The Best Places to Eat and Do in Paris

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The Goncourt Prize jury has handed down its verdict in this room every year for over a century, which makes Drouant one of the more consequential dining rooms in French letters. It's a plush, old-school brasserie on place Gaillon, the kind where vol-au-vent and sole meunière feel completely correct. The chef trained under Yannick Alléno, and the wine cellar runs to nearly 2,000 bottles, with a generous pour-by-the-glass selection.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The open kitchen anchors a spare, elegant dining room near Montparnasse, white tablecloths against pale wood, nothing fussy. Two veterans of L'Arpège run the room together, one cooking, one hosting, and the food follows the same logic as the decor: seasonal, precise, and without a wasted move. It's a tasting menu restaurant that earns its quiet confidence through restraint rather than spectacle.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Herringbone floors, green velvet, and striped wallpaper in a hotel dining room a block from the Champs-Élysées, priced like the arrondissement forgot to check its own zip code. Edith is a traditional French restaurant doing asparagus mimosa and roast chicken with the kind of quiet confidence that doesn't need to announce itself. Short menu at lunch, a little more room to roam at dinner, and service that actually moves.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A former garage on Avenue Parmentier, now a clean-lined loft with counter seats and an open kitchen, where every bottle on the wine list comes from Alsace. This small restaurant rethinks the region without the rustic props: sauerkraut turns up in crispy cromesquis or alongside house-made boudin blanc, and the whole menu exists to show off those wines. A lawyer opened it, which explains a certain precision to how the argument is laid out.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Parked across from Les Deux Magots on Saint-Germain, this ground-floor Italian brasserie runs at a pace that feels more Milan than Paris, which the regulars seem to appreciate. The team moves fast, the menu holds every canonical Italian classic you'd want, and the kitchen executes them without flourish or apology. Good linguine alle vongole, proper tiramisu, the kind of place where the food does exactly what it promises.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name unpacks as water, rice, and men, which tells you something about how seriously this Franco-Japanese restaurant takes its sake list before you've even sat down. It shares a building with the Houses of Sake and Whisky, and the counter overlooks an open kitchen where the chef works a menu that drifts between Paris and Osaka without settling for either. The desserts alone attract their own quiet following.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The menu is a chalkboard, the room is no-frills, and the Cantonese cooking is the whole point. This small dinner-only spot in the 16th sources Cotentin blue lobster and line-caught sea bass for dishes that taste like someone actually cares where things come from. The dim sum are made with real care. At lunch, the team runs a fusion street food operation at a nearby address, but evenings here are a different, quieter proposition.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Red oak panelling and 1960s vintage furniture set the room at this French-Italian bistro in the 9th, where the menu is short, seasonal, and quietly confident. The kitchen layers Italian instincts onto French technique, with house-made pasta and produce sourced with obvious care. It reads like a neighborhood place until the food arrives and suggests someone back there takes this rather seriously.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Burnt leeks with lardo and vermouth dressing is the kind of dish that sounds like it shouldn't work until it does. This farm-to-table bistro on the Mouffetard sits in a Scandinavian-leaning room with a warm, buzzy feel that the street itself seems to encourage. The menu leans seasonal and quietly plant-forward, though evenings make room for a sharing tomahawk. Wines are sensibly priced, which on this street passes for a small miracle.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Coffered ceiling, velvet seats, and painted mouldings set a quietly formal tone in this modern French restaurant near Les Invalides. The chef draws on Breton and Grenoble roots, so squab and lobster share a plate, and Chartreuse turns up somewhere in most menus. Cooking is precise without being cold. The lunch menu keeps things accessible for a room that could easily charge more.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A glazed facade beside the 12th arrondissement's town hall marks this quietly confident modern restaurant, where the chef runs a single set menu that shifts with the seasons and leans into Middle Eastern flavors and seafood. The cooking is precise and a little unexpected, the kind of food that makes you put down your phone. Service keeps up without making you feel managed.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Stone walls and white beams on one of Paris's most chaotic tourist streets, which makes the calm inside feel earned. Hestia is a barbecue restaurant where the seasonal menu revolves around the grill, and meat gets carved tableside once it's done. The chef cooks without ceremony, letting the fire do the talking. The floor runs with quiet competence to match. Book ahead; the room is small and the word is out.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Open kitchens, mason jars, and pop art on the walls set the mood at this contemporary bistro on rue Monge, just across from the old Roman amphitheatre. The chef behind Tomy & Co runs this one too, and the menu moves confidently between French and Japanese influences without making a fuss of it. Fried gnocchi changes with the seasons and tends to be the thing people talk about on the way out.