Our trip to Paris taking our daughter on her trip into adolescence was a wonderful experience. The highlights of our trip included food, shopping, sights some of which were planned and others we were delighted to discover. We’re sharing our top Paris recommendations, based on our experience.
Must Do in Paris
The Food
We LOVED our baking class as Maison Fleuret! With three locations throughout the city (we were at the Notre Dame location) and with different delights to choose to bake (we chose the eclairs) you have options for the location most convenient for you and what to bake.
Our instructor was a pastry chef trained at LeCordon Blue in Paris, and she was a delight. She taught us several nuances for baking the best eclairs that can’t be captured in a recipe.
They also do food and wine tours. If we go back we will definitely try one or more of these. And we’ll go back and bake croissants or macarones next time!
Paris recommendations will always include the Eiffel Tower, and we’re happy to comply. We planned dinner at the Eiffel Tower’s Madame Brasserie and would highly recommend it for a special occasion dinner.
Located inside the Eiffel Tower, the restaurant offers dinner service twice nightly and serves authentic French cuisine across three courses. You can pair wine with each course if you’d like or order off their drink menu.
The views here were wonderful, especially as the sun sets over the Seine, and the service was excellent.
Make sure you arrive at the Eiffel Tower about thirty minutes before your dinner seating because it takes a while to get through security and ride the escalator to the restaurant.
We also stumbled upon some great places to eat that weren’t part of our plans. The street vendors! And who can skip a great French bakery?
The best street vendor we found was right across the street on the North side of Notre Dame called Aux Tours de Notre Dame. We devoured the “sweet pancakes” (crepes) with Nutella (one order gives you three huge ones) and loved the toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, which in total cost us less than 10 euros. After discovering the crepes with Nutella, we couldn’t get enough of them.
Right by our Airbnb was a fabulous French bakery, Aux Castelblangeois. With three locations in Paris, hopefully one is close to where you are staying.
Everything was good- we sampled something new each morning- but don’t miss the croissants including the classic, chocolate, and ham and cheese and don’t forget the crepes with Nutella! Their muffins were also excellent, and they serve fresh squeezed orange juice each morning.
Most Parisian restaurants don’t start serving dinner till around 7 pm and we are used to eating around 5:30 pm, so when we were starving one day and craving pizza (yes, in Paris) we found an Italian restaurant that opened at 6:30 pm for dinner and waited until they opened the doors to get a seat.
The food ended up being fabulous (Google ratings didn’t disappoint) and the decor was unbelievable. We would go back to Zapi in a heartbeat and probably even wait later until it opened if we had to!
We happened into a great place for lunch near La Bon Marche (see below) that we would definitely visit again. Give Les Movettes a try- the fries, oh the fries! And the club sandwich was excellent and of course we couldn’t forget another serving of crepes with Nutella!
The Shopping
Obviously, Paris is a mecca for fashion. We aren’t typically ones to frequent high end designers, but in Paris, it is definitely worth browsing through some of the great French brands at the Flagship stores. Many are located down the Champs-Élysées. Spend a morning or afternoon leisurely exploring the shops along this iconic street. (Paige’s favorite was Louis Vuitton!)
We also enjoyed visiting the oldest department store in town called La Bon Marche. It has several floors of space that include everything you would expect in a higher end department store including a few restaurants. Just outside its doors are also other shopping options like Lacoste and Zara (there are multiple locations of these types of stores throughout the city).
Strolling from the left bank to the right and across an island in the Seine, we happened into a great and inexpensive jewelry store called Bijoux Fantaisie vintage et creations that has been there since the 1920s.
Not planning to be in Paris anytime soon? You can also find him on Etsy!
We also happened into Samaritaine for some shopping and had a delightful sales person explain the history of the area to us.
This post was helpful in looking at different places to shop in Paris.
The Sights
There is so much to see in Paris. Obviously, art is at the top of many people’s Paris recommendations. We went to the Louvre, and if you’ve never been before, we would recommend checking it off the bucket list. However, if you’ve been there done that and/are just aren’t that into art and massive crowds, skip it. It is pretty overwhelming. Just admiring the outside of it is an authentic Parisian experience.
Getting tickets is kind of complicated, and we found that the direct website for the Lourve to get tickets wasn’t working right. We ended up getting tickets (timed entry) from Viator and that worked out well. They also provide an audio tour at no additional cost that you can download on your phone. They also have an option to combine your visit to the Louvre with a river cruise down the Seine which was a cost effective way to do both.
Musee d’Orsay is easier to navigate and less overwhelming than the Lourve. If you like impressionist art, it is a good place to see.
You don’t really need tickets in advance, so stroll up when convenient for you and get in the line to purchase tickets.
This did not take long at all. If we ever go again, we will find more local art studios to wander through.
Notre-Dame is a must see. Their website makes you think you need a timed ticket to get in, but you don’t. It is free to enter when open, and we found that waiting in the line to get in with no timed ticket really didn’t take much longer than going with one. If the line seems long, we experienced that it was fast moving, and you can always grab something to munch on at the street vendor we mentioned earlier while you wait in line!
We also really enjoyed our trip to the top of Arc de Triomphe. You can order a timed ticket in advance and the whole visit doesn’t take that long. There are great views, a great gift shop and also a great interactive video that walks you through the history of the monument.
We wish we had also taken the time to go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and we wish we’d visited the Montmarte area where Sacre Coeur is located. We also should have planned one full day with nowhere to be, so we could just wander the streets and into local places – in particular in the 6th and 7th Arrondissements (shown in the map below).
Paris recommendations often include Disneyland Paris. About an hour train/metro ride outside of the city center, it was fun, but we wouldn’t go back. If you’ve been to Disney World, Disneyland Paris may be a little bit of a let down in terms of its size. It has two parks instead of four.
You still quintessential Disney service, but in our opinion, it isn’t worth scheduling a multi-day visit like it’s necessary to do at Disney World.
We hope these Paris recommendations help you plan! Next up, we’re sharing the Best of London. Stay tuned!
