Food stores

One of the things I admire about France is that every employee, regardless of the company they work for and their own seniority, gets a mandatory five weeks of paid vacation time per year. Even though this doesn’t include me as a freelancer, I’m happy to see others getting the time they deserve to relax and enjoy their families. I already knew that my native US was far behind other countries in this respect, but this color-coded map on Wikipedia makes the contrast even more embarrassingly clear.

Anyway, as you might expect, the most popular time to take one’s time off is the summer, and the month of August has long been a time of exodus for Parisians. Everyone seems to leave all at the same time for various destinations, be they in France or farther afield. One side effect of this is that lots of small businesses all close simultaneously. A stroll around a non-touristy neighborhood will take you past a series of shuttered storefronts and notice signs such as the ones below (click any photo to switch to slide show mode) informing customers of their re-opening dates.

I always get a bit of an eerie feeling, walking around the empty streets of my mainly residential neighborhood in August. I also often forget that things are closed and make a detour to get a coffee from Dose, for example, only to find the place deserted and to curse my poor memory.

So while it’s a good thing for people working in France, this annual departure can be a bummer for tourists who come to Paris in part to try our vegan restaurants (usually small businesses that close all of August).

If your chosen destination restaurant (or clothes shop, etc.) has a sign in their window, you can try looking for the following key phrases to decipher it and see how long it will be closed:

fermé – closed
ouvert – open
fermeture estivale – summer closing
congés d’été – summer vacation
vacances annuelles – annual vacation
horaires d’été – (shorter) summer hours
réouverture – reopening (date)
en vacances – on vacation
bel été – have a good summer (= without us) 😉

But to help make planning easier, I’ve prepared a short list of some places where you can still find vegan food the rest of this August. Note that this list is not exhaustive and that it’s a good idea to double-check their current hours on their social media pages or call ahead. Don’t rely on what Google or even their own websites say, because those won’t necessarily be updated to reflect any special summer conditions.

Vegan places that are open

Every year, a handful of vegan restaurants in Paris do stay open all summer. Here are some that I personally recommend (plus one brand-new one I’ve heard good things about). Note however that Thursday, August 15th is a national holiday and some of these places might be closed that day.

Aujourd’hui Demain
42 rue du Chemin Vert, 75011 Paris (metro Richard Lenoir)
Restaurant/café and grocery store. A good place to hang out with a coffee and catch up on your email or work. If you’re in the mood for a sweet indulgence, don’t miss their Freak Shake.

Cantine Le Myrha
70 rue Myrha, 75018 Paris (metro Château Rouge)
Spacious and well-lit, excellent place for a buffet brunch with friends on a Sunday. You may make the acquaintance of Rainette, the restaurant’s sweet tabby cat, who sometimes wanders among the customers to be petted.

Cloud Cakes
6 rue Mandar, 75002 Paris (metro Sentier)
As their name suggests, they have some heavenly cakes! Savory lunch items available too until the mid-afternoon. Limited seating at busy times, but well worth a visit.

Le Faitout
23 avenue Simon Bolivar, 75019 Paris (metro Pyrénées)
All the ambiance of a traditional French brasserie, none of the usual animal products. Live music on Thursday nights. Don’t miss their platter of housemade vegan cheeses!

Hank Burger
55 rue des Archives, 75003 Paris (metro Rambuteau)
8 rue de Rochechouart, 75009 Paris (metro Cadet)
Really nice burgers, with a choice between their standard patty and a Beyond Beef one. I also love their potato wedges with a cheese topping and their chocolate chip cookies!

Hank Pizza
18 rue des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris (metro Arts et Métiers)
Vegan pizza with a range of preset toppings, including a couple of gluten-free ones each day. They have a particularly spacious upstairs dining room. If you come here, be sure to stop by the vegan grocery store Mon Epicerie Paris on the same street (see below for a description).

Les Petites Pâtisseries Raw & Vegan
44 rue du Chemin Vert, 75011 Paris (metro Richard Lenoir)
So many creative and delightful raw desserts! I especially like their little fruit tarts and matcha opéra cakes. Rumor has it you can now also find blue mermaid nice cream bowls there! On the same block as Aujourd’hui Demain (see above).

Le Potager du Marais
24 rue Rambuteau, 75003 Paris (metro Rambuteau)
Traditional French dishes in vegan versions. I often recommend this place to visitors since it’s a way to try classic dishes without the animal products. I love their seitan bourgignon, onion soup and crème brûlée.