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Three friends who collectively cooked at Le Meurice and Plaza Athénée named the restaurant after themselves, which is either charming or extremely on-brand for Paris. The compact dining room near Marché d'Aligre has exposed stone, jars of fermented vegetables on the shelves, and an open kitchen running vegetable-forward seasonal food that leans light and precise. A modern bistro that takes its produce seriously without taking itself too seriously.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Exposed stone walls and visible cables run the length of this narrow Paris dining room, where a Korean chef cooks solo behind an open pass, turning out a mystery-menu of modern French food with quiet Asian detours. There's no choosing: the chef decides, and the result tends toward the surprising. A creative restaurant for people comfortable handing over control, which, in the 10th, is most of them.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Straw lampshades, bamboo chairs, and seagrass underfoot set a beach-hut tone that somehow works on a Paris boulevard. This Mediterranean restaurant leans hard into Marseille, with fragrant, sun-drenched cooking, panisses, stuffed vegetables, and braised artichokes, loosening up at lunch on the terrace and pulling itself together at dinner for a set menu. The 20th arrondissement is happy to have it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A midnight-blue façade on a quiet residential street in the 16th hides this intimate modern Japanese restaurant, where the tableware, heavy meat knives and all, gets as much attention as the plate. The chef weaves Japanese ingredients into a broadly French framework: miso saikyo with foie gras, yuzu in a white wine sauce. One set menu in the evening keeps things focused, with a little more flexibility at lunch.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A teppanyaki counter in Issy where the flames are part of the show, so sitting back from the grill would be a genuine waste. The chef works through premium fish and meat with the kind of quiet precision that doesn't need a dramatic finish to make its point. The room leans into traditional Japanese wood tones, keeping things calm while the cooking does the opposite.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Counter seating wraps a central open kitchen where everything is prepared in full view, the whole room held in deliberate near-darkness. This is Joël Robuchon's famous counter-dining format, a French riff on the Japanese sushi bar, where the menu breaks into small plates and portions so you can graze or go deep. The mashed potatoes alone have their own cult following, which tells you roughly what kind of restaurant this is.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The 1940s wooden bar and panelled walls make L'Auberge des Crus feel like a Paris bistro that never got the memo about reinventing itself, and that's the whole point. The kitchen leans into the classics, pâté en croûte, snails, steak tartare, chateaubriand, tarte Tatin, executed with a confidence that doesn't need to announce itself. A serious wine cellar backs it all up, with a good spread by the glass at prices that don't sting.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Hardwood floors, exposed stone walls, and a beamed ceiling set the tone at this small French restaurant near the Seine in the 5th. The kitchen works squarely in the classical tradition, running glazed sweetbreads with fragrant jus alongside clean, unfussy desserts. In summer, tables spill onto the terrace, and the room fills with the kind of unhurried lunch that Paris does better than anywhere will admit.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The butter is house-made. So are the vinegars, the pickles, and most everything else, because the chef-owner runs a farm in Haute-Loire and trucks the harvest to Paris once a week. La Borie is a set-menu restaurant where the kitchen builds surprise menus around whatever arrived, so the seasons do the deciding. Dishes tend toward quiet simplicity rather than architectural drama, which takes more confidence than it looks.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A corner spot in the 9th with an open kitchen that the chef, who has cooked across nine countries, is happy to talk you through. The format is a surprise tasting menu in three, five, or seven courses, each built from a different corner of the world, so the longer you go, the further you travel. Half-glass wine pairings keep things sensible. The room is small and sleek, and the staff move like they've done this before.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Jean-François Piège took over this old-school Parisian institution near Les Halles and leaned hard into cuisine bourgeoise, the 19th-century tradition of simple, comforting, ingredient-forward cooking. Think veal blanquette, frogs' legs, escargot, dishes your grandmother would have ordered if she were Parisian and knew what she was doing. The room has the worn charm of a place that has never needed to reinvent itself, and the prices are surprisingly civil for that postcode.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Fine dining inside a luxury hotel in Versailles, where plush carpet, painted mouldings, and porcelain-set tables lean into the grandeur of the address without apology. The kitchen leans vegetable-forward, with seasonal produce doing most of the heavy lifting and the meat and fish appearing as optional supporting cast, which is a rarer philosophy than it sounds this close to a royal palace.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The kitchen sits right at the entrance, so the smell hits you before the host does. This relaxed modern bistro in Montreuil fills a big, mismatched room of vintage furniture, old floorboards, and a fireplace, with an old piano lurking next door. Share plates or a five-course evening menu keep things convivial. The wine list runs past 1,300 bottles, with a sommelier who seems personally invested in every single one of them.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

