The best seafood in Paris

Stylistically a bit Ikea, while also conveying the relaxedness of a Breton beachside bar, cosy blue-and-yellow restaurant Mersea serves an upgraded take on the classic British ifish and chips to diners on the restaurant-packed Rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Its menu is simple: customers must choose between two types of delicately breaded fish which come with a side of freshly cut chips and a sauce of their choosing...

Nestled down a small alleyway adjacent to the Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, this unassuming little canteen gives little away on the outside. Venture beyond its anonymous black façade, though, and you’ll come away very happy indeed.  On our visit, the miso mussels make for a particularly bracing entrée, while an indulgent pollock brandade is a hearty treat of a main...

At The Fish Club, chef Julien Burlat crafts seafood dishes with traditional French flavours, served with an excellent wine selection. On the tables the menus serve double duty as place mats, adding a charming seaside shack touch to an otherwise properly Parisian space with graphic wallpaper and cosy banquette seating. The menu covers classic dishes and shellfish assortments as well as some properly ambitious cooking...

Yves Camdeborde is a name to conjure with, and L’Avant Comptoir de la Mer is another hit for the cutting-edge chef. This 2016 venue follows in the footsteps of his extremely popular Avant Comptoir, but this time focused on seafood. Like its older sibling, here you eat standing up, and everything happens at the bar – from ordering to getting stuck in to the quality wines and tapas-style dishes...

A non-nonsense oyster restaurant that recalls a charming Breton crêperie; it’s all piles of picnic hampers, paper tablecloths and the jolly bustle and clatter of butter knives, cooking pots and oyster shells as the owner deftly flicks the shellfish open. Certainly not a destination for fine dining, it’s still a brilliant pace for hungry and thirsty groups of friends who want to sit around a table and consume plates of ultra-fresh oysters...

At l’Ilot, you don’t have to pay Parisian prices for the best catch of the day. The venue is tiny but beautiful, with big slate menus, earthenware pots and white parquet, a bay window, a few photos on the walls and a terrace for nice days – it all has a solid, comfortable charm.Perch yourself on a stool and order your white wine, then browse the menu:  €4.50 to €9.50 for pink or grey Madagascan prawns, €6.50 for whelks and €8 for a half crab...

Although Les Halles no longer bustles with the same type of food sellers that once inspired Zola to describe the former market as the ‘ventre de Paris’ (the ‘belly of Paris’), foodies still flock to its environs. With its eye-catching décor of exposed brick walls, blue tiling and fishing nets, Breton-style fish restaurant La Marée Jeanne reels customers in before dinner with sumptuous starters like fried smelt fish and excellent Quiberon bay oysters...

Atao looks like a dream of a fisherman’s cabin – marine blue on the outside, then wood, white and colourful touches of fresh flowers inside, with an old mariner’s portrait, an anchor and a black and white Gwenn ha Du flag from old Brittany. At night, soft candlelight enhances the atmosphere even further.This pretty place is owned by the daughter of an oyster farmer from Morbihan, who showers her guests with platters of fine oysters...

With its beautiful old model sailing boats, lobsters, shells and bottles of sand everywhere, l’Ecailler du Bistrot feels a little like a fishing boat during the calm after the storm.Decide between, for example, incredible platters of fruits de mer, oyster selections or the lobster set menu – 12 oysters and a half lobster with fries and pudding. Aside from shellfish, there are also things like scallop carpaccio, turbot and sole meunière...

In a spruce little room with white tablecloths and hanging lamps, the 14-seat Régis oyster bar concentrates on one sole product: oysters from the Marennes-Oléron, a world-famous cultivation area. You can choose between top class strains, rare strains, farmed strains that are enriched for four months in lightly salinated beds, and the very popular Belon oysters (€59 a dozen, though prices start at €25 a dozen)...