Sunday’s Coffee Paris
171 boulevard Voltaire, 75011 Paris (metro Charonne)
This place is so new, I haven’t had a chance to go there yet. People on Instagram seem to like it though, so take a look if you’re nearby!

Wild & the Moon
Various locations throughout Paris
Another chain place with generous hours. Try one of their superfood elixir drinks or one of their dishes of the day (often a rice and curry bowl). I love their raw desserts, especially the lemon tart. Their location near Opéra is especially nice as it gets less traffic.

Other options

Certain other places are fairly reliably sources of vegan eats.

Restaurants

L’As du Fallafel
32-34 rue des Rosiers, 75004 Paris (metro Saint Paul)
Home of the best falafel sandwich in Paris! Prepare yourself for a line at the door. Closed Friday evenings and Saturdays all year round.

Ethiopian restaurants
Various locations throughout Paris
Due to a cultural tradition of abstaining from all animal products on certain days of the week and at certain times of year, Ethiopian restaurants generally always have a vegan option (sometimes labeled “vegetarian” on the menu). Be sure to specify that you don’t want fish. Google “restaurant Ethiopien Paris” plus the number of your arrondissement to find one. My personal favorite is Le Ménélik in the 17th.

Lebanese restaurants
Various locations throughout Paris
The chances of finding falafel (an accidentally vegan food) are high at just about every Lebanese restaurant. Look for places with the country’s very cute cedar tree flag.

Maison Landemaine
Various locations throughout Paris
Try their croissant ordinaire (regular croissant), which is always vegan, but be sure to specify ordinaire so they don’t give you a non-vegan butter croissant. They also have a vegan chausson aux pommes (apple turnover) and usually at least one vegan fancy dessert/pastry. Check the labels in the display case for the “VEGAN” in very small green text, or ask if unsure. They also sometimes have a vegan tofu, avocado and sun-dried tomato sandwich. Their baguettes, like all baguettes in France, are vegan by default.

Prêt à Manger
Various locations throughout Paris
This chain store is from the UK, which means it’s quite vegan-friendly. In France, they offer one vegan sandwich (avocado, sun-dried tomato and black olive spread on baguette type bread) as well as some vegan soups, chia pudding and sometimes a muesli bowl. They make coffee and matcha drinks with plant milk at no extra charge!

Vegan grocery stores

Vegan items can increasingly be found at mainstream grocery stores (check the bio (organic) aisle in particular), but with the stores below there’s no need to scrutinize labels since everything at them is fully vegan. This can be a good source for groceries for your AirBnB, or for things to pick up and put in a baguette for a DIY sandwich-on-the-go.

Aujourd’hui Demain
42 rue du Chemin Vert, 75011 Paris (metro Richard Lenoir)
Combination grocery store and restaurant/café. Also sells clothing, shoes, purses and personal care products. They offer an extensive range of vegan cheeses and certain hard-to-find items such as vegan honey and liquid smoke. Beyond Meat products are available here.

Naturalia Vegan
4 locations in Paris and the near suburbs
Part of the Naturalia organic grocery chain, these stores have a much wider selection of vegan cheeses, yogurts and plant-based imitation meats than other Naturalias. Unlike the other vegan grocery stores listed here, Naturalia Vegan locations also offer fresh produce.

Mon Epicerie Paris
31 rue des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris (metro Arts et Métiers)
This little grocery has a surprisingly wide selection of products, including Beyond Meat and some others that are found nowhere else in Paris as far as I know (for example Linda McCartney frozen items). Carries more Asian products than the other ones.

Un Monde Vegan
64 rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, 75003 Paris (metro Strasbourg-Saint Denis)
The first all-vegan food shop to open in Paris, Un Monde Vegan is still a popular source of interesting grocery products and books.

With that, I wish you a pleasant stay (or staycation) in Paris. Bon appétit!

Some years ago, I lived in San Francisco—still one of my favorite cities. One of the things I loved about it was its neighborhoods populated by minority ethnic groups, including Chinatown, North Beach (Italian), the Mission (Latin American), Japantown and even a tiny French area (a few restaurants, a French church and the French consulate between Union Square and Chinatown). I loved the cultural and linguistic plurality these areas brought to the city, in the form of distinct architecture, street signs and advertisements in languages other than English, restaurants and grocery stores selling foods from other lands. In some of these districts, especially Chinatown and the Mission, I sometimes felt as though I had stumbled through a portal to another land.

