8 Delicious Wine and Food Tours in Paris
Whether it is through seeking out local restaurants or taking cooking classes, I think it’s become abundantly clear that food is a large part of what I enjoy most about travel. No matter how many times we visit a place, I try to put at least one food or wine experience on our itinerary. In the five years, we’ve spent about six months in France. I have worked really hard to find wine and food tours in Paris (and beyond) to expand our palates when it comes to French food and wine. These experiences have made us more adventurous. It’s helped us identify some of our favorite foods in Paris and helped us find better restaurants in Paris, too.
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Food Tours in Paris by Neighborhood
Marais Food Tour in Paris
If you are looking for an introduction to French food, I recommend starting with this Marais food tour. This tour starts at the Marché des Enfants Rouges with a cheese and wine tasting. This small market is a great place to come back to for an easy meal, too. Not only is there plenty of fresh food, but there are several small restaurants in the market that smell amazing.
After tasting some savory cheeses, we headed out to a few shops throughout the 3rd arrondissement for a few sweet treats. We tried everything from filled choux pastries, macarons, and chocolates. (Don’t be afraid to try unique flavor combinations. This is the perfect, low-stress time time to do it!) The other thing I really enjoyed about this food tour is that we visited a few stores that made items that we could bring home. This meant we could enjoy tastes of France all year. (These tasty souvenirs got us through 2020 when we couldn’t travel!) Our tour wrapped up with falafel at one of Paris’s famous falafel stands, as well as a stop at a Corsican restaurant where we tried a couple of traditional Corsican dishes.
There is no shortage of food to try on this tour. It offers a good balance of sweet and savory foods to try. It’s also extremely filling. You’ll want to skip breakfast and plan for a light dinner when you schedule this.
Book a food tour of the Marais in Paris
Montmartre Food Tour
If you are interested in learning more about Montmartre, this food tour does a great job of introducing you to the local restaurants in 18th arrondissement. While I think the Marais food tour balances fresh foods and foods you can take home, this food tour of Montmartre includes plenty of local restaurants and cafes. This tour is more focused on pastries than the Marais food tour is. However, you’ll still have the opportunity to try a few savory treats, French cheeses, and some wine as well.
This tour also provides a lot of context and history of the area around Montmartre. It starts near the Moulin Rouge, visits Sacre Coeur, and ends at the Place du Tertre. The views of Paris from this tour are absolutely outstanding.
If you want to level up your Montmartre tour, I recommend taking this food tour with a Parisian chef.
Book a food tour of the Montmartre in Paris
French Wine and Cheese Tastings
Best Wine and Cheese Tasting in Paris
Even after spending months in France, I still consider myself to be a novice to French wines. Yes, we’ve done wine tastings in Alsace, spent several days in Bordeaux, and bring wines home regularly. However, we are always still learning about other regions. As a result, I LOVE this wine tasting in Paris with Erwan. I love it so much that we book this wine class in Paris almost every time we visit. Erwan has a small wine bar in the 15th arrondissement (behind the Eiffel Tower and the Champs de Mars). He runs an incredibly thoughtful and curated wine tasting. It’s set up as a small group tasting which facilities great conversation. We do it almost every time we’re in Paris.
We learned how the French refer to wines by region, appellation, and then the grape. (This is why French wine lists seemed so daunting. We just didn’t know how to read it.) Once we realized that, everything made so much more sense in the restaurants. We tried five different French wines and five different cheeses from various regions of France. I was surprised to learn that most regions produce both red and white wines, and we tried both. All the wines are available for purchase and are very reasonably priced. We even tried a Saint Emilion Grand Cru that was only 22 euro! (Erwan is the reason we ended up staying near Saint Emilion, too!)
Erwan provides a list of the wines and cheeses that tried, which proved very useful at the frommagerie. We always purchase a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. (He also ships to the US and offers a wine club.)
Every time we’ve booked a wine tasting with him, we’ve learned more.
