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Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper has made an art of the French tradition of long lunches.Illustration by Maya Nguyen
It is August in Paris and everything is closed – even the bistros.
The writer Simon Kuper and I try three or four restaurants in the hip 11th arrondissement, to no avail: chairs on tables in unlit dining rooms every time. The French take their vacations seriously.
Never mind – lunch must be eaten. Kuper has made an art of it, even a philosophy.
He has lived in the French capital since 2002, working as a columnist for the Financial Times, a newspaper famed for its long-running series Lunch with the FT. Kuper has had his share of impressive meals on the company dime – an interview with Roger Federer was a highlight – but lunch, to him, is about far more than flexing his expense account. It is, more or less, the reason he still lives in Paris.
His most recent book, 2024’s Impossible City, is about living and, yes, lunching in 21st-century Paris.
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To North American sensibilities jaded by sad desk salads and limp sandwiches, the midday meal may seem like an odd, even frivolous, thing to fixate on – but not to the French. Lunch is arguably the embodiment of what is best about their country.
We finally settle on an Italian trattoria where Kuper is acquainted with the staff, and take a seat on the terrasse. People-watching is one of the essential pleasures of Parisian life. As Kuper points out, almost everyone lives in tiny apartments, so as much as possible, they live their lives outdoors. It’s partly why the norms around public behaviour can be so icily policed – no kids throwing food in restaurants, s’il vous plaît – and also why the French take such care in their appearance. For them, the world is a stage. Notice, says Kuper, how the terrasses in Paris mainly face out toward the street, the better to gaze at passersby.
We don’t look long at the menu, opting quickly for la formule, the daily two- or three-course special that Kuper almost invariably orders at any French restaurant. These are the dishes likeliest to be made with fresh ingredients, rather than reheated from a freezer. The tradition of la formule constitutes nothing less than a “daily miracle,” Kuper says, and “the best affordable lunch on earth.”
It combines two crucial and seemingly paradoxical French traits: A deep seriousness about pleasure – imagine if Canadian office-workers routinely ate gourmet prix fixe lunches, often with meal coupons provided by their bosses – and a love of regimentation and rules. That is how we get the rigid tradition of deliciousness that is la formule.
Our starter is a ciabatta with soft white cheese and cherry tomatoes. It may not be as perfect as the chestnut soup at one Parisian bistro that almost made Kuper laugh with delight, but it is striking how much care the kitchen has taken with such a simple dish, the cherry tomatoes blistered just so.
I suggest we each order a glass of wine – an old Lunch with the FT trick for getting subjects talking – and Kuper acknowledges that he’s “easily convinced.” Having wine with lunch isn’t as automatic as it once was in France, but it’s still far from the taboo that would raise eyebrows and maybe a quiet e-mail to HR in North America.
Again, the light Sicilian red we choose is not quite like “Jesus pissing in your mouth” – the memorable French formulation for exquisite wine that Kuper relates in his book – but it is fresh and minerally and delicious.
We can hardly spend the whole meal talking about our food, and fortunately Kuper and I have something major in common: We’re both fathers of twins. I knew this about him before we met, from his wife Pamela Druckerman’s brilliant book about child rearing in France, Bringing Up Bébé. My twins are under 2 – adorable, chaotic toddlers – while his are teenagers now. “It gets easier,” he assures me. “Stay strong.” I take a gulp of my wine and choose to believe him.
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One thing you rarely have to worry about as a parent in France is what your kids will have for lunch. At their state-funded crèches – daycares – and later in public school, French children eat like gods. In Impossible City, Kuper recounts how his children found their school food “so superior that they’d often spend dinnertimes at home raving about lunch” – a sure sign his anglophone brood were becoming true Parisians.
His kids were all born in France, but he’d backed his way into Frenchness. Born in Uganda to South African Jews, Kuper grew up in the Netherlands then went to university in England and elsewhere, before buying an apartment in Paris because housing prices were so much lower – and the lunch options so much better.
In London, he’d usually scarf something at his desk, or stagger out into the sunlight for a sandwich at a place known as “Toilet Harpers,” because the building had once been a public toilet. In Paris, there were 20 good restaurants in walking distance of his flat.
“Looking back,” he writes, “I can say honestly, without being pretentious, that lunch may have been the main reason I stayed.”
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As our plats principaux arrive – heaping bowls of al dente fettuccine with a meat ragu – Kuper acknowledges that the cheap, slightly sleepy Paris he moved to is long gone. At the turn of the millennium, all the economic momentum – along with the cultural dynamism and social fracturing that came with it – was stacked in London’s favour. Paris felt disarmingly provincial, but as a result it was affordable in comparison.
“Some cities benefit by skipping modernity,” says Kuper, tucking into his pasta. “That’s over now.”
Today, Paris is a world hub again, thanks to an influx of finance in the wake of Brexit that has driven up housing prices, and high rates of immigration that have helped turn the city into continental Europe’s densest and most ethnically diverse. That has changed Parisian customs, including those around food and self-display.
The best meals are no longer necessarily French – my favourite dish on this trip was a salad at a Georgian restaurant – and not everyone considers themselves an object of display for people having long lunches on a terrasse any more. I told Kuper I’d been surprised to see people doing chin-ups in an outdoor gym in the Jardin du Luxembourg recently.
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“Before the pandemic it was not socially acceptable to wear exercise clothes in public,” he said. “Working on your body in public is still not quite part of the Parisian ethos.”
Then again, what is and isn’t Parisian changes fast these days. The most ubiquitous restaurants in many neighbourhoods are French “taco” stands, which sell a weirdly addictive confection halfway between a kebab and a burrito that was invented in the Lyon suburbs by cooks of North African descent some time in the 2000s.
“Paris has this very strong culture of Frenchness, but it’s also a global city,” said Kuper.
As if on cue, we end our meal with a perfectly pulled espresso, never a guarantee in coffee-challenged France. Although we had eaten an Italian meal, shared between a cosmopolitan Jew and a Canadian WASP, speaking English the whole time – in a season when most French people had fled to the countryside − we had nevertheless just finished one of the great rituals of Parisian life. We had well and truly lunched.
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