"Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they [visited] they ate something better than they had ever eaten before," wrote the New Yorker's former Paris correspondent Adam Gopnik. And while the city's famous restaurants remain open to those who can afford them, Parisian home cooking is somewhere out of sight, unless of course you have Parisian friends who are good at cooking and happen to invite you over for dinner. Paris might be full of culinary epiphanies, but rarely do you get to meet the person who created them for you.
There is, thankfully, another way. You can book yourself a genuine Parisian dinner party by paying a visit to the website, Meeting the French (meetingthefrench.com). Once you have registered, the site matches you with a host - each carefully vetted - according to age and common interests and then invites you into their home for a meal. You help choose the menu beforehand and pay a fee in exchange for their hospitality. Prices range from £37pp for two courses plus wine, to £58pp for three-course menu with wine.
The site also offers gastronomic tours which promise to lead you through the streets of Paris, while a "confirmed gastronome", usually a food journalist or chef gleefully demonstrates the culinary delights of their city. The full three-hour tour costs £58pp, including tastings along the way, and is limited to groups of six.
The tradition of placing tourists in the homes of locals for dinner is older than you might think. The Danish tourist board began such a scheme in the early 70s, but abandoned it, apparently due to over demand. Recently, the Danes have taken it up again with dinewiththedanes.dk, a private company that operates on the same lines as the Parisian site (from £34pp for a two- or three-course dinner, drinks and pastries). If you fancy the often underrated Dutch cuisine, there's a site for that, too (dinewiththedutch.com, £33pp, under-8s free).
You can even eat with someone much closer to home. The site homedinnersinwales.com also offers organised "table surfing", although the woman who runs it tells me that the service is predominantly aimed at foreign visitors.
What's surprising about all of this is that not one is a social networking site. You can't browse for potential hosts as if it were a gourmet version of Facebook. Instead, each operates more like a matchmaking service or private club with someone behind the scenes pairing hosts and diners with a precision usually given over to the arrangement of a seating plan at a wedding.
However, like-a-local.com keeps its guest list wide open. Covering much of the Low Countries and Spain, it might offer a less rarefied dining experience than Meeting the French and its clientele is much younger. It is cheaper too. A tour of local tapas bars in Barcelona, for instance, has an average fee of around £27pp all-in.
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