A 5-Day Paris Itinerary Built Around What's Actually Open

The order below isn't arbitrary, so here's how it falls out. Champagne has to be a weekday, which rules out the weekend. The Louvre's late evenings are Wednesday and Friday, so the Louvre is Friday. The South Marais is the Sunday exception for food shopping, so that's Sunday. The catacombs close Mondays, which leaves Saturday. Work backward and you arrive on a Thursday, because it's what's left.

Which makes Thursday the day to do nothing on purpose. Land, drop everything at the hotel, and walk with no destination. Place des Vosges is fifteen minutes from most of the Marais and the arcades hold up in the rain.

Dinner should be somewhere that won't hold you to a time. Au Pied de Cochon at 6 rue Coquillière has fed people at Les Halles since 1947 and advertises itself as open around the clock, which is close enough to true that a delayed flight can't cost you a table. Onion soup gratinée, and the grilled pig's trotter with béarnaise if you want the dish the place is named for.

After dinner, walk toward the river. The tower is lit from dusk and it sparkles for five minutes on every hour, and seeing it that way costs nothing and needs no reservation. Tomorrow you go up it.

This is the big day and it's stacked on purpose, because a first visit to Paris should be.

Start at the Eiffel Tower, and understand the trap before you try to beat it. Eiffel Tower tickets go on sale sixty days out and the summit sells first. The problem isn't that they're hard to get. It's that sixty days out, most people haven't settled their dates, and by the time they have, the window has been open for weeks and the summit is gone. The stairs used to be the way around that. From 29 September 2026 they require an advance reservation too, which closes the last walk-up the tower had.

What I book here is a guided ascent with reserved entry to the summit, which runs on a separate allocation, so the sixty-day window stops being your problem. These are semi-private, which is the format most people don't know exists. Groups are usually six to eight, which in practice is a family, or a couple of couples, or a few solo travelers who happened to book the same morning. Small enough that nobody is holding things up at the back and you can ask the guide an actual question, and it costs a fraction of private, which makes it the sensible answer for a solo traveler or for anyone who can't justify a private guide for two.

Lunch at Les Ombres, on the roof of the Musée du quai Branly, looking back at the thing you just climbed. Alexandre Sempéré cooks there, out of the Plaza Athénée, and Gilles Pudlowski has written that the food deserves the kind of praise usually kept for starred restaurants. Lunch runs about €48 to €65. Portions are on the small side and the pacing between courses is slow, so go when you have the afternoon.

One thing that applies at every Eiffel view restaurant in the city. Only some of the tables actually have the view, and those are often a paid upgrade. An Eiffel Tower view on the booking page describes the restaurant, not the table you'll be sitting at. Confirm the specific table in writing.

Then the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa is the part you can't fix by being organized. The Salle des Etats fills within minutes of the doors opening and stays full until they close, because everyone has the same idea and a timed ticket doesn't put you ahead of anyone else holding a timed ticket. Her purpose-built room, awarded to Selldorf Architects in May 2026, doesn't open until 2031, so that's the situation for the next five years.

There are two ways around it. The one that costs nothing is to go at six in the evening, because the museum runs until nine on Wednesdays and Fridays and those are the only hours it sells after the day crowds clear. That helps with the building. It does not help much with her. The one that actually works is a semi-private tour that enters ahead of general admission and reaches her before the room fills, same format as the tower and usually six to eight people. That's the one I book, and it's the only version where you see her without a crowd at your back.

One thing before you buy anything. Admission is €32 for visitors from outside the EEA, raised from €22 in January 2026, and most published guides still print the old figure. That €22 is now the EEA rate, so two people traveling together can pay different prices depending on where they live.

Walk through the Galerie d'Apollon while you're in there. It reopened in July 2026 after the crown jewels were taken the previous October, and it's presented now as architecture, because nothing has been recovered. An empty case in a gilded seventeenth-century room is a stranger thing to stand in front of than a full one.

