6 Paris Bistros to Try Now

Paris has recovered its scents, and the city is suddenly ravenous. The whiffs of shallots sautéing in butter, bread baking, meat roasting and bouillon simmering that invisibly punctuate any stroll in this food-loving city are back. In fact, the French capital is in the midst of a restaurant boom.

“I think it’s a carpe diem thing,” said Ezéchiel Zérah, the Paris-based editor of two popular French food publications. “After Covid, everyone has a keen appetite and wants a good time.”

Encouraged by pent-up local demand and a dramatic revival of the city’s tourist trade, young chefs and restaurateurs are hanging out their first shingles in Paris, and the most popular idiom is the beloved Parisian bistro. Some of them are pointedly traditional — the delightful Bistrot des Tournelles in the Marais, for example — while others offer a refined contemporary take on bistro cooking, notably the just opened Géosmine in the 11th Arrondissement.

What all of them have in common is chefs with a refreshingly simple culinary style. “No wants tweezer cooking anymore,” said Thibault Sizun, the owner of Janine, an excellent new modern bistro in Les Batignolles, a neighborhood in the 17th Arrondissement.

Here, six restaurants to try in Paris now (prices are approximate).

Bistrot des Tournelles

When you arrive at the long, narrow dining room of the Bistrot des Tournelles for the second seating (from 9:15 p.m. onward; you don’t want to have dinner with an invisible hourglass on your table), odds are you’ll politely be informed that it’ll be another 10 to 15 minutes. It’ll be longer than that, so go across the street for a drink at the Le Vanart cocktail bar instead of milling around on the sidewalk and getting cranky.

This noisy bistro is absolutely worth the wait for the charm of its friendly grace-under-pressure staff, the contagiousness of its high-spirits atmosphere and the deliciousness of a menu that reads like a primer of French bistro cooking. It also looks like a place that the famed French photographer Robert Doisneau might have photographed many years ago, with a marble-topped oak bar just inside the front door, flea-market bric-a-brac on the walls, a stenciled tile floor, bentwood chairs at bare tables and moleskin banquettes.

The porcine richness of the rillettes (potted pork) from the Perche region of Normandy accompanied by glasses of a brilliantly flinty Alsatian Riesling is reason alone to fall in love, and then the sautéed oyster…