My Little Black Book of Ordering Food Online in Paris
On the forty-first day of the confinement, or coronavirus lockdown, I’ve decided to share the Little Black Book of Ordering Food Online in Paris that I’ve compiled through a lot of trial and error and research while ordering almost everything we eat and drink online for more than five weeks. I try to support the local shops in my neighbourhood, the 9th Arrondissement in the heart of the city, when possible, but have recently had some very bad experiences with people who don’t take social distancing seriously. I do. Very seriously. So I minimalize my shopping in person as much as possible right now, especially since so many shops are so low on inventory.
For now, then, I’m only going up the road to Landemaine for bread–I’m lucky to have a branch of this excellent bakery nearby, or to the organic grocer a few blocks away in the hopes of snagging some asparagus and foods that still aren’t easily found in regular grocery stores in Paris, like tofu.
I hope this list of addresses will be immediately useful for other Parisians like me, but it’s also worth tucking away for use after the pandemic if you’re renting an AirBNB apartment in Paris or a country house somewhere in France for a vacation. Many of these suppliers are so good that they’d make your holiday here more delicious even if you love going to the markets, and I’m sure I’ll continue using several of them even after life returns to some semblance of normality.
Note, too, that if you’ve rented a flat in Paris and want to make sure you have breakfast supplies, for example, for the morning after you arrive, you can order an advance delivery of coffee, bread, fruit, yogurt, etc. from a high quality online grocer like www.labellevie.com to get a delivery at your convenience on the first day of your stay in Paris without wasting time in a grocery store. And La Belle Vie features baguettes from Benjamin Turquier, one of the city’s best bakers, too, plus excellent croissants, pain aux raisins, etc.
With the exception of a pizza or two and some sushi, we’ve been cooking lunch and dinner every day for almost six weeks now. It’s been a challenge to eat well, healthy and economically during these unpredictable times. So after a second or third spin through the rotation of dishes we cook all the time–blanquette de veau, pot au feu, mapo tofu, spaghetti carbonara, steamed salmon with watercress sauce, etc, we’ve been pushing out in new culinary directions by digging deep into the shelves of cookbooks in my office and also gleaning new recipes from the New York Times’s excellent food section, diving into the big U.S. food magazine websites, including Bon Appetit, Food & Wine and Saveur, and tossing the dice with the occasional Google search. Some of these dice throws have been brilliant–the recipe for the harissa-roasted shoulder of lamb we ate for Easter was easy, flavourful and incredibly succulent, while others–buttersquash curry in coconut milk, which I unearthed after we received a butternut in a no-choice assorted vegetables delivery box and didn’t want any more soup, have been time consuming and disappointing.
Our days right now turn very much on the axis of what we will eat, which I suppose means that even in the midst of a horrendous pandemic, some things don’t change. The difference, of course, is that we’re the cooks, and all of this cooking has made me more grateful than I’ve ever been in my entire life to everyone who has ever cooked for me before. It’s wonderful work, but it’s also exhausting, often stressful and very intense. And for the thrill of having invented a white bean, cherry tomato and squid sauce for pasta or a broiled Cesaer salad (really–it’s delicious, easy, and a great side with grilled chicken, beef or pork), I’ve also done endless hours of dulling tasks like peeling my own not inconsiderable weight in potatoes, chopping dozens of onions and skinning innumerable shallots, garlic cloves and knobs of ginger and washing dozens of heads of lettuce and other salad greens.
I miss Paris, the city I’ve made my home for more than thirty years; I miss other people’s faces and voices; I miss the city’s chefs and cheffes; and I really miss the multi-faceted pleasures of Paris restaurants–their food, of course, but also their noise, their laughter, their scents, their atmosphere of communal complicity in seeking pleasure with strangers. Until I can dine out again, we’ll keep cooking, and enjoying it, which means a lot of online shopping.
These are my favorite regular go-to websites for getting great produce when you can’t shop for it yourself, maybe because you’re quarantined during an epidemic, really busy, or on vacation and would rather spend time in museums, gardens and cafes.
