I highly recommend Secret Food Tours Paris, they offer tours in different neighborhoods. Our tour was in Montmartre, and we basically learned how Parisians shop for food, going to the baker which included a tour of the Boulangerie and seeing how they make the baguettes , the cheese shop, the meat shop, the chocolate shop, the wine shop collecting foods along the way, looking at restaurant windows to decipher all the stickers and how you use them when choosing a restaurant, which all culminated in a picnic sort of meal with all the foods we had gathered. Our tour guide "PJ" was wonderful and we felt like we had made a friend, he had gone to University in America and spoke excellent English. Small groups, lots of walking, learning about the history, also the guide explained that because you just shop for a few days at a time you are walking the neighborhood, and you "know" the shopkeepers and they know you, you see your neighbors doing the same and become familiar with each other and the pulse of the neighborhood. He also talked about sourcing food and how the food purchased is either produced on site or sourced within a certain mile radius, the shop knows the suppliers, they have been to the farms etc. It was all very eye opening and I had a lot of "aha" moments, which really changed my view of Parisians and I felt more in tune to what was happening around me after that tour. We plan on doing more of these in different neighborhoods next time we go. It was more of an experience than a tour.
