Passport to Paris: The Ultimate Paris Food Tour

If you’re visiting Paris for the first time and are uncertain of how to approach French cuisine, Le Food Trip can help you. The start-up, created in 2015 by best friends Martin Herbelin and Adrien de Dumast, is part of a growing trend of Paris food trips that helps tripists discover different Parisian neighborhoods and the best of French gastronomy.

Herbelin and Dumast have formed partnerships with English-speaking artisan bakeries, delis, cheese shops, wine cellars and coffee shops in Paris to create their food trips. Le Food Trip offers different trips that explore specific areas of Paris, like the “Gourmet Food Trip,” which takes groups to sample luxury food products in the affluent 7th arrondissement, or the “Flavors of France” trip, which offers tastings in the trendy South Pigalle neighborhood for a comprehensive palette of traditional French food.

For a perfect in-between, the start-up just released its Tasting Passport, which offers tripists 12 degustations located in Montmartre/South Pigalle, Oberkampf, and by the Eiffel Tower, allowing visitors to explore three neighborhoods of Paris with distinctly different personalities. With the Tasting Passport in hand, one can sample French wine, olive oil, croissants, cheese, jam, sausages, coffee, cakes, foie gras, calissons (traditional Provençal almond cookies), and Breton biscuits. Passport holders can trade detachable coupons found in their individual booklets for expertise and samples from each artisan producer.

The Tasting Passport also offers information in English on how to select the perfect French wine to information about the history of foie gras. They also in list all the practical info as well as short bios of the producers.
Each Tasting Passport is redeemable for one person and costs 34 euros. Passport holders have three months from the pick-up date of their booklets to taste all of the products. Although there are numerous Parisian companies now offering food trips, many of these trips are comprised of guided three-hour visits and are limited to one neighborhood of Paris.

The Tasting Passport offers an independent experience to tripists to be able to choose when they want to sample products according to their own schedules, in addition to encouraging discovery of culturally-rich Parisian neighborhoods that stray from the typical tripist’s path.
Author: Ariana Mozafari
Ariana was my research assistant for my book Paris Cocktails, she is a budding writer and a recent graduated in journalism at American University in Paris. Follow her blog and read all of her articles on Paris for a variety of publications.