Customer Reviews

Eating and Drinking in Paris: French Menu Reader and Restaurant Guide (The What Kind of Food Am I? series)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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76 of the 123 pages are menu translations, French to English, and the vice versa so you can ask for what you want or translate what they have; all this very helpful and in a light, compact easy to carry book that makes it worth taking. The "Ten Simple Rules of Dining in Paris" in the begining along with the introduction comments are very good, they will serve you well to help make eating in Paris less stress free. The 25 pages of eating place recommendations is of less use, considering how many there are in Paris this is a very small sample. Near the Sacre-Coeur their recommeded cafe turned out to be a shabby affair with curious looking characters hunched over their rundown tables, which sat directly accross from a more relaxed less rundown place that we felt more comfortable eating at, which had fine food. You have to decide for yourself.
The book is worth taking with you. Paris is thick with places to eat, making it easier to just duck in anywhere with this wonderful little guide to manners and translation. Don't rely too much on the recommendations as the only places to eat at. It would have been nice if they had included a few paragraphs about the different types of wine.

This is the third time that I used this book while on vacation in Paris. I actually used the previous edition on my last two trips in 2000, and used this edition for my most recent trip in September 2001. The book is worth the money!

When I got to Paris, I made my way to some of my favorite restaurants and obviously started using the menus. This time, it was much easier to understand the selections. I remembered the definitions of a lot of the menu items from the previous two trips (using the book) and so understanding the menus and ordering the food was relatively painless this time. Yes, I actually improved my French vocabulary by using the book during my last two visits! The book is not exhaustive; however, I would say that at least 75% to 80% of the words on most restaurant menus are listed and defined.

I was so happy about my success with the menus that I decided to give some of the restaurant tips in the front of the book a try (pages 19-51). Now you have to understand that I never visit restaurants listed in guidebooks - EVER! I think that we tried three of the restaurants that were listed in the book and we really liked them. There weren't a lot of tourists in these restaurants and the food was pretty good.

I would like to make a comment about the best restaurants in Paris (page 29). Yes, it is very difficult to get a dinner reservation at these places -- I usually call about one month in advance. However, I almost always can get a lunch reservation at one of these restaurants without much difficulty. If you are dying to have dinner at a specific restaurant and you can't get a reservation, then try to have lunch there instead. I planned our last trip at the last minute and so I was not able to call restaurants ahead of time from the USA. When I arrived in Paris, I tried to call for dinner reservations and got the usual "complets" (full) on the other end of the line. Then I called and got a lunch reservation at L'Ambroisie with no problem! We waltzed in at about 1:00 pm, sat at a great table in a beautiful room and had a wonderful three-hour French lunch. The restaurant said that the lunch and dinner menus were the same (on that day) and so I did not feel that we had a lesser dining experience. This was confirmed when we were presented with the $300 check for lunch for two at the current exchange rate of 7FF/$1!

I highly recommend the book. It will save you a lot of time and trouble while using French menus. Also, you can try the restaurant recommendations and still feel as if you had an authentic French dining experience! I would also recommend their guidebook for Spanish-speaking countries.

I got this book as a gift. It has tips on restaurants, bistros and wine bars in Paris. The largest part of this book is a menu reader that explains what you are ordering on a menu in France. What a tough job these authors had! Exploring food markets and restaurants must be hard work. But seriously, this guide sends you to restaurants with good food and reasonable prices.

This little book - the size is perfect for a purse - was indispensible in Paris. I don't speak French but this guide book let us be confident about what we were ordering without hesitation. It was often borrowed by people at other tables who were having a difficult time. Loved the little "handwritten" notations in the margins.

We just took this book with us in November 2003 on our vaction in France: Paris, Loire Valley, and Normandy. We only used the Menu guide portion (which is the majority of the book), not the restaurant recommendations. I had this book out at every meal, and it saved us MANY times from making ordering mistakes. For tips on dining in France, I also highly recommend reading "Savoir-Flair: 211 Tips for Enjoying France and the French." Our trip would have not gone so well without either of these books!

I love this guide. It has tons of restaurants in Paris that you don't find in other books (and don't require you to spend an arm and a leg to have a great meal). I especially like the list of food and wine stores, wine bars and the food markets.

Really, the best part of this book is the thorough menu reader. Almost everything that I saw on menus in Paris was explained. If you love to eat, don't go to Paris without this book. You get a lot of information for [item price].

I would not call this book a must have for traveling to Paris but it was a handy reference guide to find out what something was on a menu. It did save me from at least one mistake in ordering something I would not have wanted to eat! On the other hand, I felt that it was a little high-brow in that the least expensive restaurants were listed as below $25 and, call me cheap, but that is not necessarily budget dining for my family. We found that drinks were often the most expensive part of our meal and this book does not touch on that at all. I used Rick Steves' Paris 2003 book much more often than I used this one. Get both if you can afford it.