Spending a few days in Paris before or after your river cruise? Two guided walks we took offer rewarding ways to explore the city: a food-focused neighborhood tour with chef Edward “EJ” Keller and a French Revolution walking tour with Walkative. We used both guides during our Paris stay and recommend them for the knowledge, stories and local perspective they brought to the streets.
The two experiences suit different interests. EJ introduces you to the bakeries, cheese shops, specialty grocers and restaurants of the Montorgueil–Les Halles neighborhood, with options to add tastings or a cooking workshop. Walkative’s roughly two-hour, pay-what-you-wish tour takes you from Place Colette to Place de la Concorde, exploring the events and places that shaped revolutionary Paris. Choose the one that appeals to you, or better yet, do as we did and make time for both.
Here’s what each tour offers and how to arrange it as part of your Paris stay.
Explore Paris’s Food Shops With Chef EJ Keller
A walk with EJ gives you more than a list of places to eat. EJ helped us understand what’s in the windows, what to ask for at the counter and how ingredients become everyday French meals. We joined him while scouting Paris experiences for guests on our 2027 barge trips in France.
At a bakery on Rue Montorgueil, for example, he pointed to the meringues. The bakery’s generous display suggested a kitchen finding uses for egg whites left over from making yolk-rich pastry creams. It was the kind of detail we might have missed without him, and a good introduction to the practical knowledge he shares along the way.
EJ is a Californian who moved to France in 1996 with his French wife. He learned French food at her family’s table and in Paris restaurant kitchens, including Le Grand Véfour and L’Escargot Montorgueil, before starting his private chef business, Carotte et Caviar, in 2005. He has lived in this neighborhood for nearly 30 years. His apartment is around the corner from the market street.
EJ also told us he once wanted to be a DJ. We could hear it: an easy delivery and a knack for holding an audience, whether the subject was cheese ripening or the disappearance of Paris’s great wholesale market.
Montorgueil is hardly undiscovered. Visitors mingle with residents outside its food shops and cafes. Yet walking here felt like crossing a threshold into the everyday business of feeding Paris. You can spend a morning looking at monuments. Here, we were learning what someone might buy for dinner.
Rue Montorgueil is a rue commerçante, a permanent shopping street, rather than one of the rotating open-air markets that set up on particular days around the city. Bakers, cheesemongers, produce sellers and pastry shops make the neighborhood feel like a market spread across storefronts.
Maison Collet wears navy and gold, its windows stacked with loaves and pastries. Customers sat at small round tables on the cobbles with paper-wrapped pastries in front of them. In the window, pink meringues crowned with sliced almonds rose in a heap above plain white ones. A little card called the pink ones meringue parfumée and priced them at 4 euros.
Inside, EJ explained how that daily business keeps changing. Alongside baguettes and specialty breads, the display offered the makings of a takeaway lunch: sandwiches, salads, something to drink and a pastry. Someone with little time could still assemble a meal from a neighborhood bakery.
Halles Montorgueil spills onto the sidewalk. Crates of grapes, figs and walnuts sat under handwritten price cards, with a pile of golden mushrooms in the middle of the display.
At Halles Montorgueil, a produce shop, autumn squash prompted another lesson. The bright orange potimarron, stacked above sweet potatoes and shallots, carried a card for 2.95 euros a kilo. EJ described roasting a thin-skinned squash, known in French as a potimarron, with its skin on. Wash it, halve it, remove the seeds and add a little olive oil. Serve it in wedges, or blend the flesh with cream for soup. Walnut oil, he suggested, could add another flavor.
There was nothing elaborate about the preparation. That was what appealed to us. Standing beside the vegetables, we could imagine making dinner rather than simply photographing someone else’s.
La Fermette announces itself with a terra-cotta awning and a black-and-white cow standing on the balcony above. In the case, a Mont d’Or, a raw cow’s milk vacherin from the Haut-Doubs, sat in its spruce box with its pale rind folded in wrinkles. We picked up one to take back to our Airbnb and cook for dinner alongside the potimarron we had purchased. The morning’s food tour had become our evening’s menu.
Inside the cheese shop La Fermette, EJ gave us a way to approach the bewildering choice of cheeses. His formula was five parts: a goat cheese, a blue, something creamy, something firm and something challenging. The last could be pungent, unfamiliar or simply a cheese you would never think to choose yourself. It gave the board a little adventure.
He explained the work of an affineur, who brings cheese to maturity. Time and conditions help determine texture, aroma and flavor. Looking around the shop, we began to see the selection as the result of many decisions made after the milk became curds. Then EJ described baking our Mont d’Or with garlic and white wine until it became something to spread over potatoes or toast.
Farther along, we visited Stohrer, founded in 1730 by Nicolas Stohrer, pastry chef to Louis XV. The shop describes itself as Paris’s oldest pâtisserie. EJ’s own preferences were wonderfully specific: a palmier made from puff pastry and the Alsatian specialty kouglof. Behind the glass, a palmier stood propped on wooden pegs, its puff pastry fanned into a heart and priced at 3.50 euros. Painted flowers climbed the wall beside the kouglof.
We also visited Au Rocher de Cancale, whose pale blue-and-gold facade makes it one of Rue Montorgueil’s most inviting stops. Founded in 1804 and celebrated for its oysters, the restaurant attracted writers including Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier and Eugène Sue. Balzac even sent characters from La Comédie humaine there to dine.
