Good restaurants in France

I liked these for Paris https://www.davidlebovitz.com/paris
https://parisbymouth.com

I use Trip Advisor with great success.
Mike

The only guide for restaurants and hotels anyone ever needs is the Michelin Red. It is my travel bible.

To the extent I use any guide, it's Trip Advisor.

If you can read some French, the Routard guides to French cities and regions are very good for value-for-money restaurants. You can get the Routards in any French bookshop.

Thank you. I checked for all three of these in the Apple iBook Store, and found some items but not any food guides for France.

Routard
Petit Futé
Michelin Red

For example, the Michelin guides that were red, applied to Chicago and San Francisco. Are the guides above only in French, and if so how do you search for iBooks in French?

I have used TripAdvisor and Yelp - however, sometimes places that serve desserts, drinks, or steaks are more highly rated than they should be.

It would be a mistake to think that the Michelin Red is only for hotels. It is quite clearly a guide for both hotels and restaurants and there are many more recommendations than just those receiving stars. Michelin Red for France has a new edition annually. No source has more up to date recommendations.

Gault et Millau is also very good but is limited to restaurants only. You´ll find many of the Gault et Millau recommendations are also included in the Michelin Red.

I don´t particularly follow the Trip Advisor recommendations and do not generally recommend them other than to say that the top half of the recommended restaurants are generally better than the bottom half. There are just too many examples of top rated restaurants on the TA list that are clearly nothing other than oddities or flukes.

Websites or blogs are also an excellent source of information. David Lebowitz and Paris by Mouth are noteworthy but I would also add lefooding.fr and simonsays.fr (in French only). Francois Simon also has a blog in English.

Michelin does not just list restaurants with stars, in fact those are very few, and often a little pretentious and formal. On the other hand, they separate ratings for "bibs"

Bib Gourmand: good quality, good value cooking: ≤ 40 €

Paris by mouth is another resource, already mentioned,
https://parisbymouth.com/

I strongly agree with previous poster: A good many of Paris by Mouth's recommendations and reviews are quite outdated -- often being 4-5 years old or with the restaurant being out of business. I'm surprised that so many people here and on TA cite it as a top site for food reviews.

That is one reason I follow John Talbott's blog; they are mostly current. At least you know the chap ate there yesterday -- or this year, at least. If you are not familiar with him, he is an American ex doctor and Vietnam Vet (a bit long in the tooth, like me) who now lives in Paris. He tries to go for lunch at a different place every day or so with his wife and/or friends and writes charmingly about the food, service, cost, and decibels. He includes pictures of the carte and the food. He recently posted a list of the top restaurants at which he dined in 2018, which you might find helpful. Scroll down to see his recent reviews.

Last time we were in Paris (May-June 2017) we tried a few of his recommendations and were never disappointed.

http://johntalbottsparis.typepad.com/

The 10th arrondissement is the place to be:
Philou and La Petite Cambodge come to mind.

I have the Michelin Green guide to France, and they have restaurant recommendations, in about similar style and number as Rick Steves's books. However, I have two problems with their recommendations.
1. They will list several cities in a row, then give restaurant recommendations, and its unclear which city they are referring to - they just give the street addresses but not the city.
2. In general the Michelin guides seem to be more thorough than other guides, and cover more cities - but everything is a positive view. I really appreciate RS and other books which give a more straight forward review - for example, places like Toulon or Marseille, which are not all nice safe places.

As I mentioned, I can't find the Michelin Red online or ebook. I did find that Michelin has a website which interactively shows restaurants by map area, and it seems pretty good - albeit in French only.

Thanks for the Paris blogs. Those are quite helpful. But what about the rest of France?

The Michelin Red France is not necessarily in French only. All of the names and addresses are in French as translations would be pointless but each recommendation has pricing guidelines and other pertinent information using symbols. The book is widely available either at your local bookstore or on line. All of the recommendations are also available on their website.