Wine Therapy Paris Wine Bar
This is probably one of my favorite finds in 2024. I had Wine Therapy on my list of places to visit for at least three years before we finally meandered over there one evening. This wine bar in the 9th arrondissement of Paris is the perfect way to spend an evening enjoying French wine and cheese. Laurent is the perfect companion, whether you know a lot or a little about wine. When we arrived, he spent a bit of time trying to understand our preferences. What wines or regions did we like or dislike? What had we tried? Having spent 6 weeks traveling around France, we gave him free reign to help us find a couple glasses for the evening.
He offers a blind tasting of three wines based on your preferences, and then you choose a glass. We LOVED this approach. If you’re still learning French wine, it can be daunting to navigate the wine list. You may know a region, but appellations can be tricky. Sometimes we over-gravitate to what we know and miss out on some truly amazing things. Trusting Laurent can open more wines up to you. Yes, he has the big names and the famous wines. However, he also has a lot of smaller producers and regions. I recommend giving him your preferences and leaving the rest up to him.
We ordered the cheese plate with it, which was served with a fresh baguette. Everything was fresh and truly delicious. We went back in November with my sister, and it did not disappoint. I expect that we’ll spend a least one evening at Wine Therapy on all our future trips to Paris. We enjoyed Laurent’s knowledge and expertise so much.
We would not have had the confidence to visit Wine Therapy had it not been for everything we learned from Erwan’s wine and cheese tasting classes though. Laurent is just as engaging as Erwan, but it’s just different when you’re trying to do a blind wine tasting in Paris without any prior wine knowledge. (I’m much better at blind wine tastings in Italy!)
Cheese Tasting in Paris
If you love cheese – or you want to learn more about French cheese, I cannot recommend booking this cheese tasting in Paris with Alex. No one loves cheese more than Alex. While this is a wine and cheese tasting, it’s clear that Alex’s passion is to help you better appreciate French cheeses. The wine is secondary to this tasting.
This cheese tasting is in a small restaurant in the Latin Quarter, which is closed during the tasting. Alex leads you through how cheeses are made, teaches you how to change the flavor profile of certain cheeses, and provides more insight into the various techniques of how cheese is made. I’m not a huge cheese person, but Alex introduced me to butter from the Normandy region of France. Butter is not butter. I had no idea. I was never a bread and butter person until I tried Normandy butter. Our next trip to Mont Saint Michel will include Saint Malo for Brittany butter.
What I love most about this cheese experience is how fiercely passionate Alex is about cheese. He is wildly passionate. I’ve never met anyone who feels as strongly about cheese as Alex does. He genuinely wants to improve your culinary experience in Paris and is open for questions and happy to make recommendations. While he did have the wines and cheese available for purchase, it felt secondary to the knowledge he was sharing with us.
I am a French cheese novice – but I loved how Alex had us try cheese with fruits, olive oil, nuts, spices, and more to better understand the flavor profiles. Tom is quite a bit more adventurous with cheeses and he definitely loved this cheese tasting experience in Paris.
Cooking Classes in Paris
Baguette and Croissant Baking Class in Paris
I know what I’m about to say is blasphemous because one of my friends makes fun of me all the time for this revelation. I didn’t even know I liked croissants until we took a baking class in Paris. (I’ve been a huge fan of the baguette since I studied abroad though.)
This baguette and croissant class in Paris takes place in a small bakery in the 14th arrondissement near Montparnasse. The bakery is run by an award-wining chef (who is gluten intolerant) and he will lead you through the process of creating croissants, pain et chocolat, and baguettes. The best croissants take THREE DAYS to make. (I made these at home during Thanksgiving 2020. When my dough expanded to Texas proportions, Chef Didier was happy to help me troubleshoot over Instagram.
This class is taught in French, but you will have an interpreter. Chef Didier is warm, welcoming, and delightfully funny. He will happily let you practice your French skills (a little practice never hurts anyone). This is a great way to practice your French – both listening and speaking – because everyone is so very kind.
Bonus: You’ll take home a few fresh baguettes and the recipes to use at home. Fresh baguettes do not last long at all, so I recommend picking up some wine and cheese on the way back to your hotel to enjoy later that same day.
Book a baking class in Paris
French Sauces Cooking Classes at La Cuisine
My mom, sister, and I took a french sauce cooking class at La Cuisine in November. We all love a good sauce, and France is the mother of all sauces. It seemed like the best place to learn, oui? La Cuisine is right around the corner from Hotel de Ville, so it’s very conveniently located in the heart of Paris. Our French sauce class was taught by Cyril, a passionate French chef with a penchant for being brutally honest and sharing stories about his life creating documentaries about French chefs. While there are likely differing opinions on this, I would rather have someone correct me so that I can get a recipe right at home. I’ve found that chefs in Italy and France are both more likely to correct you than their American counterparts. Don’t take it personal – they just want you to get it right.
Over the course of this three hour class, we learned to make several types of sauces for different dishes. Our class included the following recipes:
- Two emulsion sauces: a vinaigrette and a mayonnaise.
- One white roux: Bechamel sauce
- Two brown roux sauce: port wine sauce and a peppercorn sauce (my favorite!)
- Red wine and shallot sauce
- Béarnaise sauce
- Two dessert sauces: chocolate ganache and a salted caramel sauce (my second favorite!)
Almost all of the sauces were taught through hands-on instruction. For the first few sauces, Cyril would demonstrate and we would replicate. By the end of the class, he would give instructions and we would carry them out. At the end of the class, we were able to try the sauces with some vegetables and fruits. On one hand, it is the only thing that really makes sense given the volume of sauce made. On the other hand, it was hard to get a sense of the flavors without trying them without their proper pairing. I think you just need to go into this class knowing that the goal is to get technical skills, not have an amazing lunch with French sauces. The positive thing is that most the recipes are pretty easy, so most people should be able to replicate them at home.
These classes are taught in English, and I thought Cyril was very easy to follow and understand. It’s great for all skill levels, and I found the course to be very approachable.
Book at cooking class at La Cuisine Paris
Take a Class at the Ritz Escoffier
Taking a class at the Ritz Paris Escoffier has been a must-do in Paris item for me ever since we had the Buche du Noel at the Ritz Paris at Christmas in 2019. Ever since then, I try to include a trip to the Ritz Paris (and now also the Ritz Comptoir) to try more of the incredible pastries.
I’ve taken a full-day French pastry basics class at the Ritz and it was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done. With a Ritz Pastry chef and the assistance of an interpreter, I learned to make a pear and almond torte, choux pastry filled with homemade caramel and Chantilly cream, and a Black Forest cake. It was INCREDIBLE.
The Ritz pastries are works of art, and I expected this class to be intense. The recipes are in-depth and creative, but they aren’t TOO technical. Thankfully, the staff does an incredible job of making pastry-making approachable and “easy.” Many of the recipes can be prepped in advance, so you don’t have to plan for an entire day of pastry-making at home, but it was a lot to manage in a single class! Honestly, I learned so many great tips from Antoine that I’m excited to use in my other baking.
One of the best things about the Ritz Escoffier is they offer a myriad of sweet and savory classes so you don’t have to just do pastries or chocolate. I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to do a 3-day or 5-day pastry workshop next. I learned so much in a single day that it’s impossible to imagine how much I could learn with a multi-day course!
Take a cooking class at the Ritz Paris cooking school
Wow all this food is delicious. Can you find me a 100% gluten free food tour version of all of these? Lol.
Yes!! 100%!! I’ve actually been able to find guides who will do gluten free tours, even in Italy!! ??
Literally drooling reading this post! These are all of my favorite things – YUM! And a pastry class at the Ritz sounds like a total dream <3
oh my what a delicious post