The assumption is reasonable: you walk into a Paris pizzeria, you order pizza. That is not always the right move. A number of French pizzerias operate as full brasserie-adjacent restaurants where the pizza is one column on a menu that also runs through grilled meats, salads, and serious frites. The steak-frites combination has no nationality allegiance. It ends up everywhere it is welcome.
This plate came out of La Bête, identifiable by the branded beer glasses — a Belgian-style ale served in a tulip, the second glass a lager. Two beers, a carafe of water, a grilled skirt steak with aggressive grill marks, a wire basket of frites cooked properly golden, a ramekin of what reads as a peppercorn or mustard sauce, and a token salad of mâche with a cherry tomato doing its best. The plate itself is a bold black-and-white graphic disc. The placemat is tropical print. The room behind is leather banquettes and warm light.
The steak is the point. Skirt cut, cooked to medium with a char on the exterior that suggests the grill runs hot. The frites are thin-cut and crisp, served in the wire basket that became ubiquitous in Paris casual dining sometime around 2015 and has not left. The sauce earns its position — something this cut needs.
The same format extends to the chicken. A glazed half-chicken — leg and thigh, lacquered to a deep amber — lands on the same graphic plate with the same wire basket of frites overflowing onto the rim, the same mixed salad of lettuce and tomato doing its obligatory duty on the side. A Leffe in the glass. The chicken has been roasted and finished with something sweet, possibly honey-mustard, possibly a barbecue-adjacent glaze. The skin is set. The portion is not modest. This is the dish you order when you want something uncomplicated and are confident the kitchen can roast a bird, which in France is almost always a safe assumption.
Paris casual dining has largely converged on a format: one protein, frites in a basket, a sauce, a gesture toward vegetables. It works because the inputs are good and the execution is consistent. Ordering it in a pizzeria rather than a dedicated steakhouse changes nothing about the outcome. The kitchen knows what it is doing with a grill regardless of what the sign outside says.
If you are in Paris for a week and eating pizza every other night because it is cheap and reliable, break the pattern once and order the steak. Or the chicken. The menu at these places exists for a reason.
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