Start from 81 curated places around Paris, FR, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Septime
The 11th arrondissement's most celebrated neo-bistro — a spare, 30-seat room with a seven-course menu that changes daily based on whatever the kitchen sourced that morning. The cooking sits between Michelin restraint and bistro generosity, leaning heavily on vegetables and ferments. It ranks among the world's top 50 restaurants and is booked for weeks; cancellations open the week before service.
Clamato
Septime's walk-in-only sibling runs almost entirely on seafood small plates — raw cuttlefish, seasonal oysters, ceviche, whatever came off the boat that day — alongside a rotating natural wine list. It opens at noon and closes when the kitchen runs out, which on busy days can be by 2pm. Shows up on most serious Paris seafood lists.
Trails & outdoors
Coulée Verte René-Dumont
The original elevated urban greenway — a 4.7km former railway viaduct converted in 1988 into a planted walkway starting at the Opéra Bastille and running through the 12th arrondissement above street level. The Viaduc des Arts section passes over craft ateliers and furniture workshops; beyond it the trail descends to ground level and continues through a series of small formal gardens. Inspired New York's High Line, which came 22 years later.
Canal Saint-Martin Walk
A 4.5km towpath walk along the 19th-century iron-swing-bridge canal from Place de la République north to the Bassin de la Villette, passing through the Canal Saint-Martin neighborhood's most photogenic section of locks, arched bridges, and plane trees. Locals walk it at all hours, petanque players occupy the gravel patches, and the Quai de Valmy side has the better cafe scene.
Things to do
Musée Rodin
Auguste Rodin's former studio and home — an 18th-century mansion with a garden filled with his largest bronze works including The Thinker, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell. The garden is one of Paris's best outdoor spaces regardless of the art, with rose beds and shaded paths. The indoor museum holds the plasters, marbles, and personal collection that show how the work was made rather than just what it looks like.
Musée de l'Orangerie
A small museum in the Tuileries Garden with one overwhelming reason to visit: two oval rooms purpose-built by Claude Monet to display the Water Lilies — eight large-format panels designed for continuous immersive viewing, installed in 1927. The lower level has Cézanne, Renoir, and Matisse from the Walter-Guillaume collection. The whole visit takes 90 minutes and should not be rushed.
Landmarks & sights
Tour Eiffel
The iron lattice tower Gustave Eiffel built as a temporary exhibition piece in 1889 and that Paris never had the heart to tear down. The second floor strikes the best balance of views and manageable crowds; the summit on a clear day stretches to the suburbs. At dusk the tower sparkles gold for five minutes every hour on the hour.
Musée du Louvre
The world's largest art museum occupying a former royal palace along the Seine, containing everything from ancient Mesopotamian reliefs to Napoleonic grand salons. Most visitors spend three hours and see a tenth of it; locals pick one wing per visit and know it well. The Richelieu wing (French painting and sculpture) and the medieval moat under the Cour Carrée are routinely skipped.