The Consommation Logement Cadre de Vie (CLCV, if, like 8% of restaurants, you’re nasty) has crunched data from 1,700 inspections conducted by the agriculture ministry and found that 34% of Parisian restaurants received a “good” grade while 62% of restaurants in Avignon could boast the same.
When bundled together with “acceptable” grades, Paris’s numbers rose to the mid-80s—Avignon to 99%. Avignon, which completes the northern corner of the Montepellier-Marseille coastal triangle, only had 200 restaurants inspected, compared to 1,500 in Paris.
All graded restaurants were invited and encouraged to post their results on their façades, but in Paris, only seven of the 188 restaurants checked had chosen to emblazon their walls with their results. That’s only six fewer than Avignon. The results are nonetheless now public as a matter of policy.
Of the twenty arrondissements of Paris, only the 7th had a majority of restaurants in the “good” category.
It also had by far the fewest number of restaurants inspected—less than twenty, in fact, nearly 150 less than the 2nd arrondissement. Montmartre was the most mixed of the feed bags, with a peace symbol-esque split between the good, the bad, and the ugly. A good number of neighborhoods were largely found to have “acceptable” hygiene, putting them in the larger majority of restaurants not directly told to improve their cleaning game.
The worst news isn’t about where you shouldn’t eat in Paris but what you shouldn’t eat. What cuisine had the highest percentage of “needs improvement” ratings? French cuisine.
The CLCV was quick to point out that the sampling size here—around 120 restaurants, or 8% of the restaurants inspected—along with missing data on the exact prevalence of certain cuisines in Paris have likely skewed the data. But if you’re a stickler for hygienic food, you may want to stick to samosas and crêpes instead of sushi and cassoulet.