Dinner at Chez Georges on rue du Mail, which closes weekends and all of August, so a Friday is one of the few nights it's an option. Pavé du Mail and the mille-feuille. No website and no online booking, so it's a phone call.

Notre-Dame first, before nine thirty. Entry is free and the timed reservation is optional rather than required, which catches people out in both directions. Arrive early and you walk in. Arrive at eleven and you're in line for a building you could have walked into.

Then Line 4 from Cité, at the cathedral's own door, straight down to Denfert-Rochereau. One train, no change, about twelve minutes. Aim for an early afternoon catacombs slot and you get a slow lunch on the Left Bank in between, which is the only unplanned stretch of the day and it's there on purpose.

The booking is what catches people. Tickets release on a rolling seven-day window and nothing further out exists, so you can't book this in advance no matter how organized you are. The official booking page gives the reason, which is ticket fraud. It's €31 with the audio guide included, and tickets can't be refunded or moved to another date. The site reopened on 8 April 2026 after a five-month renovation.

If the window closes before you get a slot, there's a semi-private version that goes into sections shut to the standard route and doesn't depend on the release at all. That one isn't publicly listed and I book it.

It's 131 steps down and 112 back up with no elevator, and it holds at fourteen degrees Celsius all year, so bring a layer even in August.

Dinner ten minutes from the exit at Le Petit Sommelier on avenue du Maine. Pierre Vila Palleja trained as a sommelier at the Ritz and the Crillon before taking the place on from his parents, and he buys direct from growers rather than through a distributor. Fifteen hundred references. Closed Sundays.

Sunday is the day Paris shuts, and it's the day most visitors waste. The South Marais is the exception. It's one of the very few parts of the city where the serious food shops open on a Sunday, and that single fact is why this day sits here rather than anywhere else in the week.

A small-group food walk through it in the morning, five or six shops, bread and cheese and charcuterie and wine along the way, with time at each counter to ask something.

Eat properly at lunch, because Sunday dinner is genuinely hard. Chez Georges is closed weekends. Bistrot Paul Bert closes Sundays and Mondays both. Joséphine Chez Dumonet is closed weekends too. Sunday is when the good restaurants are dark and the tourist places are full, so a long lunch and a light evening is the honest plan rather than a compromise.

Père Lachaise fills the afternoon and it's open Sundays, which cemeteries tend to be when everything else isn't. Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein and Chopin are all in there along with about seventy thousand other people, and the map at the gate is worth the two minutes, because the numbering makes no sense from the paths.

The day is a grande marque in the morning and a grower in the afternoon, and that pairing is the entire point. The big houses take you down into Gallo-Roman chalk pits, cut by hand and now full of bottles. The grower pours you their own wine in their own cellar and explains why they picked three days before their neighbor did. The contrast is the thing, and you only get it by doing both.

This has to be a weekday, and it's the constraint the whole week bends around. Larmandier-Bernier in Vertus receives visitors Monday through Friday, mornings, by appointment, and most small producers run the same way. The grande marque houses open on weekends. Build the day around famous names and it can be a Sunday. Build it around growers, which is the version worth doing, and it can't.

What I arrange here is a full private day with a driver and a wine guide, so the afternoon can follow whatever the morning turns up instead of running to someone else's schedule.

Book to Reims Centre, not Champagne-Ardenne TGV. They sound interchangeable and they aren't. Champagne-Ardenne sits about eight kilometers outside the city and needs a shuttle or a taxi at the far end, and some of the fastest trains serve only that station. Reims Centre puts you a ten-minute walk from the cathedral. Trains from Gare de l'Est run in roughly forty-five minutes, about sixteen a day, and SNCF opens sales around four months ahead.

Back late, which makes Septime in the 11th arrondissement the right last dinner if you want one. It's open Mondays when much of the city isn't, and tables release exactly three weeks ahead at ten in the morning Paris time. Set a reminder now, because they go in minutes and there's a charge for a no-show inside twenty-four hours.