Food and Dining in Paris

The selected restaurants have been divided into five categories: Gourmet, Business, Trendy, Budget and Personal Recommendations. The restaurants are listed alphabetically within these different categories, which serve as guidelines rather than absolute definitions of the establishments.

Most restaurants include tax and a 12-15% service charge in their prices. If service is good, guests will often leave an extra €2 tip or the small change from their bill, if they pay in cash. If service is not included, it is customary to leave a 12-15% tip. The prices quoted below are for an average
three-course meal for one person and for a bottle of house wine or cheapest equivalent; they include tax and service charge.

Language in Paris

Parisians would probably argue that they speak French with no accent as opposed, for example, to the strong southern accent of the Midi. Provincials, however, argue to the contrary. The Parisian bourgeois accent (affected) and vocabulary (pretentious) was successfully ridiculed by famed comedians Les Inconnus in the early nineties.

Their catch phrase, ‘ça va? tu vas bien?’ (pronounced with elongated vowels - çar var: tu var bi-ar?) has become part of the national folklore. British words, slotted into French sentences, are particularly prized among this set (’c'est top’), as are hyperbolic adjectives (’c'est absolument magnifique’).

At the other end of the social spectrum, the Parisian suburbs have given rise to the back-to-front (envers) coded language Verlan. While most French people are familiar with the basics - woman (femme) becomes meuf, bloke (mec) becomes cem, cops (flicks) turns into cuf - but as soon as whole phrases are turned back-to-front, only clan members stand a chance of comprehension. Those in doubt should attempt to decipher the original French version of Matthieu Kassowitz’s film La Haine, which depicts the socially excluded inhabitants of the Parisian suburbs.

Tourist Attractions of Paris

Sightseeing Overview

The city center is actually surprisingly compact and the metro system makes getting around fairly easy. A good way for first time arrivals to get an idea of how Paris fits together is to take a cruise on the River Seine or ascend the Eiffel Tower and take in a sweeping view of the city. With so much to see, time management is crucial and many people opt to choose to concentrate on one or two of the arrondissements.

The nostalgic should wander around the mansions of the Marais district, past the Musee Carnavalet, 23 rue de Sevigne,
3rd; Hotel de Sully, 62 rue St-Antoine, 4th, and Place des Vosges, home to the Maison de Victor Hugo. Those interested in modern art and design should opt for the Center Georges Pompidou, place Beaubourg, 4th; Jean Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe, 1 rue des Fosses-St-Bernard, 5th; or the Grande Arche de la Defense with its high-speed glass lift offering a spectacular view of Paris. The Grande Arche, which lies along the same geographical axis as Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysees, was built a century and a half later. This incongruity (the modern city juxtaposed with the old) is all part of the charm of Paris.

Paris overflows with museums, ranging from the vast collections of the Louvre to the small and quirky - such as the Musee des Arts Forains, 53 avenue des-Terroires-de-France, 12th, a shrine to fairground art, with something for everyone scattered through the metropolitan area.

Repeat visitors to Paris usually end up uncovering something new, such as the rejuvenated Bercy district to the east with its green spaces, popular bars and development buzz or Belleville, with its grungy cosmopolitanism and ethnic restaurants. A new attraction is the Paris Plage in summer when the car takes a back seat and the city’s citizens relax by the Seine amidst a world of sand and deckchairs. This is only one urban escape in a city with a sprinkling of parks that offer respite from the bustle.

Passes
The new Museum Pass allows free unlimited access to more than 70 museums and monuments in the Paris region, including the Arc de Triomphe, Musee National du Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and Musee Rodin. The pass is for sale (€25 for one day, €44 for three days and €62 for five days) from tourist offices, participating museums and monuments, the main metro stations and FNAC stores. The pass allows visitors to bypass queues but does not provide free admission to special or temporary exhibitions. For more information, visit www.museums-of-paris.com

Key Attractions:

Tour Eiffel (Eiffel Tower)

The Eiffel Tower literally towers over the Champ de Mars in the smart 7th arrondissement. The top (third) floor offers a sweeping panorama of Paris. From directly underneath there is a fascinating view of the delicate ironwork of Gustave Eiffel, who was commissioned to build the tower for the Exposition Universelle in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution. The Tour Eiffel is also home to a number of restaurants, which offer views of the city and sky high prices to match.

