L’Escargot Montorgueil, restaurant on Rue Montorgueil since 1832

L’Escargot Montorgueil, the restaurant in the Halles district, opened in 1832 on Rue Montorgueil, at the corner of Rue Mauconseil. In this market quarter it fed shopkeepers, cooks, workers, artists and writers, and made the Burgundy snail its speciality.

It became one of the tables of fashionable Paris. Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt, Sacha Guitry, Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin were among its customers. The cooking stayed Burgundian, and the snail gave the house both its name and its motto: « Doucement mais sûrement », slowly but surely.

The house has kept its nineteenth-century sign and its Second Empire décor of gilding, dark panelling and mouldings. Its ceiling, painted by Georges Clairin in 1900, comes from Sarah Bernhardt’s town house. The whole is a listed historic monument. The Laporte family runs it today and keeps its recipe: Burgundy snails cooked in a house butter.

At 38 Rue Montorgueil, a pedestrian street in the heart of Les Halles, it serves its snails, foie gras and onion soup every day, at lunch and dinner, followed by cheese or dessert. It remains a neighbourhood address as much as a stop for visitors to Paris.