The original establishment stood across the street; its successor occupies No. 78 today. Inside, beneath old ceiling beams, painted wall panels preserve another glimpse of the neighborhood’s past: a gentleman raising a glass, game birds and a basket of fruit. It’s a worthwhile pause on a food walk, where Paris’s culinary and literary histories meet.
EJ shared some of his best stories outside L’Escargot Montorgueil, the restaurant at No. 38 that dates to 1832. Gilded snails crawl across the sign above the door, and ferns and ivy spill from the window boxes. EJ worked there when he first came to France. He remembered an elderly owner who watched the restaurant closely and a demanding kitchen where he learned by repetition. On special evenings, the chef would give him something new to prepare. He might struggle through the first fish in a case before finally producing a few he could serve with confidence.
We asked about escargots. Sometimes, we told him, the snails arrive small, dry and disappointing. What makes a good plate?
“Escargot is really an excuse to eat butter,” he said.
And garlic. Above all, he advised having bread ready for the sauce. He recalled preparations with parsley and garlic, apple and curry, and Roquefort and walnut butter. We had asked about the snail. He had us thinking about the bread.
Near Les Halles, EJ put the neighborhood into perspective. For centuries, the central markets supplied Paris. The great iron-and-glass pavilions designed by Victor Baltard became their architectural signature. In 1969, the wholesale food market began its move to Rungis, outside the city.
Standing in the gardens above today’s shopping and transport complex, we tried to picture the deliveries, porters and restaurant buyers who once worked here. EJ explained how the food trades extended into the surrounding streets. Kitchen equipment, tableware and ingredients all belonged to the same working neighborhood.
You can still follow those connections. He pointed out lettering on an old storefront that recorded an earlier business in porcelain, crystal and cutlery. We would probably have walked past it.
At G. Detou, the specialty grocery on nearby Rue Tiquetonne, he explained how the name echoes j’ai de tout: I have a bit of everything. The oils, dried mushrooms, chocolate, nuts and pastry ingredients made the joke easy to appreciate. Shelves of Pommery and Martin-Pouret mustards climbed the wall, and a sign in the window promised retail sales at wholesale prices. It was also the sort of shop where we could see buying something useful for our own kitchen.
We ended at Chardonnay, where the five of us took a table for lunch. The bistrot-comptoir sits on a tree-lined side street and wears a green-and-white striped awning strung with small lights. On our October 2026 visit, a chalkboard by the door listed a 23-euro formule déjeuner: chakchouka, terrine, velouté de potimarron, salmon, blanquette de veau with rice pilaf and linguine aglio e olio. Potimarron appeared on the lunch menu, too, this time as soup. We ordered from the board, with a bottle of red Burgundy. Dessert was île flottante, a meringue afloat on custard, another appearance of the egg whites EJ had discussed that morning.
Lunch also gave us time to ask EJ about everyday life in Paris, beyond the shops and ingredients we had explored that morning.
By then the morning had a shape. We had a few names, a little history and more than one idea for dinner.
Reach EJ Keller
For travelers joining a French river or barge cruise, a morning like this adds something to a Paris stay. EJ can arrange a market visit and cooking experience before, between or after our 2027 barge trips, and he works with independent travelers year-round.
His programs include a walking tour of the Montorgueil–Les Halles quarter, taking in Place des Victoires, Galerie Vivienne, the Palais Royal, the Bourse de Commerce and Saint-Eustache. A market tour adds tastings of cheese, chocolate and more. A market tour with a cooking workshop sends you shopping with EJ, then back to his kitchen or your apartment for a hands-on lesson and a casual three-course meal. He also designs custom tours around themes such as chocolate, pastry or bread, and offers private meals and kid-friendly events. These are customized experiences rather than a standardized tour with a fixed duration or published price. Contact EJ to agree on the itinerary, timing and cost, and ask him to specify whether lunch, tastings and any food purchases are included in your estimate or paid separately.
Contact EJ Keller of Carotte et Caviar at chef@carottecaviar.com, by mobile or WhatsApp at +33 6 69 26 99 23, or through carotte-et-caviar.com.
Explore Revolutionary Paris With Walkative
For a history-focused walk, we recommend Walkative, a walking-tour company offering guided city walks on a pay-what-you-wish basis. We joined its French Revolution tour the morning after our walk with EJ, meeting near where we had finished the previous day. Our guide introduced himself as “Thomas the French” and carried the company’s yellow umbrella. His roughly two-hour walk from Place Colette to Place de la Concorde was a highlight of our Paris stay.
The appeal for visitors is the chance to connect familiar Paris landmarks with the events that unfolded around them. Walkative’s published itinerary includes the Palais Royal, the Tuileries Gardens and Place Vendôme, linking the French Revolution with later upheavals, Napoleon and the Paris Commune. At Place de la Concorde, the elegant square takes on another meaning when you consider its history as the execution site of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Choose this tour if you want historical context for central Paris in a manageable two-hour outing. It pairs well with EJ’s food walk: one helps you understand the city’s political past, while the other introduces its daily culinary life. Our experience with Thomas reinforced what we appreciated about walking with EJ: a knowledgeable guide gives you reasons to stop where you might otherwise keep going.
Walkative’s Paris in Revolt! The French Revolution Tour operates on a pay-what-you-wish basis, with no fixed ticket price. Advance booking is required; look for the guide with the yellow umbrella at Place Colette.