Cathedrale de Notre-Dame (Cathedral of Our Lady)

The stocky Notre-Dame Cathedral, situated on the Ile-de-la-Cite, could not be more different from the filigree Eiffel Tower. Bishop Maurice de Sully began construction on the cathedral in 1163, to outshine the new abbey at St-Denis; work was completed in 1345. The result is a Gothic masterpiece, with three stunning rose windows. Visitors should be prepared to climb the 387 spiral steps to the top of the 75m (246ft) north tower. The views over the River Seine and the city center are well worth the effort. There is also a treasury with various liturgical objects on display. A violent storm in 1999 caused significant damage to the cathedral, though by 2004 much of it had been repaired. The scaffolding, which has blighted the cathedral for as long as anyone can remember, looks set to remain for the foreseeable future.

La Basilique du Sacre-Coeur (The Sacred Heart Basilica)

A long, wide series of steps lead to the snowy-white-domed Sacre-Coeur that dominates the arty district of Montmartre. A mishmash of styles, the Catholic church was built between 1870 and 1919, to fulfil a vow made during the Franco-Prussian war. The interior is splendid with neo-Byzantine mosaics and the domed tower offers a spectacular view over Paris. The crypt contains an interesting collection of religious relics and a slide show on the construction of the Basilica. Below the church, a park tumbles down the hillside in a flurry of benches that make an ideal spot for surveying the city skyline.

Musee National du Louvre (Louvre National Museum)

The Louvre first opened to the public in 1793, following the Revolution, as a showcase for the art treasures of the kings of France. The museum is organized into three wings on four floors - Richelieu (along rue de Rivoli), Sully (around cour Carree) and Denon (along the River Seine). The vast permanent collection includes Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian and East Asian antiquities, French, Spanish, Italian and northern European sculpture and 19th-century objets d’art. The painting collection is the strongest, with French, Italian, Dutch, German, Flemish and Spanish masterpieces from the mid-13th to the mid-19th centuries.

Most famed French works include David’s Coronation of Napoleon, Ingres’ The Turkish Bath, Gericault’s depiction of disaster, The Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s ode to revolution, Liberty Leading the People. The museum’s greatest treasure, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, is in a bullet-proof case. There are plans to move it into its own room, but for now it is on display in room 13, on the first floor of the Denon wing. Excavations have exposed traces of the medieval Louvre, which are on display together with the history of the Louvre under the Cour Carree, in the entresol level in the Sully wing. Buying tickets from the official website in advance saves unnecessary time spent queuing. (more…)

Districts in Paris

Paris has many different districts that are not necessarily reflected in any administrative plan.
Parisian habits make their own map, and sometimes in total ignorance of existing divisions: merchants tend to live near their boutiques, and to sell where the concentration of their clients is the greatest; artisans will live near their ateliers, and artisans of the same type often group together; factory workers will live near their place of labour if the rents are not too dear. Certain quarters have lived through centuries in total ignorance of Paris’ various divisions; an example of this would be its Les Halles market region that was divided at one point into as many as five different crown-imposed arrondissements, and another would be its university region that even today is spread between two arrondissements.

In fact, administrative maps were sometimes drawn in an effort to modify the habits of certain regions of Paris: Haussmann in 1859 drew the dividing line between today’s 19th and 20th arrondissments (each with its own Mayor and administration) down the main street of the rebellious town of Belleville. This of course had few immediate results, and it took over a century for habits to fade for reasons that had more to do with the fading of small-scale production than it had to do with government.

Below are a few quarters that have developed or retained a character of their own, usually identifiable by a grouping of commercial activity and named for neighbourhood landmark.

The Central Islands

Paris’ islands were once many, but over the centuries have been united or joined to the mainland. Today there are but two adjacent islands forming the centre of Paris, the Ile de la Cite and the Ile Saint-Louis.

