marché d’aligre, paris

located at Place d’Aligre, 75011 Paris. (bad and rather rudimentary) website here.

so yes, I know, I have shared a few markets with you before, and mostly from france. but really, I haven’t seen any markets elsewhere in the world that have produce better, or even comparable to that in france. ripe fruit, vibrantly-coloured vegetables, the tastiest food you’ve ever seen all piled up in a large compound – not always the prettiest, the shiniest, or any of those incredibly mundane and utterly meaningless attributes supermarkets all over the world have decided are desirable in our fruit.

I won’t bore you with much more, and there are loads of other posts from paris residents about the market aligre, or marché d’aligre. but since our last visit to paris nearly five years, this is the market my father most remembers for having eaten very good rotisserie chicken (they no longer sell chicken legs, only whole chickens and so h didn’t get some this time) there, as well as its wide stretch of produce.

the different markets in paris all have character, and are unique amongst themselves. aligre is noisy, full of middle-eastern store vendors who alternately dish out free samples of sweet fruit and scold foreigners for taking photos or handling the food – very hectic, very cheap, and probably the sort of place you’d want to  do your marketing if you lived in paris.