a couple of nice paris restaurants 🗺

We spent a couple of days in Paris and had some really great food. As always in France… All the places we visited was really good but three of them stood out.

Bistro des Livres

This was our last impression of France over lunch before moving on in different directions. It is a nice small resaturant not far from Île de la Cité on the southern side of the Seine on cozy side street Rue Galande. The theme of the interior is - as the name suggest - books. We had Canard Confit (duck bascially) and a Sauciss Purée (sausage with mashed potatoes). The mash could be upgraded to Aligot which turned out to be a cheese fortified mash. Before that we shared a baked camembert. Definitely a place to return to.

It has two sister restaurants: Bistro des Lettres and Bistro des Poèmes and you can read more about them here. Maybe the locations of the other two suits you better.

Huitrerie Régis

Last time in Paris we visited this tiny oyster place with perhaps 8 tables. We liked it so much so we decided to come back this time as well. It is mostly oysters and some other shellfish on the menu and they have really nice wine and champagne to go with it. We shared a platter of 12 oysters of 3 different kinds. It is a nice number as you get to taste each oyster twice.

Ambassade de Bourgogne

After the great oysters we moved on to this nice winebar dediecated exclusively to wines from Bourgogne. We tried a Givry and another one we already forgot what it was. They were quite similar. We also had some really nice cheese to go with it. I have learned at some point that you are supposed to have white wine with cheeses but here there was on cheese platter for red wines and another one for whites. Makes sense.

Honorable mentions

From the map it is easy to see where our hotel is located. The Grand Hôtel de L’Univers. A really nice hotel with friendly staff that we came back to a second time.

So it turned out that the restaurants we found close by were the best but we also made two excursions to restaurants worthy of mentioning.

We had lunch one day at L’Escargot Montorgueil that we found while searching for escargots places. It has a huge snail on the wall above the restaurant that looks really nice. the food here was really fine but we was more impressed by the environment in the style of 1920s Paris perhaps. We had escargots (obviously - they had a few different kinds to choose from), scallops, canard and tartare. All good.

Also from the 20s La Coupole that was founded 1927 so almost 100 years ago. It brands itself as an american bar which it surely may have been at one time. But now it feels really french. The interior is art deco with some nice art as well. And it is a really grand room buzzing with energy - waiters running around making sure that everything is fine. They seem to be into shellfish so we had an oyster plate to start with and then sea bass and salmon. And a bottle of Sancerre to go with that. The whole place felt a bit touristic but the food was really good so it made up for it. (It was also the only place on our trip where the waiter actually asked for tipping.)

All photos by Katarina Östlund and excluded from the creative commons license below.

written by fredrik at 2026-02-07