Like any self-respecting major city, Paris has its minority ethnic neighborhoods too. My favorite one is the area roughly between and around La Chapelle, Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est, home to large numbers of people whose families hail from Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan as well as countries farther afield such as Madagascar and Mauritius. There isn’t really an official name for this neighborhood, although I very often hear it referred to as the quartier sri lankais. For the sake of full inclusion I will refer to it here as Little South Asia.

All along rue du Faubourg Saint Denis and the various side streets are shops selling colorful saris and jewelry, sweets and Bollywood DVDs, as well as restaurants and cash & carry stores. Garlands and fluttering mobiles can sometimes be seen decorating the streets for various holidays.

The most festive time of year in this neighborhood is definitely La Fête de Ganesh in late August or early September, when an elaborate and spectacular parade honoring the elephant god winds through the streets from the Temple Sri Manika Vinayakar Alayam (17 rue Pajol) around the La Chapelle area and back again. The participants include women wearing pots of burning camphor on their heads, shirtless men pulling the Ganesh statue down the street with ropes, flutists and drummers, mustachioed dancers with papier-mâché horses and larger-than-life ambulant statues. The festivities are accompanied by energetic smashing of coconuts on the streets and free distribution of cold drinks.

The rest of the year, this neighborhood’s main draw for me is VT Cash & Carry (11-15 rue Cail), a wonderland of spices, lentils, nuts, teas and exotic fruits and vegetables hidden behind a nondescript storefront on a side street. When you enter, the shop at first appears to be fairly small and cramped, as many of the cash & carrys (carries?) in the neighborhood are. But as you proceed further through the coats at the back of the wardrobe, it opens up, revealing a much larger space full of aisles packed to the ceiling with wares and edibles of all kinds.

It is of course a great place for spices, both common and rare, at better prices than at mainstream grocery stores. And it’s also where you can stock up on staples like lentils, rice, flours and grains.

Lentils of every description and color!

If you’ve got the muscles to carry it, and room at home to store it, a 20 kg (44 lb.) bag of rice is really your best buy. Or, of course, if you run a restaurant…

Every time I go here, I plan to get a can of ramboutans to see what they taste like, but then I invariably end up with too many other heavy things and decide to leave it for the next trip.

Some interesting jams and chutneys (ginger, chow chow, candied citrus peel, pineapple, lime, ambarella, passionfruit, tamarind, soursop, baobab and more) and a mysterious English thing called golden syrup that I have not tried yet. My favorite jam ever, which I discovered here, is made with physalis fruit, also known as aguaymanto in Peru and pok-pok in Madagascar, where this particular brand comes from. It is simply heavenly, with a tanginess reminiscent of kiwi and a sweeter side that brings to mind raisins or dried cherries.

These metal bowls, usually seen only at restaurants, are an elegant way to serve dal or curries at home.

Here, you can get many imported European items that are hard to find elsewhere, such as Marmite (if you enjoy it, or like me are trying to acquire a taste for it), psyllium powder (good for thickening raw desserts), date syrup, the aforementioned golden syrup and (not shown) Heinz baked beans, cream crackers, Scottish and Irish oatmeals and baking ingredients. VT Cash & Carry is also the place to head when you’re looking for your favorite brands of English tea.

Other often-tricky-to-find items include fonio, an African semolina, and peanut butter. Yep, in France peanut butter is a somewhat exotic item. You can still usually find it at regular grocery stores, but at really high prices. My favorite place to get PB is actually at Franprix, in their growing organic & fair-trade section, both because of these characteristics and because the taste is just nice.

Some ready-made sauces in foil packets that you immerse in hot water to heat up. Some of them are vegan (just check the ingredients carefully).

The produce section always contains a few items I’m unfamiliar with, so I sometimes buy things to find out for myself what they are and how they taste (trying to remember to note down the name before leaving the store!). Here, among other things I was already able to identify, we have fresh and dried turmeric root.

I did once buy a wood apple in spite of an Indian fellow shopper’s warning that they aren’t very good. Turns out she was right!

Also available toward the front of the store is sugarcane, young coconut (good for raw dishes) and fresh aloe leaves.

If after your lengthy shopping experience you need to rest a bit before facing the crush of people on the metro ride home, pop into one of the three Krishna Bhavan restaurants on the same street (at 15, 21 or 24 rue Cail) for a tasty bite. At the one shown above you can also get take-out veggie samosas at the front counter for €1 a piece.

Enjoy your explorations!

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Solid gold vegan recipes and more from a United Statesian living in Paris, France.

Category: Food stores

Ghost town

Vegan places that are open

Other options

Restaurants

Vegan grocery stores

Little South Asia