La Belle Vie
A comprehensive online grocery store with a good selection of organic produce; vegan and vegetarian products, including tofu and tempeh; decently priced wines; and excellent meat and charcuterie offers. In addition to the tabs for individual product categories, the site also has a regular supermarche (grocery store) tab, which allows access to dull but essential goods like window cleaner, dishwasher soap and paper towels. N.B. Like many delivery services, Le Belle Vie has been overwhelmed by demand since the lockdown was announced in France, which means that an occasional item might go missing from your order. When this has happened to me, I’ve direct messaged them via their live-chat customer service on their website and requested a credit. These have always shown up immediately in my La Belle Vie customer account, with no questions asked. They also offer free delivery for any order over 40 Euros, too, which is very consumer friendly compared to most other online grocers in Paris.
Carrefour
Almost all of the major French supermarket chains offer home delivery, but I have consistently found Carrefour to be the best among them in terms of the variety of produce, prices, and the impressive attention the give to good packaging. Not only have I never ended up with a bunch of cherry tomatoes crushed by cans when ordering from Carrefour, but they also package mostly in recyclable paper and/or plastic fabric shopping bags that you return to the store the next time you order. They have a decent Bio (organic) offer on their site; their own-brand products–canned white beans, for example, are very good; and their wine selection is worth a look if you’re shopping for decent everyday drinking. They also deliver batteries, detergent, light bulbs and all of those other household necessities that can be hard to find online elsewhere. The only drawback here is that their site is so popular it takes some time to snag a home delivery slot.
Epicery
This popular app and website is a great way to support small local food businesses in your immediate neighbourhood or city during the lockdown. After you’ve entered your home address and clicked on a food category – butcher, charcutier, green grocer, fishmonger, etc., the site will propose a selection of merchants who can deliver to your address. Each merchant is rated with Google reviews and has a delivery menu illustrated by photographs. Two of my favorite addresses available through this site are Le Roi du Saucisson in Montmartre, which makes excellent sausage and the very good oeufs en glee we ate part of an Easter brunch, and Schmidt, the Alsatian traiteur and charcutier in business since 1904 near the Gare de L’Est–they sell excellent quiches, tourtes, charcuterie, 5 different kinds of choucroute (sauerkraut), and a childhood lunch-box favorite I hadn’t eaten since I was ten years old–olive loaf, in a Gallic version that is vastly superior to one my mother would buy at the Stop & Shop supermarket in Westport, Connecticut.
A minium order of 20 Euros is required, and delivery charges depend upon the distance between you and the shop you’re ordering from, but are generally reasonable. Use the code ALOBRANO on your first order to get a 5 Euro reduction.
Circus Bakery has become a cult hit among local bread lovers since it opened in the Latin Quarter two-and-a-half years ago. I’d heard raves about their sourdough bread, cinnamon or cardamon braids and focaccia, but had never found myself in the neighbourhood when I needed bread. So when I learned they were delivering their bread, I pounced, since it seemed like the perfect little splurge to lift our spirits.
If you live nearby and would rather pick up your bread in person, they also do click-and-collect orders, and their address isCircus Bakery, 63 rue Galande, 5th Arrondissement, Paris
https://flyincircusparis.com/about-our-bread-and-our-delivery-program
Frichti
Frichti originated as an online meal company heavily targeting an office-bound clientele during the day and then cooking averse singles in the evening. With their reasonable prices and focus on healthy dining, they’ve been very successful in Paris.
Now responding to the fact that many Parisians are homebound, they’ve launched an online grocery store that deserves some discerning cherry-picking for some great buys and interesting produce, including a whole free-range chicken for less than ten euros–a recent special, hamburgers from the venerable Boucheries Nivernaise, Poilâne bread, and cheeses from Beillevaire, a dairy and cheesemonger in Machcoul in the Vendee.
If you don’t want to cook, their reasonably priced changes-daily menu-du-jour of prepared foods is still available, too, and runs to dishes like polenta with sun-dried tomatoes and ratatouille, lasagna and confit de canard with wild mushrooms and potato puree.
Luximer
Before I offer my enthusiastic endorsement of Luximer, let’s have a little chat about seafood. To wit, I am firmly of the opinion that France has the best seafood offer of any country in Europe, because it still has so many small fishing boats working out of ports along its different Atlantic littorals and Mediterranean coast line. Many of these small boats catch fish on long lines, instead of in big nets, which results in much better quality, and none of them employ the industrial sweeping of the sea practiced by so many trawlers from Russia and Asia.
