Paris—The City of Light, Love, and Now: Vegan Cheese
Paris used to be famously unfriendly to vegans, but something has changed…
The first time I visited Paris, I spent most of my mornings just walking down the charming streets eating a baguette and drinking Coca-Cola. It was the early 2000s and besides overpriced pasta marinara and lots of Indian food that was almost certainly not ghee-free, cheap bread was the only safe vegan breakfast in a city full of crêpe stands and ham-and-cheese-filled baguettes.
But every year since then, it’s been getting better. One year, I found some great deep-fried tofu and vegan duck at a Chinese place near the Sorbonne. And enjoying an incredible falafel on the steps of Trocadero with a view of the Eiffel Tower felt like a small victory over a city that hadn’t seemed particularly interested in catering to my diet. In 2009 on our honeymoon, my husband and I ate vegan chocolate and mango gelato under a red awning in one of the cafés near The Louvre, and it felt like things were beginning to change in Paris. Almost ten years later we came back to find that they had.
