Planet Food

While staying in Paris for 4 days, me and my wife ended up at this place by accident. And boy were we glad we came here. Its cheap and fresh. Your order is cooked right in front of your eyes. The food is amazing and full of flavour. From the pizza to sandwiches to burgers, all items are very tasty and cheap. Highly recommend this place

In a nutshell, this is some of the cheapest food you’ll be able to find in Paris. Five euros is enough to get you a full meal here. But even though I was a broke college student who needed to save up all the money I could, I absolutely hated coming here. It was really only because food anywhere else in the city was so expensive that I was forced to come to Planet Food to be able to survive until the next day. Had the prices here been a little higher, I don’t imagine these guys getting very many customers.
I don’t suppose it would help them very much to post a review for their restaurant on Unilocal; it doesn’t seem like a lot of restaurant owners in France look up their businesses on this site, let alone sift through the English reviews and see how they could make improvements. The workers here don’t speak French all that well, either. And when they do, it’s with a heavy Arabic accent that is understandable but takes a while to get used to. The plus side to having immigrants run this place is that they don’t close their store in the afternoon like all other French people seem to do. I’ve come across this place shortly after midnight to find that they were still open.
The food here isn’t some sort of exotic or elegant North African cuisine as you might expect from this place upon giving it a cursory glance. On the sign they have posted outside, they claim they have couscous, but when I ordered it, they said they didn’t have couscous. So disappointing to find false advertising in Paris. What you might find here instead is essentially oily fast food, except they make it right in front of you after you order it. Burgers and fries, but given a bit of a Middle Eastern touch.
It’s not quite like McDonald’s, although the care given to the quality of their food seems to be reminiscent of it. I’ve seen the people who work here many times use their bare hands to pick up a patty and then toss it on the grill, and then proceed to handle cash afterward. No gloves, no napkins, no handwashing. I don’t know about how the laws in France, but where I’m from, you have to get a food worker card if you want to be allowed to work in a restaurant setting. One of the most basic things they teach you during training (although it should be common sense) is that you don’t use your bare hands to touch ready-​to-​be-​eaten food.
You can also tell how seriously these people take their jobs just by how slowly they move. Sure, it’s not like there’s a huge line behind me or anything, but I really didn’t plan on staying there any longer than I had to! They’re also rude to their customers (although I think that’s the norm in France), and appear to be hard of hearing. Even when I said my order in the best and clearest French I could, they still wanted me to repeat my order. I’ve learned that coming here isn’t exactly the best way to brighten up one’s day, although it’s not like I had oodles of cash to spend elsewhere. Definitely, their target audience is the few people who somehow made it to Paris but don’t have any money to show for it.
Now the food itself is a mixed bag. The first thing I got here was a generic cheeseburger. There’s not much creativity here; it’s just the ordinary components of a cheeseburger put together in the expected way. In other words, it’s not more than the sum of its parts. There’s the bun with the sesame seeds on top, plus the patty inside and the cheese, tomato, and lettuce. It’s really nothing you couldn’t prepare yourself if you had the right ingredients and means of cooking and putting them all together. So it’s a wonder how they could screw something so simple up. The bread is way too thick and dominates everything else too much. I thought French bread was supposed to be among the best in the world, but no, this bread is not good. The tomato has this strange texture to it that’s hard to describe; it’s probably from sitting out too long. Everything else in there was okay at best. From a cheeseburger, it’s just not fair to expect high levels of complexity, so I won’t complain any more about it.
There is one thing here that’s passable, though, and that’s the kebab sandwich. I generally don’t like to give one-​star ratings, and this may be the saving grace for this place. I’ve never seen it in the United States, but apparently in France, they have a huge chunk of meat on a skewer as it’s slowly roasting and then they literally shave pieces of it off to serve as food. I found this amusing to watch, although I’m sure French people see this happen all the time. Those slices go in a hot dog bun to make a sandwich, and they throw in some soggy fries in the styrofoam container. Ketchup and mayonnaise are optional; it reminds me of a quote from Pulp Fiction.
The rest of the menu here is certainly less than spectacular. Once I ordered this meatloaf-​looking thing that appeared to have green onions in it; it was unbearably salty and I had to throw it away. Honestly, the kebab sandwiches are the only redeeming feature here.