The streets around the Église de la Madeleine are considered one of the most important culinary strips in Paris, thanks to a few legendary food shops and at least one restaurant that absolutely deserve a mention. This walking tour will help you get to know some of the tastiest spots in the area.
We’ll start the tour standing with the Église de la Madeleine right in front of us. You can get there on metro lines 8, 12 and 14 (get off at Madeleine station).
Got here and ready for the culinary journey? Let’s get started!
The food shops and restaurants around the Madeleine
Patrick Roger: the chocolate sculptor
Patrick Roger is considered one of the most important chocolatiers in France, and he’s won no shortage of awards, including the title MOF (a literal translation of the French acronym is “the best worker in France“), which is the highest mark of quality in French cuisine.
Beyond his wonderful (and pricey) chocolates, Patrick Roger is known for the sculptures he creates out of chocolate, so a visit to his shop feels a bit like a visit to a museum.
Address: 3 Place de la Madeleine
Patrick Roger’s official website
Lucas Carton restaurant
This grand restaurant opened in 1880. It used to be run by the legendary chef Alain Senderens (1939-2017), and it’s now run by chef Julien Dumas. It’s one of the best-known and most respected three-star Michelin restaurants in Paris, and also one of the most beautiful. Pay special attention to its gorgeous Belle Époque facade.
If you’d like to get to know this restaurant a little better, and enjoy a bit of nostalgia along the way, I found a video from 1987 that shows us Alain Senderens’s “soldiers” at work, creating some of the most famous dishes in French cuisine.
Address: 9 Place de la Madeleine
Caviar Kaspia
If you had enough money to eat at Lucas Carton and still have some left over, this next place is definitely for you. It’s a combination shop and restaurant built entirely around caviar and seafood.
The place opened in 1927 and was a pioneer in spreading the culture of eating caviar among Paris‘s upper crust. Here you can buy the finest grades of caviar (black beluga, of course) and/or enjoy it at the restaurant attached to the boutique. Here’s a short video in French about the place, which will make every food lover among us drool on the keyboard 🙂
Address: 17 Place de la Madeleine
La Maison de la Truffe Madeleine
After tasting the caviar, it’s time to try another delicacy that’s just as pricey: the truffle.
The shop and the restaurant next to it were founded in 1932 by truffle merchants from the town of Carpentras in Provence. In 1978, chef Guy Monier bought the shop and opened a small restaurant alongside it where visitors could taste the products sold there. In 2007 the place was bought by the Kaspia group (the same caviar shop I mentioned earlier), and two years later a second, larger restaurant opened here.
If you’d like to learn more about this place and about truffles in general, feel free to watch this video (it’s in French, but English subtitles are available):
Address: 19 Place de la Madeleine
La Maison de la Truffe’s website
Crabe Royale
Note: It looks like this place has closed. I’ll leave the text below until I can get to Paris and confirm it myself.
At the same address as La Maison de la Truffe is the restaurant Crabe Royale, which (quite unsurprisingly) specializes in crab and seafood. The restaurant, founded in 1870, is named after the king crab, considered one of the largest crabs in existence (it can weigh around 15 kg) and found mostly in the Bering Sea. You can learn more about this crab in the following video:
At the restaurant you can find Kamchatka king crab, considered the tastiest and the largest of its kind, and surprisingly, the prices won’t knock you off your chair or wreck your stomach (26 euros for a leg or 37 euros for a tasting plate).
Address: 19 Place de la Madeleine
Hédiard and the late Fauchon
These two shops used to be the highlight of a visit to the Madeleine’s culinary quarter, but sadly both have since closed. Even so, you can’t talk about this area without mentioning them, at least briefly.
The Hédiard shop opened in 1854 and initially specialized in spices imported from France’s various colonies. The shop grew over the years and became a food lover’s paradise. The same family that founded it kept ownership until 1987, but after that the shop changed hands several times until it went bankrupt in 2013. Here’s a video in English telling the story of its sad downfall:
The name Fauchon is much better known to travelers, and for good reason. This food shop, which spread across several storefronts on Place de la Madeleine and included, among other things, an excellent pâtisserie and a café, became the place that symbolized this culinary quarter around the Madeleine more than any other.
The shop opened in 1886, founded by Auguste Fauchon, and achieved international success thanks to the quality of the food and products it sold. As a result, the shop grew and opened dozens of branches around the world. That rapid growth eventually worked against the chain, causing heavy losses in the United States and China, made worse by the COVID-19 crisis. As a result, the chain itself survived, but the legendary shops on Place de la Madeleine closed in 2020.
You can learn more about the shop closures in Paris in this video:
Boutique Maille Paris
While the western side of the Église de la Madeleine is packed with food shops, the eastern side has very little to offer a hungry traveler. The exception is the Maille shop, located on the southeastern side.
The Maille family started out as vinegar makers, which they even tried selling in Marseille as a remedy during an epidemic that struck the city in 1720. In 1747 the family began producing mustard and opened their first shop on Rue Saint-André des Arts, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Madame de Pompadour (1721-1764), the famous mistress of Louis XV (r. 1715-1774), fell in love with their vinegar, and from that moment on, Maille became a supplier to the French royal household.
The family’s vinegar and mustard business kept growing over the following years, with much of European royalty buying their famous vinegar and mustard. Fast forward to today, and you’ll be happy to know that their excellent mustard (I haven’t tried the vinegar) is still around, and you can buy and taste it at the shop near Place de la Madeleine. My favorite flavor, by the way, is the wild berry one.
Address: 6 Place de la Madeleine
And that’s where our culinary tour ends. I hope you’re full (at least from looking) and enjoyed it 🙂
Finished the culinary tour around the Église de la Madeleine? Where else can you explore?
First, if you haven’t gone inside the Église de la Madeleine yet, now’s the time. You can learn about its fascinating history in this article.
Second, since the Madeleine sits at a crossroads, you can choose to visit the 1st, 8th or 9th arrondissements once you’re done here. Here are a few articles that can give you some ideas for the rest of your trip:
- Attractions in the 1st arrondissement of Paris: the Louvre and more
- Attractions in the 8th arrondissement of Paris: much more than the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées
- Attractions in the 9th arrondissement of Paris: the Opéra and more
Is it worth staying near the Madeleine?
The answer is a clear yes! The Madeleine is close to Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries Garden and the Paris Opéra. On top of that, quite a few metro lines pass through both Madeleine station and Place de la Concorde, so you can easily reach plenty of places in Paris from here. And the last reason, of course, is the food. True, Fauchon closed in 2020, but there are still plenty of wonderful food shops around (especially relevant if you decide to rent an apartment in the area).
If you take my advice and decide to stay in the area, I recommend checking out these two articles, which list places to stay near the Madeleine:
- Recommended hotels in the 8th arrondissement of Paris (Champs-Élysées, Madeleine, Arc de Triomphe and Chabad House)
- Recommended apartments in the 8th arrondissement of Paris (Champs-Élysées, Madeleine, Arc de Triomphe and Chabad House)
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