Wild fish and shellfish in France are an expensive luxury, because so much labor is required to bring these products to your table and fish catches are steadily declining due to overfishing and global warming. At the risk of being a bit bleak, we may be the last generations that still find wild fish regularly available, since the future would seem to point towards more and more sea farming. This will be in addition to the salmon cages in Norway, Scotland, Chile and other countries; flabby flavourless sea bass from fish farms in Greece, which is often exported to the U.S. with no indication that it’s been farmed; the horrendous tilapia ‘farmed’ in Africa, and worst of all, the environmentally disastrous fish farming in Asia and Central America that produces most the shrimp and catfish consumed in the United States.
I eat as little farmed fish as I possibly can, because so much of it is produced using antibiotics, industrial feed stocks, etc. Instead, I prefer to spend more money and eat wild seafood as a more infrequent pleasure, and this is why I love Luximer. Almost all of the fish this small Breton company sells is fished in local waters and is wild. The exception is their salmon, which is farmed, but still very good.
I have ordered clams, cockles, langoustines (cooked in seawater and sent sous-vide), lobsters, cod, scallops, sole, salmon, squid and a variety of other products from Luximer since I found them a year or so ago, and I not only have never been disappointed, I’ve regularly been astonished by the freshness and quality of their seafood.
La Maison Conquet
I have to admit that I was initially wary of ordering meat from a butcher I didn’t know over the internet. A lot of the meat that La Belle Vie sells, however, comes from La Maison Conquet, which is located in Laguiole, a village in the Aubrac in Auvergne famous for its cheese of the same name, and its quality was so good that I eventually hunted down La Maison Conquet outside of the La Belle Vie website to have a look.
Their beef is excellent, as is their pork and lamb, and they also sell local cheeses, good country ham, stuffed cabbage and excellent sausage. For me the proof of the pudding, or rather, in my case, the Bolognese, would have to be their ground beef, which is truly outstanding.
I’ve never had a problem with any delivery from them, and I really like the idea of spending money at a small butcher’s shop in an Auvergnat village, because it not only keeps the butchers busy but also goes into the pockets of the local farmers who supply them.
Nicolas
I can’t imagine getting through a pandemic without wine, but since most of the excellent independent wine stores in my neighbourhood are currently closed, I’ve turned to Nicolas, a just decent enough local chain that uses U.P.S. to deliver wines that are beautifully packed in recyclable cardboard boxes and bottle liners.
Visiting their website is sort of like panning for gold, since the available offer changes often, and you have to spend some time tracking down bottles you might want to drink. If you’re in a carpe diem state of mind, they recently had a very pleasant Joseph Drouhin Saint Romain Blanc for 29.50 Euros or on the more affordable end of the scale, Nederburg Sauvignon Blanc 2017 for 4.70 Euros a bottle and Cabernet Sauvignon for 7.60 Euros a bottle; both of them are harmless pandemic drinking for anyone who, like most of us, is prudently penny-pinching against the unknown.
L’Oliveraie JeanJean
Since we’re cooking two meals a day, we’re getting through a lot of olive oil these days, which is how I finished off the 3 liter metal drum of my favorite olive oil, the organic oil from Bosco Falconeria in Sicily much faster than we usually do. Since we order this oil with friends to make the delivery charges less onerous, we’re not able to stock up at the moment. So instead, I’ve ordered some of the oil we use at our house outside of Uzes in the south of France. These French oils come from the excellent local producer Oliveraie JeanJean, which is located just south of Nimes in Saint Gilles in Le Gard and does a superb range of different oils.
I love the rich Marcel on fresh tomatoes or melon, but since those pleasures are still a long ways off, I recently ordered 3 litres of Picholine for salads and vegetables–it’s excellent on asparagus, and 3 litres of L’Authentique for regular cooking.
Delivery charges are reasonable, the products are well packaged, and the website has a generous customer-rewards point system for future purchases. N.B. They ship internationally, too.