Ile de la Cite

The westernmost of these two island, Ile de la Cite, is Paris’ heart and origin. Its western end has held a palace since even Roman times, and its eastern end since the same has been consecrated to religion, especially after the construction in the 10th century of the cathedral predecessor to today’s Notre-Dame. The land between the two was, until the 1850’s, largely residential and commercial, but since has been filled by the city’s Prefecture de Police, Palais de Justice, Hotel-Dieu hospital and Tribunal de Commerce. Only the westernmost and north-eastern extremities of the island remain residential today, and the latter preserves some vestiges of its 16th-century canonic houses.

Ile Saint-Louis

Purely residential in nature, this island formerly used for the grazing of market cattle and stocking wood. One of France’s first examples of urban planning, it was mapped and built from end to end during the 17th-century reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIII. A peaceful oasis of calm in the busy Paris centre, this island has but narrow one-way streets, no metro station and no bus halt.

La Rive Droite

Paris’ Rive Droite, formerly a marshland between two arms of the Seine river, remained largely uninhabited until the early 11th century. Once growth began there it soon eclipsed that of both the island and its Rive Gauche combined, and has remained Paris’ densest area ever since.

Chatelet-Les-Halles / Hotel de Ville

“Le Chatelet”, a stronghold/gatehouse guarding the northern end of a bridge from the la Cite island, was the origin of Paris’ first real Rive Droite growth. Where the Les Halles quarter starts and ends is debatable, but for the average Parisian, it englobes the former Les Halles marketplace, today a shopping mall centre for a highly commercial district whose many boutiques are of a “trendy” sort geared to tourism. As the Les Halles is a Metro and RER hub for transport connecting all suburban regions around the capital, the stores closest to the station reflect the rap and hip-hop trends common there. Fast-food is the restaurant staple of this quarter’s most central region, but more traditional fare can be found to its north-west.

One of the region’s most prominent landmarks is the 1976-built Centre Georges Pompidou. Built in a hightly colorised modern style greatly contrasting with its surrounding architecture, it houses a permanent modern-art museum exposition and has rotating expositions that keep to a theme of the post-pop art period. Recently renovated, it also houses the BPI, one of the city’s largest libraries and places of study. The wide square in front is a preferred place for street performers, as its location is ideal for drawing a mix of both tourist and student spectators.

Just to the east of la place du Chatelet lies Paris’ Hotel de Ville (city hall). It stands on the almost exact location of a 12th-century “house of columns” belonging to the city’s “Prevot des Marchands” (a city governor of commerce), then a later version built in 1628 whose shell is still the same today. Just across the street to the north of la rue de Rivoli is the large 1870’s-built BHV (Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville) household shopping centre.

Le Louvre / Palais Royal

The Louvre, once Paris’ second Royal Palace, is today a museum, garden (Tuileries), and, more recently, a shopping mall and Fashion show centre (Le Carrousel du Louvre). The Palais Royal just to its north, at its origin a residence of the Cardinal Richelieu, is a walled garden behind its rue de Rivoli facade, with covered and columned arcades that house boutiques forming what could be considered to be Paris’ first “shopping arcade”. This quarter in general has many 17th and 18th century buildings of large standing, as well as some of Paris’ more grandiose constructions, namely along the avenue de l’Opera, from the Haussmann era. The long perspective of massive buildings that make the northern side of the rue de Rivoli, with their covered and columned arcades, are a result of Paris’ first attempt at reconstruction in a larger scale in the early 1840s, and today house the quarter’s most tourist-oriented shops, boutiques and night-clubs. (more…)

Transport in Paris

Paris is served by two principal airports: Orly Airport, which is south of Paris, and the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in nearby Roissy-en-France, one of the busiest in Europe. A third and much smaller airport, at the town of Beauvais, 70 km (45 mi) to the north of the city, is used by charter and low-cost airlines. Le Bourget airport nowadays only hosts business jets, air trade shows and the aerospace museum.

