Essential etiquette for eating and drinking in France

À table! The call for everyone to sit down to eat is music to French ears. Gathering together around a table to share a meal is the bedrock of culinary culture and a hallowed joy that’s indulged in – at length – pretty much daily. Don’t contemplate rushing any meal in France.

Petit déjeuner or petit déj (breakfast) is a straightforward traditional affair which, depending on your culinary viewpoint and tolerances, can be the stuff of dreams or an unwelcome high-carb, sugar and gluten bomb. Eggs, ham, pancakes, sausages, cereals, nuts, grains and other American-breakfast imports are only really cooked up for brunch, generally served at weekends in new-gen coffee shops and international diners in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities.

Coffee kick-starts the day – either a long café filtre (filter) or milky café au lait. Children drink cold milk or chocolat chaud (hot chocolate). In hotels guests get a cup with handle and saucer, but in French homes breakfast drinks are typically drunk from a bowl – in which a croissant or buttered chunk of baguette, often left over from the day before, is faithfully dunked. The alternative is a tartine: a slice of bread or breakfast cracker smeared with chocolate-hazelnut spread, honey, or unsalted butter and jam.

City dwellers often eschew break-fast at home altogether, grabbing a quick coffee and croissant on the way to work. Weekends usher croissants, brioches (sweet bread) and other elaborate viennoiseries onto the breakfast table.

The French eat croissants fresh from the boulangerie (bakery) and plain – forget butter and jam. Croissants au beurre contain butter and have their tips pointing away from each other to form an elongated triangular shape. Cheaper crab-like croissants (croissants ordinaires) contain margarine or another inferior fat and sport curled tips that almost touch. Warm a day-old croissant in the oven for five minutes to freshen it up.

A national emblem and breakfast staple, this iconic stick of white crusty bread is typically spread with butter and jam. It is brought fresh from the boulangerie each morning, must be 55–70cm (21–27in) long, weigh 250–300g (9–10.5oz) and contain 18g of salt per kilogram of flour (0.3oz per pound). Come nightfall, the best of baguettes (Paris hosts a baguette Grand Prix each year to track down the city’s finest) has already started drying out; by the next day it is rock-hard.

To skip lunch or – heaven forbid – have a sandwich at your desk is a crime. A meal few French go without, lunch is often the main meal of the day and involves a good couple of hours of wining and dining in good company, from around noon to 2.30pm. In towns and cities, urbanites gravitate to their favourite cafe or bistro, brasserie or restaurant, to enjoy the good-value plat du jour (dish of the day) or special formule (set two-course meal) or menu (three-course meal at a fixed price).

Lunching is invariably al fresco, beneath a bucolic vine-laced pergola with uplifting green views, or around tightly packed tables on a vibrant pavement terrace. Most order a starter and main with wine and end their meal with a restorative espresso.

Sunday lunch is sacred and lasts hours. Gourmets-on-the-go who dare buck tradition for fast food tend to grab a ready-made baguette sandwich or miniature quiche at a boulangerie (most offer a lunchtime formule comprising a savoury item, cake or pastry and drink for a set price) to eat in a nearby park.

Cities sport a smorgasbord of tempting takeaway options: food markets and trendy food trucks, gourmet burger bars, deli-style traiteurs selling salads and cold cuts, street stands cooking up crêpes smothered in sweet crème de marrons (chestnut cream), French-Asian fusion by Michelin-starred chefs, Chinese steamed buns and kosher holes-in-the-wall... On the Atlantic coast nothing beats a dozen freshly shucked oysters on an oyster farm looking out to sea.

The afternoon snack is sacrosanct. Colloquially known as ‘le quatre heures’ (literally ‘the four o’clock’), it is relished by French children who race home from school to indulge in the French equivalent of afternoon tea.

While goûter for sweet-toothed foodies in Paris might mean polished macarons or cream-filled millefeuille and a silver pot of Dammann Frères tea in a sophisticated salon de thé (tea room), goûter for French elsewhere is anything from a pain au chocolat grabbed at the local boulangerie to biscuits, fruit or a slice of homemade yogurt cake. A slab of milk chocolate wedged inside a chunk of baguette is an old-timer that never goes out of fashion.

