Paris’s Local-Leaning Restaurants

A regional initiative to purpose labels indicating local-leaning restaurants is a step in the right direction for designating quality ingredients in the city’s kitchens, but as of yet no compulsory certification has been proposed on a national level. It therefore falls to the consumer to deduce which Paris restaurants will live up to the standards of hungry locavores.

Luckily, there are several frequently updated online guides aimed at pointing Parisians in the right direction. The trustworthy French site Le Fooding is a guide that attempts to take the stuffiness out of French food writing. Restaurants of all types are reviewed here, with frequent profiles of chefs and interviews with famous French personalities about their favorite restaurants and bonnes adresses. For anglophones, the culinary touchstone when it comes to deciding where to dine is undoubtedly Paris by Mouth. Here you will find reviews and articles written by well-loved Paris food writers (including founders Meg Zimbeck and Alexander Lobrano, and guest writers such as Clotilde Dusoulier) who write up recent openings and add them to the site’s exhaustive list of well-loved Paris restaurants. Nods are given in the review notes to restaurants that embrace market-based cooking, “prestige ingredients,” vegetarian options, and natural wines.