Paris is a central hub of the national rail network of high-speed (TGV) and normal (Corail) trains, which interconnects with a high-speed regional network, the RER. Six major railway stations, Gare du Nord, Gare Montparnasse, Gare de l’Est, Gare de Lyon, Gare d’Austerlitz, and Gare Saint-Lazare connect this train network to the world famous and highly efficient underground metro system, the Metro network, with 380 stations (more than the London Underground) connected by 221.6km of rails.

There are two tangential tramway lines in the suburbs: Line T1 runs from Saint-Denis to Noisy-le-Sec, line T2 runs from La Defense to Issy. A third line along the southern inner orbital road is currently under construction.

The public transportation networks of the Paris region are coordinated by the Syndicat des transports d’Ile-de-France[10] (STIF), formerly Syndicat des transports parisiens (STP). Members of the syndicate include the RATP, which operates the Parisian and some suburban busses, the Metro, and sections of the RER; the SNCF, which operates the rest of the RER and the suburban train lines; and other operators.

The city is also the hub of France’s motorway network, and is surrounded by an orbital road, the Peripherique, which roughly follows the path of 19th-century fortifications around Paris. On/off ramps of the Peripherique are called ‘Portes’, as they correspond to the former city gates in these fortifications. Most of these ‘Portes’ have parking areas and a metro station, where non-residents can leave cars. Traffic in Paris is notoriously heavy, slow and tiresome.

Streets and Thoroughfares

Paris is well-known for the non-uniformity of its map. This seemingly haphazard arrangement of streets, alleys, squares, boulevards, and avenues is a result of a superimposition of one street plan upon an earlier other.

As with the birth of most agglomerations, a first network of streets was formed by the built-up areas around paths, roadways and places of trade, and a second formed when land surrounding these was divided and sold for building - in the French tradition, a plot of land was usually divided in a series of long and narrow parallel plots extending to both sides of a central lateral strip reserved for a passage across it. Very rarely was a street planned in advance.

A few exceptions aside, Paris’ growth remained true to this schema (for over eight hundred years!) until the mid-19th century city renovations by the Baron Haussmann laid waste to entire quarters to make way for a network of new Boulevards and Avenues that make much of Paris today. Many of the city’s winding and narrow streets still remain, but one must search through the quarters behind the Avenues to find them.

The 1970’s City-limit-hugging circular Peripherique expressway was the first real change since the above, as were narrow “expressways” along the quays of the Seine river and a few inner-city underground passages. It is not the map of the streets that is changing most these days, but the streets themselves: A recent movement towards prioritising Public Transportation systems and eliminating “through-city” traffic has created barricaded bus/taxi/cyclist alleys, narrowing the passages reserved for automobiles and delivery vehicles. Although lightening circulation within the city itself, this tendency is a source of heavy congestion to the Capital’s gateway thoroughfares.

Public Transportation

The horse-drawn “Omnibus” became Paris’ first form of public transportation from 1828. The horse-drawn tramway was next to appear from 1871; as for motorised transport, steam-driven trams appeared from 1880 before being replaced by the electric tramway from 1888. The first attempt at local rail transportation appeared when the “Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture” was open to passengers from 1875, but was outmoded in favour of the metro (the first porte de Vincennes-porte de Maillot line) appearing from the 19th of July 1900. From 1905 the tramway began to disappear in favour of the motor-driven bus, but the “tram” has begun very recently to make a re-apparition around Paris. For a more complete history of Paris’ various forms of public transport, please see Paris Public Transport.

Just to note - the Metro and Tramway, most of the Bus and a few sections of the RER are run by the RATP (Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens), the government-subsidised company whose jurisdiction covers all transport touching the Parisian Capital. The rest of the RER, as well as the Transilien, are run by the SNCF (Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français), the state-owned train company whose rail network covers all of France.

Metro

One hundred years after the creation of its first line, today’s Paris metro has 14 lines (not including two shorter “navette” lines and the Montmartre funicular), and 12 of these penetrate well into the surrounding suburbs (as two, lines 2 and 6, form a circle within Paris). Most lines cross the city diametrically and only the above-mentioned inner-city circular lines serve as a unique lateral interconnection.