On the seventh floor of La Samaritaine, this Milan-born seafood restaurant brings its signature Italian coastal cooking to a room where the Seine view does half the work. Refined crudos and pasta built around sea urchin and line-caught fish anchor a menu that takes the ocean seriously. The crowd arrives dressed for the occasion, which at Cheval Blanc means arriving dressed.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

Fire is the organizing principle at this modern bistro on the Left Bank, where the chef built the whole menu around flames and hot coals. The cooking pulls French produce into contact with spices gathered on extensive travels, and the results are vivid and a little restless in the best sense. The sommelier co-founded the place, so the wine list gets real attention. Small, personal, and exactly as lively as the name suggests.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A long counter runs the room at this snug bistro in the 17th, where the menu rotates between Alsace in the colder months and Provence when the weather turns. The chef trained under some serious names in both regions, and the pâté en croûte and house-made boudin taste like proof of that. Traditional French cooking done without apology, in a room where the regulars seem to have memorized the entire thing.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Tucked behind Saint-Sulpice on a quiet Left Bank street, this old bougnat turned neighborhood bistro has the tiled floors and scuffed banquettes to prove it. The cooking is classic Paris without the tourist tax: black pudding terrine, roast chicken with a proper pepper sauce, a mille-feuille that earns its place. Regulars who never bother with the menu fill the room by eight, so book ahead unless you enjoy standing on cobblestones.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The address is rue du Pôle-Nord, which sets up the restaurant's name rather neatly. Le Boréal is a snug Parisian bistro in the 18th with an open kitchen, brass counter, and Thonet chairs, the kind of room that looks like it's always been there. The cooking is contemporary, with an inventive streak that nudges seasonal French ingredients somewhere unexpected. Mushroom chawanmushi on a Paris bistro menu is a quiet statement of intent.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A narrow Left Bank street, an old abbey converted next door, and a chef quietly doing something interesting inside a room that's been here forever. This is a proper sit-down dinner spot, creative French with a personal slant: fermentation and smoke run through the menu alongside childhood-memory riffs, like an onion soup turbocharged with foie gras and Appenzeller. The cooking has range without announcing it, which is its own kind of confidence.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A caviar family's third venture lands in the 9th as a chic bistro with an open kitchen and a relaxed, good-time mood. The cooking is precise and modern, leaning predictably but pleasurably on the house caviar, though the kitchen earns its keep on dishes that don't. The seaweed threads running through dessert are the kind of move that sounds strange until it doesn't. Lunch draws a crowd who know the set menu is quietly very good value.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Yves Camdeborde made this corner of the sixth arrondissement famous, and the kitchen now runs under Bruno Doucet, who keeps the bistronomic faith, noon to eleven without a break. It's a classic Paris bistro, tight tables, a heated terrace over Carrefour de l'Odéon, and a menu that moves between country comfort and whatever the market sent over. No reservations, so the queue is part of the deal.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Exposed stone walls and an open kitchen set the tone in this snug Abbesses bistro, tucked just off rue Lepic. The chef came up through Yves Camdeborde's school, and it shows: a short, market-driven menu that changes often enough to keep regulars guessing. The food is contemporary without performing about it, and the prices are modest enough that a second glass feels like a reasonable idea.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Xavier Pincemin won the French Top Chef competition and came straight home to Versailles to open this modern restaurant on the boulevard du Roi. The kitchen leans on local producers and pulls off the kind of precise, layered cooking you'd expect from a competition winner, with fish courses built around restrained broths and meat dishes anchored by deep, slow-reduced sauces. The room draws a faithful local crowd alongside visitors who've made the detour on purpose.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The period frescoes on the walls feel slightly at odds with the cooking, which is sharp, French-based, and quietly inflected with Southeast Asian heat. This Oberkampf bistro is run by two Filipino-born sisters, one of whom trained under Alain Passard and Pascal Barbot before bringing that pedigree somewhere more relaxed. The sauces are the thing: complex, precise, and never quite what you expect. Book ahead or simply don't go.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
2. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The wine list alone tells you where this modern restaurant stands: 150 small producers, all natural, all chosen by people who use the word "living" to describe a bottle and mean it. The room is raw wood, stone, and glass that catches the light, fitting for a team built around small-scale farmers and day-boat fishermen. The cooking is seasonal and instinctive, the kind that follows what arrived that morning rather than a fixed script.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A two-person kitchen on a quiet street off Avenue des Gobelins, run by Ferrandi graduates cooking lunch and dinner menus that don't overlap in spirit or price. Midday brings unfussy French classics at the kind of prices that make you check the bill twice. Come evening, the mood shifts to small sharing plates with more ambition. Pale wood, an open counter, and maybe ten tables total, so book ahead or plan to charm your way in.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant