By pasting Ville de Paris into your browser then clicking the shopping basket icon top right, you will find listed almost one hundred, first-rate, Parisian neighbourhood food markets for your pure pleasure. Meanwhile, here’s my tip for a Sunday, ‘two for one’ epicurean, Parisian market outing.
My two favourites are conveniently close yet delightfully different in atmosphere:
1) Marché d’Aligre:
With its village atmosphere you might catch yourself fantasizing that you are in a vintage French film, rubbing shoulders with locals as they fill their shopping ‘caddies’ to the brim with every type of food from fish heads and tripes to organic bread and wild mushrooms. Specialist food shops surround the stalls here and cafes, with terraces for people watching, are plentiful.
Open 6 days, Tuesday to Sunday -7am until 1.30pm.
2) Less than a mile by foot from rue d’Aligre is Marché Bastille, (old name Marché Richard-Lenoir). Here you will find a vast, glorious feast as most traders offer morsels for tasting (dégustation) of every kind of food for free. As you munch your way through the happy throng you’ll find food for the soul and mind too as street performers and assorted, small, political manifestations (demos) are on hand to entertain and politically educate …. Bon appetite!
Open 2 days, Thursdays and Sundays, 7am til 3pm.
equipement.paris.fr/?tid=289
Marché d’Aligre
Pl d'Aligre, rue d'Aligre, 12th Arr.
Metro: Ledru-Rollin.
Google map: bit.ly/fJwQDn
Marche Bastille
Bd. Richard Lenoir, 11th Arr.
Metro Bastille.
Google map: bit.ly/hfvYIf
From London this outing can be done easily in one day travelling by day return on Eurostar. Book early for the £69 return deal.