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We’re not talking haute cuisine here, but we are talking authentic. I mean the sort of modest little place where Maigret might have gone for comfort during a particularly difficult case. The decor isn’t retro-chic – it just hasn’t been changed for years. The place is small, probably family-run, and the clientèle is not particularly fashionable and mostly French. No one is in a hurry. It’s the sort of place where you can sit around in your shirt sleeves and relax. The food is traditional and honest, and so are the welcome and the prices. It costs around 25€ per person, including drinkable house wine.

Anyone who has been to Paris recently will know how vanishingly rare such establishments are, but they do exist. Over the 16 years that I have been living here, these are the ones that I keep going back to.

Le Balbuzard is a family-run Corsican restaurant in a side-street off the busy Place de la République, favoured by the journalists from Libération. The clientèle is mainly young, arty and French, but not exclusively so. The restaurant is bigger than it looks, as there is an upstairs room, but downstairs is more lively. There is a display of Corsican dried sausages dangling from a shelf on the wall, and a generous dish at 10€ featuring two of them, ‘Ficatelli et saucisse de montagne aux lentilles’, is always on the menu. A starter called simply ‘Antipasti’ consists of a delicious mixture of grilled courgettes and peppers swimming in garlic and olive oil. The ‘Crème à la châtaigne’ is a subtler, more interesting version of crème brulée made with chestnuts, another Corsican speciality, but if they have brocciu, a dessert made with ewes’ milk cheese, do try it. The group I was with burst into spontaneous applause after tasting it.
54 rue René Boulanger, 75010 Paris, tel 01 42 08 60 20. Métro République. Closed on Sunday.

L’Ecurie (The Stables) is a shabby and much-loved Parisian institution, on a hill near the Panthéon. Don’t go there if you are put off by sitting elbow to elbow at wooden tables, eating in a medieval cellar, or using a hole in the floor loo. But if you enjoy a friendly bohemian atmosphere while waiting for your steak to be cooked over a blazing fire and appreciate real value for money, this is one of the last traditional restaurants in Paris offering all this and more. I always end up getting into conversation here with the people at the next table, and they are an interesting mix of ages and occupations, both foreigners and locals. You can sit outside, inside around the tiny zinc bar and kitchen fire, or downstairs in the medieval cellar where the wait for the food is consequently longer. The 16€ menu hasn’t changed over more than 20 years. It includes a salad starter, a good steak or saddle of lamb with frites and aioli (garlic mayonnaise) and rich home-made chocolate mousse or a well-made fresh fruit salad to finish. You are brought a glass of Sangria as soon as you sit down and a glass of Calvados when you order coffee, both on the house. The house Côte du Rhône here is better value than the more expensive bottle.
58 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, 75005 Paris, tel 01 46 33 68 49. Métro Cardinal Lemoine or Maubert-Mutualité. Open 7/7, evenings.

Le Machon d’Henri was recommended to me by a French journalist. I would never have discovered it for myself, as it is in a street near St Germain des Prés heaving with tourist restaurants, the last place where I would expect to find honest cooking. It is a tiny place, decorated with a huge mural of the owner and his friends sitting around the bar. The other wall is taken up with racks of wine bottles, something of a fetish here, where the wine selections of the month are chalked up on the blackboard. The blackboard specials vary with the season and include traditional but rarely-encountered dishes such as ‘Oeuf cocotte à la Provençale’, ‘Boudin noir aux pommes’ (black pudding with apples) and ‘Blanquette de veau’. There is no fixed-price menu here but the menu always includes ‘Foie de veau aux oignons’, a bargain at 14€, and their signature dish in winter, ‘L’agneau de 7 heures’, a lamb stew slowly cooked for seven hours. The place is so cramped and so popular with locals and tourists alike that there are two sittings at weekends, at 8 pm and 10 pm, and you may have to wait for a table at other times. It is worth the wait.
8 rue Guisarde, 75006 Paris, tel 01 43 29 08 70. Métro Mabillon. Open 7/7.

Café de l’Est is an unexpectedly good value brasserie, opposite the Gare de l’Est, specialising in choucroute (pickled cabbage) dishes from Alsace, the region served by the station. It looks just like any other Paris brasserie serving the traditional seafood and choucroute, although the sumptuous decor is 1930s rather than Art Nouveau. But the food and the efficient friendly service are exceptional. The clientèle includes not only people with a train to catch but locals treating themselves to a night out, and the atmosphere is both endearingly provincial and cosmopolitan, a very Parisian mix. The menus are in French, English and German. The ‘Assiette de fruits de mer’ at 15€ consists of oysters, prawns, clams and whelks heaped on a bed of crushed ice, and the 16.50€ formule includes ‘Choucroute Lorraine’(three different kinds of boiled pork, Montbéliard mountain sausage and garlic sausage served on a bed of choucroute) and good Alsatian house wine served in green-stemmed glasses, beer or mineral water. The choucroute dishes arrive on a silver tray with a little spirit flame underneath to keep the food warm, and are enough for two.
7 rue du 8 mai 1945, 75010 Paris, tel 01 46 07 00 94, Métro Gare de l’Est. Open 7/7 to 2 am.

Le Relais du Massif Central is a small restaurant in a side-street behind Place de la Bastille. The area is very cosmopolitan, with crowds of mainly younger people, so the quiet old-fashioned Relais is something of a surprise. I was tickled by the sign ‘Cuisine Française’ over the door and sure enough, although that description is accurate, the restaurant is owned by three generations of a Portuguese family. The clientèle is mixed, with a strong sprinkling of locals and there is a relaxed family atmosphere. The menu, with a quaint English version, runs to several pages including a two-course lunch or dinner formule at an amazing 10.70€, but I always end up ordering the grilled lamb chops, which are done to perfection here. The vast choice means that it is one of the rare places in Paris where carnivores can take their vegetarian friends.
16 rue Daval, 75011 Paris, tel 01 47 00 46 55. Métro Bastille. Closed on Sunday.

Le Taverne Henri IV is a small informal bistrot, in a spectacular location on the Pont Neuf overlooking the Seine but only steps away from the quiet leafy Place Dauphine where people still play boules in the evening. I came across it by chance, not knowing that it is another Parisian institution. It has been immortalised as the ‘Brasserie Dauphine’, Inspector Maigret’s local café, just around the corner from his office at 36 quai des Orfèvres. The clientèle is mainly Parisian plus a few quietly-murmuring tourists, attracted by the restful decor of tiled tables, brass and wood and the generous servings of regional charcuterie and cheese which accompany the fine wines in which the place specialises. It is one of the few wine-bars in Paris serving the delicate, little-known Deutz champagne, which is accompanied by fingers of brown bread and rillettes.
13 Place du Pont-Neuf, 75001, tel 01 43 54 27 90. Métro Pont-Neuf. Closed Saturday evening and all day Sunday.

Annabel Simms is the author of An Hour From Paris (Pallas Athene), revised edition January 2008, www.anhourfromparis.com

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