The 10 Best Eats in Paris, through the lens of a Vegetarian Studying Abroad.

Culture Editor Evelyn Shepphird reflects on Paris through her amateur palette.

I am a vegetarian. Unfortunatley, I do not have an especially discerning palate. I was a devotée of the Pret subscription my first two years at King’s and drown my meals in imported hot sauce. 

As a francophile on my mother’s side, and a student on the ‘European Studies: French Pathway’ course, I was equipped for my year at Sciences Po Paris from a literary, artistic, musical, fashionable, and historical perspective. Sacrilegiously, I had no expectations for the food. 

And yet, below are ten of my most memorable gastronomic experiences in Paris.

Coffee

1. Partisan
   • August was waning and the Paris air was hot, damp, and new to us fresh-renters of an apartment on the edge of Le Marais. My friend and flatmate Libby and I went first—just the two of us and two iced lattes. It was our regular spot, a stone’s throw from our apartment, with brilliant espresso. It’s not especially Parisian, with its modern interior of black metals, large windows and its uniformly cool baristas that never quite learned our names. 
   • We had no idea Partisan was the epicenter of Paris fashion week when we first became regulars. Libby once claimed that she heard someone, a table over from us, talking about working with Kate Moss. But I think mostly I remember liking it in a quiet, unremarkable way the first time I went—too hot and stressed from the apartment hunt.

1. Saint Pearl
   • Saint Pearl, on Rue des Saints-Pères, does not have the cultural capital nor the brilliant espresso of Partisan, but what it lacked in Fashion Week attendees it made up for in location— on the way from the metro station to the university buildings. A loud, cramped café, with a charming interior, it was a lovely refuge on the first snow of the season. I remember it was late November, the tail end of a vibrant, bronze autumn, and the snow sat heavy and wet where it fell. I tucked inside the café with about a dozen other students, crammed against a table and too hot under my itchy red scarf.
   • For this coffee, I was ten minutes late to my class with a lunatic professor, and I must have spent the whole two hours staring out the window, watching the flurry of snow fall down. Periodically I took sips of the sweet, rich coffee, leaving a red lipstick stain and my hands around the pretty cup.

Dinner

• Kodawari Ramen – Yokochō
  • It was that same day in late November, or at least that same week. My other friend and flatmate, Caitlín and I both had two hours to kill in Saint Germain des Près, and I remember the fluttering of gentle, postcard-pretty snow in the darkening sky and the glow of the golden streetlights during our clumsy, sweater-laden walk to Kodawari Ramen. Caitlín looked like something out of a cartoon in her grin and pink puffer jacket.
  • At 5pm on a Thursday, there was no line. At our table, we unwrapped ourselves from our thick, damp layers and threw them beneath our feet. The restaurant is remarkable for its interior: it is decorated to look like a street in Japan, with ’street vendors’, the chefs, doling out ramen in blue and white bowls. There was one vegetarian option on the menu: something with pumpkin in it. It was warm, and it flushed our faces red, and I was giggling over the chatter. 

1. Le Procope
   • Not a five minute walk away is Le Procope, which boasts of being the oldest café in Paris patronized by the likes of Robespierre, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, and scores of other French notables. It’s a bit kitschy, in that it knows its tourist appeal. The menu is very French, meaning I was relegated to one of two vegetarian options, but the creme a la truffle risotto was satisfactory the several times I went.
   • It became my go-to impressive French restaurant. I ate a charming December meal with my oldest friend and her parents, I took friends there in groups of two, three, and six, and ate in every room. I learned how to open a wine bottle by observing a Le Procope waiter (“Why couldn’t you have Googled it?” Asked my insightful friend. I had no answer.) 
   • The light within the restaurant is a characteristically French gold. The warm food and rich wine left me glowing at the exit. This was by far my most frequented restaurant.
     Le Petit Pharamond
   • Some early spring night, after a long, winding walk, my friend Mia and I happened upon Le Petit Pharamond. France is not well known for ‘street food’, but ‘bouillons’ are their equivalent; a working man’s restaurant consisting of usually simple, cheap food. Pharamond specializes in food from Normandy, and it has not disappointed me or my student friends, likely because the prices are ridiculously low. 
   • My first visit was late, on a Friday. Mia and I queued for a while, then were seated at a four-person next to two girls halfway through their mains. By happenstance, or by inevitability, we fell into a sparkling conversation with them. Conversation about art, music, and student life swirled and eddied around the table, offset prettily by the green-and-yellow paint and many mirrors of the interior. We shared wine, water, bread, dessert (mainly profiteroles) and advice across the table, and accidentally stayed past midnight, after which the staff turned the music loud and plied us with mint liqueur and dance. 
   • What started as a pleasantly wine-warmed evening thus became revelry. I returned several times to Le Petit Pharamond. 

