and Zola once ate, and where their portraits now watch you hunt for your table. The windows frame the river and the Louvre, a pianist plays, and the prices have drifted well past what a working novelist could manage. Order the steak au poivre, then the namesake layered cake, and let the truffle and caviar pass.

Le 21 is a candlelit, white-tablecloth French dinner on Rue Mazarine, where each table gets its own spotlight, as if the butter needed lighting. Meals open with a parade of amuse-bouches and move through lobster thermidor and rolls soaked in more butter, a nod to the chef's American roots. Antique utensils turn up for the tableware nerds, and desserts run light and fruity, which your liver will appreciate.

This Moroccan restaurant in the Marais keeps its lamps lit so dimly that the jewel-toned Berber chairs are mostly rumor, even at lunch. The guembri on the soundtrack makes a drab Tuesday feel like a birthday, and tagines are the house specialty, nine of them, with flatbread baked to order for the broth. Groups can share mezze and couscous bowls, while the three-course lunch is a calmer, cheaper way to sit in the dark.

Le Mansart is a neighborhood French café with a copper bar, leather stools, and a sidewalk terrace where the locals sit so the tourists can wander off to Amélie's old haunt. Lunch runs on a two-course prix fixe that costs less than most sandwiches in the 9th. By evening it turns into a wine bar where getting a drink involves some light elbowing, and the natural wines are priced like it's a dare.

Le Procope is a sit-down French restaurant under crystal chandeliers, with marble tables, big mirrors, and the faint sense that Benjamin Franklin might still be waiting on his check. Philosophers and revolutionaries once argued here, and now tourists photograph the woodwork between bites. The servers are cheerful, the mains outshine the starters, and the profiteroles come with homemade ice cream.

A warm, wood-lined Vietnamese restaurant in Saint-Germain where the chairs and booths are real furniture, not stools, a detail the reservation-chasing crowd seems to appreciate. The menu leans regional, with dishes like a Cambodian bánh sung that you won't find at the usual Paris addresses. The spring rolls shatter loudly, and the phở tends to sell out by second service in winter, so book early. The Infatuation lists it among Saint-Germain's best.

This is a family-run bistro on Boulevard Raspail that quietly leads a double life: ordinary bistro fare most days, then couscous on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays, with refills of semolina until you wave a white flag. There are no reservations and nobody gets seated until the whole party shows up, so latecomers are on their own. Lines form early, and they come for the lamb shank, not the croque-monsieur.

An open kitchen tucked into the back of Paris's oldest covered market, Les Enfants du Marché is the kind of place where the chef next to you on a stool might have a Michelin star of their own. The team sources from the same small producers as half the serious restaurants in the city, and the Japanese chef turns that market haul into food that has no business being this precise at a market counter.

Les Philosophes is a corner café on the busy Rue Vieille du Temple that serves homemade bistro food all day, at prices that stay out of eye-watering territory. The onion soup is made with chicken stock, which makes it lighter than the usual brooding bowl, and the quiches come in bacon or vegetable. The croissants arrive from a good bakery up the road, with no surcharge for dunking one in your coffee. The terrace is where people linger and watch the street.

Loyo is a casual Ivorian restaurant in Montmartre that looks more like a nightclub than a dining room, which the regulars have clearly decided to ignore. They treat it like their living room and chat with the easygoing staff while portions arrive at a size that suggests nobody here has heard of restraint. Expect coal-roasted chicken under a hill of onion-tomato salad, spicy cod accras, and house-infused rum to start.

Miznon is a fast-casual Israeli counter on rue des Ecouffes where the whole roasted cauliflower is the signature, and vegetarians are treated as guests rather than a problem to be solved. Everything gets stuffed into a warm, fluffy pita, and you dunk what you like in tahini from a self-serve sauce bar. The dining room is bare bones, with a farmer's sink in the back, so expect to eat with your hands. It closes for Shabbat.

Shinjuku Pigalle is a Japanese izakaya-style spot where Kurosawa posters cover the walls and a neon sign over the bar promises sex, money, and power, which is a lot to ask of a place that also sells takoyaki. The menu runs to homestyle plates and street food meant for sharing, so ordering for the table is the move. The bathroom is decorated more freely than the rest, so consider yourself warned.

A tiny counter-service burger joint just off the Saint-Germain drag, doing smashburgers on potato buns that arrive in a state of structural collapse. You'll go through a pile of napkins and call it a fair trade. Cheese is American, the sauce leans pickle and mustard, and the one other option is a portobello that doesn't feel like a consolation prize. Order the housemade ketchup, which tastes faintly of apples, and the fries.

A tiny Sichuan noodle shop in the Marais where you perch on a wooden stool, elbow to elbow with strangers, and wait your turn for the privilege. Spice runs from one to five, and three already has people dabbing their foreheads, which is a lot to ask of a country that treats black pepper as an extreme sport. The dan dan noodles are the signature, and the vegetarian mapo tofu version comes crowned with a golden egg yolk.

Paint tins and old Coke crates serve as stools, which tells you most of what you need to know about this bar's energy before you've ordered a drink. Tucked into a courtyard off a street full of Chinese restaurants in the Marais, Andy Wahloo mixes graffiti, Pierre et Gilles kitsch, and geometric tiles under a French electro-house soundtrack. The crowd dresses accordingly. It's a bar that commits fully to its own absurd logic, and somehow it works.

Tequila ambassador Tomas Estes planted this corner bar at the edge of the Marais with the same DNA as his London outposts: fading photographs, wooden furniture, bric-a-brac on the walls, and a mirrored back-bar doing most of the decorating. The agave list is the reason you're here, and Notre Dame is close enough that you can pretend you're being cultural about it.

Chandeliers and moulded ceilings make Le 47 feel more drawing room than hotel bar, which is more or less the point given the Arc de Triomphe is a short walk away. You enter straight off the street through a corner door, stepping behind the back-bar into a room of fabric armchairs and geometric backlit shelving, with marble and quiet money everywhere. The kind of place where you don't rush your drink because the chair won't let you.

A cocktail bar tucked at the back of the Park Hyatt Vendôme, past a lounge with deep chairs and a working fireplace. Bronze figures appear at the entrance and again throughout the hotel, which turns into a small game if you're paying attention. The bar itself overlooks a courtyard full of sculpture, so the view does some of the heavy lifting. Guests in good suits fill the room by evening, and the whole thing is quieter and less theatrical than you'd expect for the Rue de la Paix.

The bar inside this Philippe Starck-designed hotel in the 20th looks completely unremarkable from the street, then you walk in and find chandeliers made of children's rubber swim rings and curtains printed with naked bodies. Chalk graffiti covers every wall and the ceiling. Staff wear dungarees off one shoulder. It's the kind of maximalist chaos that somehow holds together, and it draws the kind of crowd that enjoys explaining Starck to people who already know.