🇫🇷 France
Paris
Eat east, shoot central.
Paris runs on two maps that barely overlap: the food is east, out through the 10th, 11th, 12th and 20th, and the photographs are central. Plan the day around the bakery and let the monuments happen on the walk between.
Taste
🍜 Top 5 Eats
Boulangerie Utopie (11th)
The black sesame baguette is the one everyone photographs, charcoal-dark and studded through, and the sesame runs across the whole range down to the eclairs. Weekend specials change constantly, so ask what came out this morning instead of arriving with a list. It is a working neighbourhood bakery on a scruffy stretch of rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud rather than a boutique, and the queue moves faster than the fame suggests.
Le Baratin (20th)
This is where Paris chefs eat on their night off. Raquel Carena has run the kitchen on the Belleville hillside since 1987, self-taught, doing bistronomie before anyone had a name for it, and the chalkboard turns over constantly: offal, whole fish, sweet-sour and tart notes that keep landing slightly off where you expect. Turn up without a fixed order. Philippe Pinoteau's wine list is the other half of the meal, and the brusque service comes with it.
Chez Aline (11th)
A former horse butcher's on rue de la Roquette, vintage signage and tiling still in place, now arguing that jambon-beurre is a serious dish and not a default. Sandwiches are built to order on baguette: Prince de Paris ham is the classic, with raw-milk cheeses and chorizo if you want to fight the classic. Tiny, weekday lunch trade, and the queue is mostly people due back at a desk.
Substance Cafe (2nd)
Five seats, a roastery at the back, and a list of things you cannot have: no takeaway cups, no sugar, no pastries, no music. The rules are the product. You sit at the counter, you taste, you talk to whoever poured it, which is why the city's coffee professionals send other coffee professionals here. Not the place for a caffeine top-up between sights, and it will not pretend otherwise.
Pho Tai (13th)
The 13th's Chinatown grew out of post-1975 Vietnamese resettlement, and this family canteen is the benchmark the city's food crowd measures every other bowl against. M. and Mme Te run it, the room is very small, so go early or take the queue as read. Order the pho, then do what the regulars do and add banh cuon and the crispy chicken with fresh ginger.
Do
🎟️ Top 5 Local Experiences
Marché d'Aligre, finished with oysters at Le Baron Rouge (12th)
Work the open-air stalls on rue d'Aligre first, then the covered Beauvau hall for cheese, fish, charcuterie and North African spice and harissa; the tell is simple, the stall with the longest queue of older women is the best value in the building. There is a flea market on the same square if you want to browse other people's cutlery. Then it is 200m to Le Baron Rouge for barrel wine by the glass or a bottle refilled, and roughly mid-September to April a vendor drives up from the Atlantic and shucks oysters on the pavement at weekend mornings, which is how you end up at an upturned barrel with your shopping around your ankles. Bring cash.
The rue des Martyrs food crawl (9th)
Over two hundred shops on one street running uphill toward Montmartre: butchers, produce, fromageries, a jam and honey shop, caramels, choux, Neapolitan pizza by the time you reach the top. Build the picnic as you climb. The street is partly pedestrianised at weekends, which is when to do it and also why every cheese counter has a queue, so get there before the counters get deep. Sundays add a flea market to the haul.
Marché de Belleville (20th)
The cheapest and most multilingual market in Paris, and the least charming, which is the point: fruit and veg in bulk well under other Paris markets, plus olives, dates, chapatis, spices and bolts of fabric. Arabic, Chinese and French inside the same twenty metres of boulevard. People shop here because it is cheap, not because it photographs well. It only runs a couple of mornings a week, so check the day before you trek over, then buy lunch and carry it up into Parc de Belleville.
A car-free Sunday on the Canal Saint-Martin (10th)
The quarter closes to cars every Sunday and public holiday under the Paris Respire scheme, and the whole 10th exhales. Assemble the picnic before you commit to a spot: pain des amis from Du Pain et des Idées on rue Yves Toudic if the shutters are up, a flat thick-crusted loaf with a real smoky note, and any good boulangerie on the walk over if they are not; coffee from Ten Belles; cheese and a bottle from a caviste. Then take the quais, feet pointed at the water, and let the afternoon go.
