After a winter of violence and a spring of torrential rain, now that the river is receding, taking its rumoured population of mutant Breton-striped piranhas with it, Paris is filling up with visitors again. And everyone’s looking for restaurant recommendations.

Like any big city, Paris offers many different cuisines (although spicing levels leave a lot to be desired), and the last decade’s explosion of Thai, Mexican, Moroccan, Indian and American food is much welcomed by residents.

Near the university, students lunch at Le Petit Grec, perch at the Vieux Cedre Lebanese café (if you say the “Libinais” to anyone in the neighbourhood, they’ll know what you mean), or grab a quiche or sandwich from the bakeries dotted across the fifth arrondissement. Towards the end of the month, you can find them queuing up outside Chez Gladines; the wait is worth it for the happy, hustling waiters and the mountainous, cheap portions of Basque food. Everyone has a favourite bahn mi spot, their own pad Thai purveyor and their own ‘secret’ Laotian address in the 13th arrondissement. In Montmartre, my own northerly neighbourhood, people meet for sushi, Korean dumplings, steak-frites, empanadas, and pizza. On weekends, people shop and lunch at the hip indoor market of the Marché des Enfants Rouges, where the food stalls dish out sushi, tartiflette , Caribbean cod cakes, pulled pork sandwiches, and couscous, all generally under €10.

Visitors, however, feel differently. “But we’re in France, we want something French,” they say, which no one ever says, for instance, in London. Luckily, eating well doesn’t mean eating extravagantly, and in Paris, you aren’t obliged to spend hundreds of euros to get a fabulous meal. With a recent profusion of bistros and brasseries that serve interesting, good-value food, there’s no reason to restrict yourself to hotels and the stars within them.

The vast majority of the new crop has no Michelin stars (many Parisian restaurateurs have refused to play to the stifling tastes of the Michelin, which tends to applaud primarily formal French-inspired dining). At this kind of bistro, generally in a neighbourhood far from the touristy streets around the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées, the atmosphere is relaxed, the staff are friendly, and the décor minimal. Most fall within the borders of the new ‘bistronomie’ style — food that is accessible, creative and eclectic in its choice of ingredients, ranging over Asia, Africa and America for inspiration. While the distinction between a brasserie, a bistro and a restaurant (in order of fanciness) is fast blurring, what the last two have in common is a penchant for reservations. Some of the more popular bistros are full up for weeks on end — a problem compounded by the fact that restaurants typically have only one seating every meal, and in a maddeningly Gallic way, many close on Friday and Saturday nights (no joke).

Laminated menus, just like a menu in five languages, mean you should leave immediately; it indicates they never change their food. Menus printed on paper or written on a chalkboard indicate that they decided what to cook based on what they bought that morning (or that week), so you’re more likely to get fresh, seasonal and local ingredients.

Although eating your largest meal at lunch generally necessitates siesta, you can also try the age-old trick of looking out for the magic words ‘ prix fixe ’, ‘menu’, or ‘ formule ’. Confusingly, in French a menu is la carte , while a fixed-price list within the menu (€25 for three courses, for instance) is un menu or une formule . These set menus, often only available at lunch, offer a selection of the restaurant’s dishes, passing on the benefits of buying ingredients in bulk to you. Websites like LaFourchette follow the same principle, putting up a short sample of the eatery’s offerings (restaurant websites with actual information are still a rarity in France). When you book a table, you get a discount of anywhere between 10-50 per cent.

Wine is often cheaper than bottled water. The tap water is safe, so ask for ‘ une carafe d’eau ’ instead. And though you may spot a café crème here and there, most people drink espresso, which is confusingly, called ‘ un café ’. In a bar or café, it’s cheaper to drink your tiny cup standing up at the counter (and it still gives you the right to use the bathroom).

For anyone on a budget, consolidating a couple of meals into a large picnic (best in the summer, unless it’s raining) can earn you the spare cash for a nice meal. A picnic is no consolation prize; you can skip deciphering a menu from Google Translate and just point and smile at the array of cheese, fruit, prepared foods, bread and cured meats in one of Paris’s beautiful markets. Don’t bother stooping down to the bottom-shelf screw-top wine bottles in the supermarket; many cashiers have a corkscrew handy and will open your bottle for you if you ask nicely, or you can borrow one from your neighbouring picnickers.

And finally, le doggie bag is a new and somewhat suspect concept in Paris, where portions are adequate, but not so enormous as to generate leftovers. So take your time, and linger over your three courses. Ask for cheese, or dessert, or a café gourmand: a shot of espresso that comes with three (or more) mini-portions of the day’s desserts , to enable the indecisive to sample everything . The upside of the only-one-seating policy is no one will ever rush you out of a Paris restaurant until the lights go off and you and the chef are both ready to go home.

Naintara Maya Oberoiis a food writer based in Paris; Follow her on Twitter@naintaramaya

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