Terroirs d’Avenir
After graduating from business school in 2008, Alexandre Drouard and Samuel Nahon decided to create a business around their real passion: good food. Horrified by the stranglehold of one or two huge industrial distributors on the restaurant supply business, they originally founded Terroir d’Avenir as a boutique wholesale supplier to offer chefs better quality produce. To do this, they traveled all over France sourcing meat, fowl, fish, dairy goods, fruit and vegetables and foods and condiments from small most organic producers who specialised in heirloom breeds. Their business became a huge success that dramatically improved the quality of restaurant produce, so they eventually opened a first shop on the rue du Nil in the 2nd Arrondissement to sell directly to the general public. Today, they have a second shop in the 11th Arrondissement, and a fishmonger’s counter and a bakery in addition to the original shop in the rue du Nil.
With the arrival of the coronavirus punching a huge hole in their restaurant-supply business, they decided to start delivery from an online shop, and it’s been my Christmas wish website ever opened up. By this I mean, it’s the website I love combing through for special treats and foods that will inspire our cooking and lift our spirits. A perfect example? The Gascon chorizo I bought with the idea of using it chopped up to add flavour to various dishes. Before that happened, Bruno had eaten half it, and once I tried some, it was gone within a day, because it was some of the best French charcuterie I’ve ever had.
Their vegetables are outstanding, too, including three types of asparagus–green, white and purple, right now, and so are the strawberries. I also bought the best chicken I’ve ever roasted in France from them last week, and though it was expensive, it was worth every centime.
Unfortunately, they very quickly sell out almost every single day after they’ve restocked, so please consider that I’m doing you a real good deed by telling you about this website. Their produce is just plain superb.
https://shop.terroirs-avenir.fr/shop
Next up: www.culinaries.fr
I haven’t yet ordered from culinaries.fr, an online grocery specialising in natural wines and a superb selection of carefully curated foods, including meat, fish, vegetables and cheeses. I’m very tempted by the Tomme de Brebis from the farm of Jean-Bernard Maita in the Pyrenees, though, but wonder if Bruno and I could possibly eat two-and-a-half pounds of ewe’s milk cheese without suddenly only being able to wear trousers with stretch waistlines. Whether I succumb or not, I will definitely be ordering some of the dark yellow Couleur Froment butter from Brittany I’ve been hearing people rave about for the last couple of years, along with organic meat and charcuterie from this site sometime very soon.
Big disappointments
I expect that the coronavirus pandemic will have a major long-lasting impact on all kinds of consumer behaviours, including restaurant menus, restaurant going, restaurant delivery and food delivery. It’s too soon to predict much, but I suspect menus will become much simpler after the epidemic, with people craving beautifully prepared high quality produce over fussy over-cheffed cooking.
I think there will also be a major craving for things that even the best home cooks are less likely to undertake on their own, like lobsters rolls and sushi. I know that I will quickly head for Homer and also Yannick Alleno’s L’Abysse, his brilliant Japanese restaurant, for Japanese chef Yasumari Okazaki’s superb sushi and other dishes. It will also be a thrill to pick up the thread of my regular life, which is the discovering great new restaurants and chefs in Paris and elsewhere in France.
In the meantime, though, I’ve had two major coronavirus era online food disappointments, which will resonate for me long after life returns to some semblance of normalcy. Deliveroo, one of the most popular online food delivery services in Paris, has been a total letdown in a variety of different ways during the pandemic. When items went missing from a delivery that was “sans contact,” or unverified before the delivery person had already left, Deliveroo refused to offer credit for the missing items. Not only that, but their customer service was incredibly slow and snide. I won’t use Deliveroo again.
The other local store that has been a big letdown is Monoprix, the chain of food, clothing and houseware stores that I’ve always really liked For the last year or so, they seem to have been off their game, especially as the rapid expansion of Marks & Spencer in Paris has probably cut into business, because it’s fun to shop at Marks & Spencer and it’s not fun to shop at Monoprix anymore.
The deliveries I’ve had from Monoprix have been a disaster, too. A couple of articles were missing, and despite repeated interactions with customer service, I’ve never been reimbursed. They also substituted goods of lesser quality for what I’d ordered–changing my organic lardons to regular ones, for example, and charging me the same price for the lower quality item. Their deliveries also generate too much unrecyclable plastic, so suffice it to say that my long-standing loyalty to this store has been badly dented.
We miss you in Paris this spring, and one way or another, we’ll be waiting for you once it’s possible for you to travel again. And if you’d like to dream a little bit about your next trip to France, you might enjoy an article I wrote last year for TASTE OF FRANCE, a new food magazine devoted entirely to French food and wine.
