Paris

Touller Outillage

• Rated as: 4/5
• Price band: 2/4

The Parmentier area is already stiff with good bars, but this one is still well worth a detour from your favourite. Opened by the team behind L’Alimentation Générale (just next door), Touller Outillage used to be a toolshop but, like many of the area’s businesses, succumbed to the new wave of local land use – eating and drinking. The result has

Tigersushi Furs

• Price band: 2/4

Tigersushi Furs combines clothes and records, a dangerous combination. The first branded outlet for the seven-year-old Tigersushi music label, the little boutique in the third arrondissement seamlessly mixes its twin passions for fashion and music. On the rails and shelves, there’s a simple, elegant collection. Most of the t-shirts sport the

Le P'tit Garage

• Rated as: 3/5
• Price band: 2/4

As sweetly tuned as Chuck Berry's cherry-red '53, this quite marvellous rock 'n' roll bar is the pick of the bunch on rue Jean-Pierre-Timbaud. Not that the owners have fitted it with Americana or waitresses on rollerskates; the L'il Garage is as basic as the real car-fit business a few doors down the road. Stuffing bursts out of the bar stools and

La Place Verte

• Rated as: 4/5
• Price band: 2/4

Next to the famous Café Charbon, the big, beautiful terrace of La Place Verte stretches out over a small shady square. It goes without saying that it’s rammed on sunny days, but if you can’t get a table, the inside isn’t bad either. The café was renovated in 2011, and the new '70s-inspired ‘design’ décor is a pleasant background to an evening

Chez Justine

• Rated as: 4/5
• Price band: 2/4

This is the place to get fed and watered before heading to Nouveau Casino or to L’International for a gig, and to see the film crews gathered in the corner who have made this their official canteen. The food isn’t half bad either, the quality of the ingredients and cooking lifting the kitchen above the level of the bar’s neighbourhood dive feel.

Giotto e compagni

The Louvre invites you to Florence, Assize and Padua in the time when Giotto di Bondone (c.1267-1337) was decorating the churches and Basilicas of the Italian peninsula. The visionary painter of ‘Trecento’, Giotto, with his delicately composed religious scenes and three-dimensional sense, prefigured the humanist art of the Renaissance. The 30 or

Vanessa Winship

• Critics choice

Winner of the Henri Cartier-Bresson prize, British photographer Vanessa Winship crossed the Atlantic in 2011 to rummage in the rubble of the American dream. She brought back a black and white record of a tour that was touched with melancholy, during which she met solitary people, isolated roadways and a few animals, lost on the verges of Uncle

La Fine Mousse

• Rated as: 4/5
• Price band: 2/4

Beer offerings in Paris can be distinctly below par, but thanks to the trend for all things organic and artisanal, a few treasures are emerging from the sea of Stella and Kro: La Fine Mousse is one. It’s run by a team of ‘bièreologues’ who man the twenty or so taps, offering a plethora of artisanal beers from France, Belgium, Norway and England.

Jesper Just

• Critics choice
• Free

Jesper Just uses the language of cinema as easily as if he shot his first short while still in nappies – except that in place of phrases with a beginning, a middle and an end, the Dane prefers to juggle crazily with film’s visual grammar, codes and references, creating snatches of narrative sculpted with light and music, successive moments that he

Coltrane

• Rated as: 4/5
• Price band: 2/4
• Critics choice

Don’t expect to find a jazz club at this new Marais venue; Coltrane is a hip bar with an eclectic music policy and a great outdoor space, set behind an art nouveau drinking fountain in a narrow cobbled pedestrian street, making for a delightful spot with the air of a village square, perfect for sunny apéros. Inside there are stone walls and bright