Soré, a generous African canteen-grocery on the Canal Saint-Martin

The banks of the Canal Saint-Martin are home to a new place dedicated to African cuisine: the canteen-grocery Soré(cooking in Soninké, the language and ethnicity of West Africa), and it's the assurance of a one-way trip to Africa and its thousand-and-one flavors and colors.

Soré founder Sophie Béhar's ideas are as numerous as they are clear: celebrate the openness, sharing and conviviality of African cuisine, promote authentic recipes from all corners of the continent and offer traditional dishes in vegetarian or vegan versions, for those concerned!

If you're not familiar with African cuisine, then you're about to discover just how rich, tasty and varied it is at Soré. At the canteen, depending on the season, traditional dishes come and go: beef or vegetarian mafé with a fine taste of peanuts, long-marinated yassa chicken, chicken or vegetarian thiéboudiène, saka saka - an astonishing and devilishly salty preparation of crushed cassava leaves then boiled -, DG chicken and its farandole of plantain bananas, Senegalese thiou accompanied by attiéké, fonio or gari, semolinas that are unfamiliar to Parisian palates but oh so exotic.

The journey begins with the starters, with crispy fish fritters, a coconut-carrot-ginger velouté, cowpea beans spiced up with chilli and ginger, not forgetting the unavoidable allocos of plaintain bananas that we'd happily gobble up by the dozen.

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All these marvels are served in large quantities, always with a smile, and prepared with a lot of love, you can feel it. The dishes are so generous that we won't have room to sample the desserts, too bad! The vegan and gluten-free peanut cookie, the banana coconut cake and the peanut brownie would have pleased us. But that's for another time!

In order to take home all the good stuff, a trip to the grocery store is a must! On the shelves, you'll find a range of savoury, sweet, dry, fresh and frozen African products, as well as infusions, syrups, juices and wines sourced directly from the continent.

Oils, sauces, spices, bouillons, chillies, but also cereals, flours, legumes, chocolates, honeys, jams, cakes, sweets... and even recipe books so you can learn how to make traditional African dishes at home, and keep your fingers crossed that they'll be as delicious and comforting as they are at Soré!