Rue Montorgueil

Street · Montorgueil–Les Halles (2nd)Paris,France

A pedestrian food street in Paris where every shop sells one thing, the last working remnant of the Halles market quarter.

Rue Montorgueil is a pedestrian food street a few minutes from the old market quarter, and every shop on it sells one thing. Fishmongers, bakers, cheesemongers and greengrocers stand in the same premises their trades have held for generations, selling to people who live within walking distance. The street was closed to cars in the 1990s, so the tables come out into the middle of it. Number 38 carries a gilded snail the size of a dog over its door. On a Saturday morning it is packed shoulder to shoulder with people carrying bags. This is what is left of Les Halles. The city's wholesale food market filled the streets south of here for eight centuries, and the shops along this one supplied it, fed the porters and sold what the market brought in. When the iron pavilions were pulled down in 1971 the market had already gone to the suburbs and the quarter lost its reason to exist. This street kept its trade. Number 51 has been a pastry shop since 1730, opened by a cook who came to France with Louis XV's Polish queen.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Saturday morning is full and Monday is thin — The food shops keep the week their local customers keep, so Monday closures are common and Sunday trading stops in the early afternoon.
The queues are the signal — On a street where every second door sells something to eat, the line outside a counter tells you more than any sign on it does.
The market it fed is a shopping centre now — Walk two minutes south and the ground where the pavilions stood is a sunken mall with a garden laid over the top of it.
The buildings are older than they look — Many date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and only had shopfronts added later, which is why the upper floors do not line up.

Things to do

1
Walk the street once before eight and once at noon
Come before eight and the street is at work: crates on the pavement, ice going into fish trays, shutters rolling up. Come back in the middle of the day and the same hundred metres is full of tables, queues and shopping bags. The early visit is the one that shows you how the food shops here actually run.
2
Look above head height at the shopfronts
Most of the fronts here are older than the businesses behind them. Several of them are legally protected, which means the owner is not allowed to alter them. Look up for gilded lettering, carved wood, a painted panel or a carved animal: a snail over one door, a sheaf over another. That protection is why a shop can change hands and still look exactly the same from the street.
3
Buy one thing at one counter
Pick a single shop and buy a single thing at it: one piece of cheese, one pastry, one fish. You will be asked when you plan to eat it, and the answer changes what you are handed. A cheesemonger keeps pieces at different stages of ripeness, so a cheese for tonight is not the same piece as a cheese for Thursday.