An Oberkampf natural-wine apéritif crawl (11th)
The classic visitor error is arriving at nine expecting dinner. Apéritif in the 11th is a standing, sociable, pre-dinner thing, so start early, around half six, and let it drift: La Buvette is tiny and Camille Fourmont runs it, Septime La Cave is a bottle shop by day and standing room by night, Aux Deux Amis on Oberkampf is the loud crowded small-plates version, Cave du Paul Bert has the vintage copper bar and the small-producer bottles. Order the small plates, they are not an afterthought. Treat the whole thing as a neighbourhood ritual rather than a fixed route, because these rooms change their evenings without telling anybody.
Frame
📸 Top 5 Places for Photos
All 5 spots on one map
- Rue Montorgueil (2nd) · facing N
- Place d'Aligre and the Marché Beauvau arch (12th)
- Rue des Martyrs (9th) · facing N
- Belvédère Willy Ronis, Parc de Belleville (20th) · facing W
- Square Rapp (7th) · facing W
Loads an interactive map from OpenFreeMap. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Rue Montorgueil (2nd)
Stand mid-street at the rue Marie Stuart junction and shoot north up the pedestrianised stretch: awnings, produce crates, terraces stacking on both sides. Then take the facade of Stohrer, the oldest surviving patisserie in Paris, straight on and slightly low so the gold and glass fills the frame. Early on a weekday for delivery crates and low raking light, Saturday late morning if you want the crowd instead; after eleven the terraces close the sightline and it is done. The restaurants here coast on footfall, so photograph the shops, buy pastry, eat elsewhere.
Open in Maps Approximate, within a blockFacing N: north up the pedestrianised stretch from the rue Marie Stuart junction, awnings and produce crates stacking on both sides
Place d'Aligre and the Marché Beauvau arch (12th)
Two frames from one spot. Stand where the open-air stalls meet the entrance arch of the covered hall and shoot in, letting the exposure fall from bright street to shaded interior, then turn and shoot back out so the shoppers silhouette against the arch. Weekend mid-morning, Sunday fullest, and in oyster season the Baron Rouge pavement scene is worth the last frames on the card. This is the one place in Paris where photographing people is unremarkable, but ask before a close-up of a stallholder, and do not dawdle, because the market winds down early.
Open in Maps Approximate, within a blockinto the covered hall for the drop from bright street to shade, then back out so the shoppers silhouette against the arch
Rue des Martyrs (9th)
The gradient is the whole trick. Stand on the lower to middle stretch, shoot due north straight up the street, and the white dome of Sacré-Coeur sits at the top of the frame with butcher awnings and shop signage compressing underneath it. A longer lens makes the basilica read much bigger; wide-angle kills the shot outright. Weekend morning, and overcast beats hard sun here, because bright light blows the dome to white.
Open in Maps Approximate, within a blockFacing N: due north straight up the street, where the gradient sets the dome of Sacré-Coeur at the top of the frame
Belvédère Willy Ronis, Parc de Belleville (20th)
The upper terrace at the top of the park, looking west and south-west, puts the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur in one frame, which no other free viewpoint in Paris manages. An hour before sunset for the gold, early morning if you want the terrace empty, never midday. Bring the picnic up from the market below, that is what the terrace is for, and note the park does close at night with gate hours that shift by season.
Open in Maps Exact vantage pointFacing W: west across the city, the one free viewpoint that gets the Eiffel Tower and Sacré-Coeur into a single frame
Square Rapp (7th)
A short dead-end street off Avenue Rapp: stand at the closed end, look back out, and the Art Nouveau buildings frame the Eiffel Tower straight down the corridor. Low, centred on the street axis, portrait orientation, and midday overhead light actually works here because it lifts the detail in the stonework. People live on this street, so keep it quick and quiet. It is the answer to the Trocadéro scrum, and on the same principle, skip Rue Crémieux altogether: residents there have been campaigning for gates since 2019 and photographing the photographers back.
Open in Maps Exact vantage pointFacing W: west down the street axis from the closed end, with the Art Nouveau stonework framing the tower
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