What to Eat in France
France invented the restaurant, the menu and most of the vocabulary of professional cooking. Day to day it runs on something simpler: bread, a dish of the day, a piece of cheese, and a firm belief that lunch deserves an hour.
Ask the French which dishes stand for France and they do not choose anything delicate. In an Ipsos poll published in April 2025, bœuf bourguignon came first, named by 39 per cent, followed by cassoulet, blanquette de veau, confit de canard and choucroute garnie. Every one is a slow, generous dish from a particular region, and more than seven in ten people said they eat traditional dishes of this kind every week.
What they buy at lunchtime is another matter. The plain ham and butter baguette, the jambon-beurre, still accounts for about half of all sandwiches sold, but in 2017 the burger overtook it for the first time, with 1.46 billion sold against 1.2 billion, and burgers were on the menus of 85 per cent of French restaurants. Both things are true of France at once.
The country is also intensely regional. Butter and cream rule the north, olive oil the south. Brittany eats buckwheat pancakes and Marseille fish stew, the Alps melt cheese over potatoes, and Nice guards the recipe for its salad so closely that it has a label to protect it.
How a day of eating goes
Breakfast is small: coffee, often milky, with bread, butter and jam. Croissants and pains au chocolat are mostly a weekend treat.
Lunch is the bargain. Most restaurants offer a formule or menu, a fixed-price meal of two or three courses, and it is cheaper at midday than in the evening. Look for the plat du jour chalked on a board.
The early evening belongs to the apéritif, a drink and something to nibble. Dinner starts at about eight, and half past eight or nine is more usual.
Breakfast and brunch
The French breakfast is bread and a hot drink. Pastries are for Saturday and Sunday.
Tartine beurre-confiture
A length of baguette split, buttered and spread with jam, and often dipped in the coffee. This, not the croissant, is the everyday breakfast.
Croissant
Bought from the bakery in the morning and eaten the same day. Ask for a croissant au beurre; the straight ones are usually made with butter and the curved ones may not be.
Pain au chocolat
Croissant dough wrapped round two bars of dark chocolate. In the south-west it is called a chocolatine, and people argue about it.
Café crème
What to order for a milky coffee in a café. At home the same thing is a café au lait, often drunk from a bowl.
Pain perdu
Stale bread soaked in egg and milk and fried in butter. A weekend breakfast or a dessert.
Street food and snacks
Lunch on the move means the bakery. The sandwich counter is where the old France and the new one meet.
Jambon-beurre
Half a baguette, butter, cooked ham. Nothing else. Still about half of all sandwiches sold in France, and its price is tracked as an index of the cost of living.
Crêpes
Sold from street stands with sugar, lemon, jam or chocolate spread, folded into a paper cone. France eats them at home on 2 February, Candlemas.
Galette complète
Brittany's savoury pancake, made with buckwheat flour and water and folded round ham, cheese and a fried egg. Drunk with cider.
Pan bagnat
A round roll soaked with tomato juice and olive oil and filled with the ingredients of a salade niçoise. The name means bathed bread.
Croque-monsieur
Ham and Gruyère between slices of bread, topped with béchamel and grilled. The standard café snack; with a fried egg on top it becomes a croque-madame.
Burger
Now outsells the jambon-beurre and is on most restaurant menus, usually eaten at a table with a knife and fork.
Starters and small plates
The entrée is the first course of a French meal, and bistro menus still offer much the same short list.
Salade niçoise
Tomatoes, raw vegetables, tuna, anchovies, olives and egg, arranged and not tossed. In Nice it contains no potatoes and no green beans.
Quiche lorraine
An open tart of smoked bacon in a custard of eggs and cream. The Lorraine original has no cheese and no onion.
Œufs mayonnaise
Hard-boiled eggs under a spoonful of mayonnaise. The cheapest starter on any bistro menu and a test of the kitchen.
Escargots de Bourgogne
Snails baked in their shells with butter, garlic and parsley, served by the six or the dozen with tongs and a small fork.
Huîtres
Served raw on ice with lemon, shallot vinegar and rye bread, by the half-dozen. Christmas and New Year are the high season.
Assiette de charcuterie
Dry sausage, ham, pâté and rillettes with gherkins and bread, often ordered to share with a drink.
