Food-obsessed France has a fair slice of the world’s 350,000 food blogs, with Paris being home to some of the best known, such as Clotilde Dusoulier’s Chocolate and Zucchini , Alexander Lobrano’s Hungry for Paris , as well as blogs by David Lebovitz and Dorie Greenspan .

Regular posts from this coterie of cyber-gourmets reveal the latest gastronomic tips and trends. Well connected with chefs and well informed by feedback from their thousands of readers, they often have the best independent overview of what is hot and what is not in Gallic cuisine. Crucially, for us, they are prepared to share their secrets.

Lobrano, an American, is the European correspondent for Gourmet magazine and author of Hungry for Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City’s 102 Best Restaurants. The Diner’s Journal section of his blog monitors the art of great French chefs and reflects on new restaurants and good deals.

A recent review declared Yannick Alleno’s €90 (£80) Terroir Parisien menu at Le Meurice, on Rue de Rivoli, “the best lunchtime buy in Paris”. In a nod to the city’s first restaurants to open after the revolution, Alleno uses produce from the Île-de-France, the region surrounding Paris. This includes local asparagus, lamb, Crécy carrots and honey from hives on the rooftop of the Opera Garnier.

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The sweetest secret in Paris was given away recently with the opening of the boutique La Chocolaterie in the elegant Marais district, according to Lobrano. Previously Jacques Genin’s brilliant handmade chocolates were available only in a handful of exclusive restaurants. Now they are sold in glass cases like precious jewels. Caramel eclairs, mimosa pâté de fruits and Szechwan pepper ganache are just some of the treats to savour.

David Lebovitz, another American in Paris, divulges that the best hot chocolate is found at the tiny Pâtisserie Viennoise, in Rue de lÉcole de Médecine in the 6th arrondissement, and his favourite chocolatier is Patrick Roger in the 16th.

A former pastry chef, Lebovitz discerns a new vogue for wine bars serving excellent food. “The way to get around rising food prices is to serve great ingredients, simply prepared, without fancy dinnerware or pretence,” he says.

His favourites include Les Fines Gueules, in rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, near the Opera in the 1st. It has platters of amazing charcuterie, prepared by butchers to some of the city’s finest restaurants, to be enjoyed in corner café modesty with a glass (or pitcher) of reasonably priced organic wine. Le Verre Volé, in Rue de Lancry, he says, is a “packed, boisterous little place in a trendy area (near Canal St Martin), where food is cooked in a toaster oven, served simply and you can pull any bottle of wine off the shelf and pay a €7 supplement if you are drinking it there.”

Dusoulier’s girl-about-town blog features a guide to where to eat the best tartines and offers a market directory covering all 20 arrondissements. Gastronauts could do a lot worse than follow her musings on an imaginary final 12 hours in the city.

These start with a big salad lunch at the Rose Bakery, in Rue des Martyrs in the 9th, followed by an ice cream at Carmella across the road, and they round off at the Experimental Cocktail Club, in Rue Saint-Sauveur in the 2nd, with an organic Strawberry Alarm Clock cocktail.

Her latest restaurant “crush” is for Chamarré Montmartre, which, she says, serves “sparkling French-Mauritian cuisine and the lunch menu is a particularly good deal”.

Cookery writer Dorie Greenspan’s dual passions are pastry and Paris. Her blog’s most popular posts provide a peek behind the scenes at patisseries, in particular at the work of Pierre Hermé, the new-wave pastry genius.

“The best food secrets are the ones that travellers discover themselves,” Greenspan says. “All you need to do is wander around and follow your nose.” She adds: “It is hard to keep a place secret in Paris but the Café Salle Pleyel, in Rue du Faubourg in the 8th, seems to have managed the impossible: it is a secret address that is full every day.”

This airy, modern room in a concert hall, rotates chefs annually — this year it is the imaginative David Zuddas, late of Auberge de la Charme near Dijon — and serves terrific burgers and polenta fries to a backdrop of Debussy and Berlioz.

For avant-garde gourmets, Hidden Kitchen is a private dinner party run by two young American restaurant consultants from their apartment near the Palais Royal. The seven-course menu features global dishes made with seasonal market produce.

“Meals at Hidden Kitchen bring together people from all over the world certain that they have at least one thing in common: a lively sense of adventure and an appetite for good food,” Greenspan says.

Finally, now that Rheims, the champagne capital, is less than an hour’s ride from Paris by TGV, it is easier to reach the picture-perfect village of Hautvillers. A pilgrimage to Dom Pérignon’s tomb in the village, about 15km outside Rheims, and a coupe de champagne overlooking the vineyards are always worth the trip, Greenspan adds.

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