The Best Baguettes in Paris in 2023

Peo­ple just want to eat bread. This much we know.

While arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence sug­gests humans were bak­ing bread at least 14,000 years ago, it was the French peo­ple who  altru­is­ti­cal­ly stepped in to slake the human yearn­ing for crusty breads with the inven­tion of  « La Baguette  » just over 100 years ago, in 1920 to be exact. Baguette trans­lates as « wand » or « baton » in French. Très phalique, non?…The More You Know: French law states that it must be made with no less and no more than flour + salt + water + yeast. Do you think the baguettes on our list clas­si­fy as legal? Shame­less­ly tear away a piece and judge for your­self as you walk the streets of Paris — the only eat­ing while walk­ing not frowned upon around here. And — très impor­tant — get a baguette ‘tra­di­tion’ and not a plain old baguette.  The baguette tra­di­tion is the crusti­er, denser hot sis­ter to the, let’s be hon­est, ~basic~ baguette… But first…

~Some Tea, Spilled to Go With Your Bread~

This being France, there’s reg­u­lar­ly some baguette scan­dal, like famous bak­ers copy­ing their non-famous teacher’s bread (NOT nam­ing THOSE names).So way, way, back, in 2021, Makram Akrout of « Les Boulangers de Reuil­ly » (see below),  won the cov­et­ed « Best Baguette of Paris »…and was all set to deliv­er his wands to the Elysée Palace where the Pres­i­dent would share them with world lead­ers, etc. Jour­nal­ists did their thing and dis­cov­ered that Mr. Akrout seemed to have maybe kind of post­ed some ISIS Jiha­di stuff on Face­book — It hap­pens to us all, non? You send inap­pro­pri­ate nudes, or you sud­den­ly become famous and your old black­face videos or Jiha­di posts sur­face (LOL, which is worse?), and there’s some ‘splain­ing to do. #sore­lat­able. Should a baguette be judged on its mer­its, com­plete­ly sep­a­rate from the hands that *alleged­ly*  typed out some pro-ISIS stuff cir­ca 2015? (Philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions… WWSD What Would Jean-Paul Sartre do?) But we love sink­ing our teeth into phi­los­o­phy here in France. Case in point: I attend­ed a neigh­bor­hood meet­ing after the 2015 ter­ror attacks, which I Amer­i­can-ly expect­ed to be about for­ti­fy­ing secu­ri­ty, etc. What I found was French­es debat­ing the nature of fear. LOL. I’m not from Texas but in com­par­i­son to them, I felt like Yosemite Sam.

But back to bread: 

Besides the gossip, the 2023 Best Baguettes in Paris have just been announced –

We welcome them to the vaunted PARIS > D E F I N E D masterlist of unmissable, baguettes below: