Eating Your Way Through Paris - for Cheese Lovers

One of my favorite things about France is the absolutely amazing array of cheeses. The fromageries of Paris are mind-blowing for cheese lovers, and I recommend tasting tours in Paris because they'll inevitably stop at a fantastic fromagerie. I'm returning to Paris next month for a tour of boutique hotel properties, and for sure I'll be stopping to taste and buy some deliciousness before I head home. If you aren't a cheese lover before coming to France, you'll definitely leave as one!

Virtuoso article below from 1/15/2026 by Adam Erace can be found HERE.

Follow the city’s master cheesemakers to taste the generosity – and future – of French fromage.

It was more than misting, but not quite drizzling, one night in Paris just before Christmas. You know the kind, when you step out of the hotel thinking, This is fine, and Those fancy hotel umbrellas are so huge and stupid, then after walking a few blocks realize this is definitely not fine and you’d give anything for said huge and stupid umbrellas.

It was 30 minutes to opening at one of Paris’ most in-demand restaurants, and I was more than peering, but not quite leering (OK, I was probably leering) into Bistrot des Tournelles in the Marais. Like svelte French meerkats, chef Geoffroy Langella and his team looked up together from their staff meal. The chef graciously cracked the door, then said he’d save me a bar seat if I came back promptly at opening. The caveat: I was actually 90 minutes early.

When I returned, cold and wet, the little bistro swaddled me in effortless hospitality, Sauternes-colored light, and molten cheese flowing from the cordon bleu de volaille. Tournelles’ marquee main is one of Langella’s childhood favorites: “My father’s butcher shop was famous for its cordon bleu,” he told me – and, his parents would admonish, they were for customers only.

Liquid, 24-month-old Comté poured forth when I sliced into the crispy chicken-and-ham grenade. “People sometimes don’t understand why there is so much Comté,” said Langella, who owns Tournelles with wine pro Édouard Vermynck. The technical explanation: They need to overcompensate for leakage during cooking. The spiritual one: “You feel when you come to this place, it’s generous.”

Even as an extremely picky kid, I always loved cheese. I wouldn’t touch the most innocuous of white fish, but I’d go nuts on ripe Gorgonzola. Sometimes my mom would defrost and bake one of the only “fancy” dinners I would allow: chicken cordon bleu. Not exactly Tournelles-level, but man, that gush of piping-hot cheese? Just as satisfying.

During my self-guided cheese tour of Paris, which was inspired by the opening of the city’s first cheese museum, I kept coming back to Langella’s word: generous. More than other food in this city of magnificent foods, the fromage ecosystem possesses a spirit of largesse. Makers, mongers, and maestros generously aided my attempt to absorb the beloved traditions and understand how Parisians are innovating within this holy lactic medium.

There’s never been a better time for cheese lovers in Paris. But there’s also never been a shakier time. The Musée Vivant du Fromage, the first place I visited on my cheese journey, is a cultural celebration – but also an existential insurance policy for an imperiled craft.

“Even in France, people lose their link to the agricultural world,” Guillaume Gaubert, the museum’s director, said as we stood in front of an illustrated map of the country’s AOPs, the 47 nationally protected, place-specific cheese styles. “We think that, in 20 years, it’s going to be difficult to sell good, unpasteurized cheese here – a lot of farm owners are going to retire, and there’s nobody in school to replace them.” The museum, playing the long game against corporate consolidation and industrialized production, frequently hosts school field trips. Under woolly brows, Gaubert’s intense gaze brightened. “We try to plant some seeds in their heads.”

Founded by master fromager Pierre Brisson, the museum opened last summer with cheesemaking artifacts, a live curd-making demo, and other exhibits. A fromagerie anchors the front of the space, and downstairs is a cellar for aging and tasting, where my guide, Nicolas Ferrand, waxed poetic over pungent mini Époisses: “The passion that we give to food, that’s what makes us French.”

Could an American keep up? Reader, he tried.

I shopped classic and avant-garde fromageries and arranged picnics in my suite at the Mandarin Oriental Lutetia: Taka&Vermo’s kumquat-shingled Saint-Félicien, Androuet’s bloomy-rind goat inlaid with cherry-tree leaves, Quatrehomme’s fig-stuffed indigo doughnut of Fourme d’Ambert. I ate at restaurants with young cheese and aged cheese and cheese-adjacent cheese, like the yogurt-esque swoops of Fontainebleu (a mix of fromage blanc and whipped cream) with saffron-pear preserves at the diminutive natural-wine canteen Olga. I had cheese with breakfast, cheese with lunch, and cheese at midnight, after I asked the front-desk staff at Esprit Saint Germain to send my welcome plate right up despite the very late check-in.

La Laiterie de Paris in the scrappy 18th arrondissement. Opened by former farmer Pierre Coulon in 2017, it was the first cheesemaking operation within the city limits. The friendly staff wrapped me a zesty, za’atar-dusted chèvre topped with honeyed hazelnuts, which I brought to lunch with Catherine Down, American expat and author of the Ciao Down French cuisine newsletter. “Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have seen that, but some of these younger cheesemongers who have multicultural backgrounds or have traveled a lot are bringing global flavors into the scene,” she said. “Taking these traditions and making space for them to look a little different, that’s the future of French-ness.”

Down and I were having lunch at the Printemps department store’s food hall, in famed cheesemonger Laurent Dubois’ café, which, frankly, is less impressive than his four fromageries. (My favorite is the one in the Marais, where I eyed triple-crème beauties beaded in whole Burgundy cherries and chèvre snowballs inset with valentines of apricot-verbena preserves.) For dinner she recommended fromagerie and restaurant Monbleu Faubourg Montmarte. That evening, twentysomethings devoured Morbier-topped burgers and Brillat-Savarin cheesecake in its packed dining room as I plunged potato after potato into an outrageous, gooey Mont d’Or baked with rosemary, garlic, white wine, and honey. It was like a self-contained version of my other childhood cheese favorite, fondue.

At Le Repaire de Cartouche in the 11th, another Down haunt, I passed through the vermilion facade to find a multigenerational family with a wrinkly bulldog pooling around the patriarch’s Nikes and a ridiculous spread of house-made charcuterie and shucked shellfish lining the bar. Lunch begins with this grand serve-yourself buffet, which Rodolphe Paquin and his wife, Corinne, have been doing since 1997. Plated roast chicken, carved from birds spinning on a rotisserie, follows with frites and creamed morels, and for dessert, Corinne piles the bar with îles flottantes, cloudlike chocolate mousse, and seven cheeses, most from Normandy, puzzled together on a wooden board.

I sliced into the heart-shaped Neufchâtel and went to add it to a dish I’d already heaped with desserts. Corinne, likely alarmed by this Golden Corral interloper but too generous to show it, calmly passed me a clean plate and some advice to live by in Paris: “Cheese first."

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