RER

The RER (reseau express regional) is a large-calibre metro that runs far into the suburbs of Paris, with fewer stops within the city itself. From its first line A in 1977 it has grown into a network of five lines, A, B, C, D and E: three (A, B, and D) pass through Paris’ largest and most central Châtelet-Les-Halles metro station. Line C occupies the path of former railways along the Seine’s Rive Gauche quays, and the most recently-built line E leaves Paris’ gare Saint-Lazare train station for destinations to Paris’ north-east.

Transilien

These are suburban train lines connecting Paris’ main stations to the suburbs not reached by the RER. The “Transilien” lines are named as a play-on-words for the “transit” of “Franciliens,” inhabitants of the “Ile-de-France” region of which Paris is the capital.

Tram

Paris’ last tramway stopped running in 1937, but it is a mode of transport that has begun to return to the Parisian scenery in recent years. Begun from 1992, there exist two lines (the “T1″ and “T2″) running parallel to the outside limits of the capital. Begun in 2003, and destined for completion in late 2006, a new tram line (the “T3″) will run along a grassy alley running along most of Paris’ Left Bank rim. (more…)

Administration of Paris

The city of Paris is a commune (municipality), divided into twenty municipal arrondissements numbered in a clockwise spiral outward from the Ier arrondissement at the centre. The two parks on the edge of the city proper, Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes, belong to the 16th and 12th arrondissements respectively. Each arrondissement has a directly-elected council (conseil d’arrondissement), which in turn elects the arrondissement mayor. A selection of members from each arrondissement council form the Council of Paris (Conseil de Paris), which elects the mayor of Paris, a position created in 1977.

Paris has yet to completely emerge from the centralised administrative system created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800: the State-appointed prefect of Police is in charge of public order and the Paris Fire Brigade). Although Paris has no municipal police force, it does have its own traffic wardens.

Paris departement

The city of Paris is also departement no. 75, which is a unique status solely introduced for the capital city. The Council of Paris, presided by the Mayor of Paris, is the single council for both entities, meeting either as municipal council (conseil municipal) or as departmental council (conseil general) depending on the issue to be debated.

The State appointed Prefect of Paris, not to be confused with the Prefect of Police, is the representative of the French State in the Paris departement, in charge of the control of legality as in other French departements. The Prefect of Paris is at the same time regional Prefect of Ile-de-France, in charge of some economic development and urban planning issues for the whole region of Ile-de-France.

Number 75 was the official number of the Seine departement, which encompassed the city of Paris and its nearest suburbs. In 1968, Seine was split into four new departements: the city of Paris proper (which retained no. 75) and the departements of Hauts-de-Seine (92), Seine-Saint-Denis (93), and Val-de-Marne (94). The latter departements form a ring around Paris often called petite couronne (”small ring”), as opposed to the grande couronne (”large ring”) of the more distant suburbs.

The Prefecture of Police jurisdiction, formerly the whole Seine departement, is now limited to Paris proper, but for some matters (such as fire protection or rescue operations), it still covers the three departements of the petite couronne. However, the jurisdiction of the Prefecture of Paris, called Prefecture of the Seine until 1968, is now strictly limited to the city of Paris.

Paris as the prefecture of Ile-de-France

Paris is also the prefecture, or capital city, of the Ile-de-France region which was created in 1976 to replace the District of the Paris Region created in 1961. Ile-de-France encompasses eight departements: the Paris departement, the three departements of the petite couronne, and the four larger departements of the grande couronne (Val-d’Oise (95), Yvelines (78), Essonne (91) and Seine-et-Marne (77)).

The Ile-de-France region, the seven departements of petite couronne and grande couronne, and the hundreds of suburban communes around the city of Paris all have separate administrations, resulting in an extremely complex administrative grid. Proposals for a more efficient metropolitan structure to cover the city of Paris and some of the suburbs range from the socialist idea of a loose “metropolitan conference” (conference metropolitaine) to the right-wing idea of a more integrated Grand Paris (”Greater Paris”).