Boulangerie

1. Mamiche
   • Mamiche has been unmissable to me for nearly as long as I’ve been going to Paris. It’s adorable, cramped but filled with light, nipping at the heels—hills—of Montmartre. I never had a pain au chocolate there that wasn’t worth the forty minute walk up hill and long queue.
   •  I bought the best pain au chocolate of my life at Mamiche, on little sleep and the comedown from an exam. A kind french girl had invited me to hers after said exam, and her mother had cooked us a light, fresh, and toothsome lunch in their beautiful apartment—herringbone floors, and filled to bursting with books and a a slinking black cat. 
   • I left her apartment contented, and decided to buy a viennoiserie. Warm and golden and flaking in its paper bag, it kept me company on my wandering walk back home. 
2. Stöher
   • Stoher was a late find, but a lovely one. Blue and mirrored on the inside, delicate, little, and rich desserts stand at attention in their glass cases. It’s apparently the oldest patisserie in Paris—founded in 1730–and my last month in Paris was dotted three separate times with a (terribly timed) early morning St. Honoré. 
   • I like their ‘baguette tradition’ the best. I split one with a friend from home once—we made sandwiches and took them to a little riverside where we could swim—the water was silky and cool, the air gentle and warm, and the sandwiches were made excellent by the bread. 

Drinks

1. La Mutinerie
   • Insofar as it we had a ‘local’, it was La Mutinere. Charmingly vulger and constantly threatening to close, the lesbian bar wasn’t a five minute walk from my apartment. The floors were sticky, and the walls were covered with stickers and, inexplicably, pink cheetah print. People would crowd around red metal tables, or else slink around outside, talking rapidly and asking often for cigarettes, their lighters flickering faster and glowing brighter on damp, dark evenings.  We went a million times. To dance, sometimes. More often to talk.
   • On Caitlín’s last day of class, her and I spent four hours sat at one of the red tables outside, watching the sun turn gold then fade on the side of the building. The wine (or—the wine I didn’t spill all over the pavement—) was cheap and pleasantly dry. 
2. Hotel Particulier
   • I knew Hôtel Particulier before moving to Paris, through a loose but warm acquaintance with the DJ. It’s the bar of a lovely little hotel in Montmartre, the entrance hidden by a garden behind great big gate. 
   • I once went on a chilly night in spring with Libby and her boyfriend, just for something to do. We sat next to a heat lamp in the garden for a while as we waited for a table, and the whole while, the boyfriend was trying to convince an American couple that the very real chicken in the garden was an animatronic. Depressingly, this worked for a while. The drinks themselves are nice—crisp and lovely—and it was another perfect, overpriced venue for a conversation. 
   • It’s worth it for the plaque in the toilet helpfully informing occupants “Brad Pitt Pissed Here” and for the postage-stamp-sized view of the Eiffel tower glittering that we got as we exited on the hour and looked left down the garden. 

1. Le Caveau de la Huchette
   • Iconic—appearing, like my hometown, in La La Land—and completely full of international students and tourists, La Caveau de la Huchette used to be a wine cellar. It also inspired ‘the Cavern’ in Liverpool, where the Beatles regularly performed early in their careers. 
   • The Caveau and I got off on the wrong foot. I choked on the heat and sweat that inevitably saturates air of the cellar, and I emerged coughing and uncomfortably flushed. 
   • I tried again with a group of people I love dearly—flatmates and visiting friends and the daughter-of-a-friend of my fathers. I understood it then—the place was glowing, the music was lovely—sort of skiffle—and my friends were hilarious. The wine was cheap enough, and the crowd was game enough to humor us in all our little social dares—pretending to be related to random Canadian tourists, or pretending to recognize someone from a long-ago cruise. We danced in bops and twirls, and this time, it was music, not the hot breath of strangers, which heavied the air. 
   • The digestif to this perfect evening was French McDonalds sat on the benches outside the Notre Dame (glowing silver against the velvet dark night,) with two people I love dearly. It was an evening I want to wrap carefully in my rememberance and keep forever. 

Again, I am not a foodie. I will inevitably forget the tastes and textures of Paris, though I hope the film reel of memory will unfold these perfect and golden moments for me, again and again. Full of friends, and interesting ambiances, and laughter.