Paris

France gave the trade its vocabulary, and the Parisian traiteur still behaves like a restaurant that happens to travel. Expect classical service, real sauce work and a quote that assumes you respect the courses.

Paris invented the traiteur, the house that cooks for other people’s rooms, and two centuries later the structure is intact. A Parisian quote reads like a restaurant menu because it is one: a named chef, a brigade, a service plan, a wine list and a maître d’hôtel who will run your evening to the minute. The classical instinct is strong, which is a blessing when you want a sauce and a constraint when you want a fire pit.

Value is better than London for food and worse for flexibility. Food and kitchen for a four course plated dinner runs 160 to 240 euros a guest, service staff 30 to 38 euros an hour, and the rental companies are excellent and strict: count your glasses back or pay for them. What you buy in Paris is produce. Rungis puts the best fish, poultry and cheese in Europe within forty minutes of your table, and a good chef here will build the menu around what was there that morning rather than around what you asked for in March.

The limiting factor is the building. Parisian apartments have long corridors, slow lifts and neighbours with rights, and the service kitchen is often a galley with a domestic oven. Serious traiteurs solve this with a van kitchen and hot cabinets at the door, but it means the last ten metres decide the temperature of your plates. A host who walks the route from van to table with the chef before the date has done the single most useful thing available.