Cafes and bars countrywide buzz with life from around 5pm as bon vivants unwind over an apéritif or apéro (early evening drink) or – as it is dubbed in some hip city-slicker circles, un after-work. In cities cocktails are hot. Come weekends, a leisurely noon-time apéro before lunch is acceptable and insanely delightful.

Accompanying snacks range from a ubiquitous bowl of complimentary peanuts to a shared board of charcuterie (cold cuts), cheese and cornichons (baby gherkins). Increasingly in French homes, the uber-cool thing to do is invite guests for an apéro dînatoire – hybrid drinks-dinner lasting late into the night and promising a meal’s worth of shared savoury bites. To see what apéritif to order or concoct at home.

Dinner is traditionally lighter than lunch but is increasingly treated as the main meal of the day. A full-blown dinner is an elegant, impeccably executed ritual comprising une entrée (a starter), un plat (a main course), fromage (cheese) and dessert, followed by coffee – always an espresso – and a digestif perhaps.

In gastronomic restaurants, meals open with a complimentary amuse-bouche (literally ‘mouth entertainment’) – a savoury morsel crafted to excite and ignite taste buds, often combining unexpected flavours. Each course is paired with an appropriate white, red or rosé wine – almost always made in France, often a local vintage.

Reassuringly, very few French indulge in the full monty on a daily basis: ordering a starter and main, two starters perhaps or another combination of courses in restaurants is perfectly acceptable. In provincial France, regional culinary tradition sometimes spurns the classic three-course meal structure for a hearty ‘one pot’ meal such as bouillabaisse (fish stew) in Marseille or cassoulet (duck and bean stew) in Languedoc. Standard bistro and restaurant times are 7pm to 10.30pm, but most French deem it scandalous to sit down to dine earlier than 8pm.

It is not difficult to unwittingly commit a culinary faux pas or appear a barbarian in France. The French are fastidious about manners and the art of eating certain foods – familiarise yourself with French dining etiquette basics before tucking in à table.

Dress the part. Smart casual is best, particularly in cities and on the chic French Riviera where local hipsters dress up for dinner. In provincial towns and rural France, anything goes providing you’re well covered. No bikini tops or bare male chests – even in beach restaurants.

A rare handful of top-end, gastronomic restaurants exercise a formal dress code: jacket and tie for male diners, smart dress for women. When asking for a menu in your best French, don’t confuse carte and menu. In French une carte is the written list of dishes available that day, while un menu is a two- or three-course meal at a fixed price – by far the best-value dining (most bistros and restaurants chalk a menu du jour on a black board) and not at all what it means in English! Lunch menus occasionally throw in a glass of wine and coffee; dinner menus sometimes pair a perfectly matched glass of wine with each course.

Within seconds of ordering, a basket of cut bread will be brought to the table. Butter is rarely an accompaniment, and when it is (often in top-end addresses), it will be doux (unsalted). Except at upmarket addresses, don’t expect a side plate – simply place the bread on the table. And yes, in bistros and other casual diners, it is perfectly acceptable to mop up what’s left of that delicious sauce on your plate with a bread chunk. The French even have their own verb for it: saucer (to mop up sauce with bread). In traditional bistros, you might be expected to keep the same knife and fork for the duration of the meal.

Asking for une carafe d’eau (jug of tap water) is perfectly acceptable. Should bubbles be your cup of tea, order de l’eau gazeuse (bottled mineral water), of which there are numerous French brands.

Do not be alarmed when the cheese board or trolley is rolled out before dessert. This is the order in which the cheese and dessert courses are served in France. Embrace the difference, if only to ensure you don’t miss out on France’s marvellous fromage extravaganza.

Never end a meal with a cappuccino, café au lait (coffee with lots of hot milk) or a cup of tea; the latter, incidentally, never comes with milk in France. Play French and order un café (espresso), invariably served with a complimentary chocolate-coated almond or coffee bean, homemade shortbread or miniature dark-chocolate bar. Alternatively, order une tisane of mint (menthe), verbena (verveine), camomile (camomille) or other herbal infusion.

Returning home from a restaurant with leftovers would have been scandalous a few years ago. Today, to cut food waste, restaurants in France are legally obliged to provide doggy bags – or rather the sexier ‘un gourmet bag’ as the gourmet-proud French prefer to call it – to customers keen to take what they don’t eat home.

Splitting the bill is considered uncouth in upper-crust circles – the one who invites pays. Among younger generations and close friends however, going Dutch is the contemporary norm.