Soups and stews
The dishes the French themselves put first are nearly all of this kind: meat cooked slowly in wine or broth.
Soupe à l'oignon
Slow-cooked onions in stock under toasted bread and melted Gruyère. It was the food of the night workers and late revellers of Les Halles, the old Paris market.
Bœuf bourguignon
Beef cooked for three hours in red wine with bacon, mushrooms and small onions. First in the 2025 poll of dishes that represent France.
Blanquette de veau
Veal simmered without browning and finished with cream and egg yolk, served with rice. Third in the same poll.
Coq au vin
Chicken, originally an old cockerel, marinated and braised in red wine with bacon, mushrooms and onions.
Pot-au-feu
Several cuts of beef simmered with root vegetables. The broth is served first, then the meat and vegetables.
Cassoulet
Beans baked for hours with duck or goose confit, pork and sausage. Castelnaudary, Carcassonne and Toulouse each claim it, and Castelnaudary has a brotherhood to defend it.
Bouillabaisse
A saffron broth and several kinds of rock fish, served in two parts with rouille and croutons. A 1980 charter sets out what may be called by the name, and it is never cheap.
Main dishes
The plat is the centre of the meal, and in a bistro it is most often meat with potatoes in some form.
Steak frites
A grilled or pan-fried steak with a pile of chips. Say how you want it cooked: bleu, saignant, à point or bien cuit.
Moules marinières
Mussels steamed open with shallots, white wine and parsley and served with chips. The dish of the north and of Lille's great street market, the Braderie.
Confit de canard
A duck leg cooked and kept in its own fat, then crisped in a pan. From the south-west, and fourth in the 2025 poll.
Choucroute garnie
Alsace's plate of sauerkraut cooked in wine and piled with sausages, bacon and pork. Fifth in the 2025 poll.
Ratatouille
Aubergine, courgette, peppers and tomato cooked in olive oil, eaten hot or cold, alone or beside meat or fish.
Gratin dauphinois
Thin slices of potato baked slowly in milk and cream with garlic. The true version has no cheese.
Tartiflette
An Alpine dish of potatoes, bacon and onion under melted reblochon cheese. It is newer than it looks: the recipe was promoted by cheese producers in the late twentieth century.
Desserts and sweets
Cheese comes before dessert, and both are taken seriously.
Tarte Tatin
Apples cooked in butter and sugar under a pastry lid, then turned out. It comes from Lamotte-Beuvron in the Sologne, where a brotherhood keeps the recipe.
Crème brûlée
A rich vanilla custard under a thin sheet of burnt sugar that cracks under the spoon.
Mousse au chocolat
Dark chocolate lightened with whipped egg whites. Often brought to the table in a big bowl for you to help yourself.
Clafoutis
Whole cherries baked in a pancake-like batter, from the Limousin. Traditionally the stones are left in.
Madeleines
Little butter cakes baked in shell-shaped moulds, at their best warm from the oven.
Macarons
Two smooth almond meringue shells with a flavoured filling, sold by pâtisseries in a dozen colours.
Fromage
A few cheeses served with bread after the main course and before dessert. Take a little of two or three.
Drinks
Wine with the meal, coffee after it, and an apéritif before.
Café
Un café is a small black espresso, taken after a meal, not with dessert. A noisette has a dash of milk.
Vin
Order a glass, or a pichet or carafe of house wine for the table. Tap water is free if you ask for une carafe d'eau.
Kir
The apéritif of Burgundy: dry white aligoté with a little crème de cassis. Named after a mayor of Dijon, Canon Félix Kir.
Pastis
The drink of Marseille and the south: an aniseed spirit let down with cold water until it turns cloudy.
Champagne
Drunk as an apéritif more often than with food. A coupe is a glass.
Cidre
Brittany and Normandy's drink, served in a bowl or cup with galettes and crêpes.
What is changing
The burger's victory over the jambon-beurre in 2017 was reported as a small national shock, though the consultancy that counted them pointed out that seven in ten burgers were eaten sitting down in restaurants, not in fast-food outlets. The French took to the burger and then made it a plat.
Tradition holds all the same. The 2025 Ipsos poll found most people eating the old slow dishes weekly, mostly cooked at home. And tradition is sometimes younger than it seems: tartiflette, now a fixture of every ski resort, was promoted by reblochon producers only from the 1980s and 1990s.