Russian food in France: what it's called, where to buy it, what to use instead

Where can you buy Russian food in France?

Your safest bet is a Russian or Eastern European shop. The signs over the door vary: Russian, Armenian, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian. What we go in for is the same everywhere. In the South, Nice has the most of these shops (13), Marseille six, Toulouse five, Montpellier and Perpignan four each. All 46 addresses are in the directory of Russian shops in the South of France, together with opening hours wherever we managed to verify them. And Nice, Montpellier and Toulouse have pages of their own, with public transport stops and who sells what.

In Montpellier we shop at Épicerie Arménie, 5 rue Anatole France. It’s a community partner: open every day from 10:00 to 22:00, with tvorog and kefir, and pelmeni and khinkali in the freezer.

If the nearest shop is a long way off, some of the familiar things sit in an ordinary chain under a French name. Look for buckwheat under kasha or sarrasin grillé; kefir is simply called Kéfir. Pelmeni are harder: on 6 October 2026 a search for “pelmeni” on the Auchan, E.Leclerc, Picard and Grand Frais websites didn’t find a single pack.

What’s inside each guide

All six guides follow the same pattern. First, what the product is called in France and what it’s easy to confuse it with on the shelf: crème liquide is not smetana, and a tin of lait concentré without the word sucré turns out to be milk with no sugar. Then, honestly, what to use instead and which recipe the swap won’t work in.

Next come shops by city across the South, and what to buy at the ordinary chains. Online shops that will bring the product to your door get a section of their own, with their terms for chilled and frozen goods: buckwheat travels by post without a fuss, tvorog and pelmeni are trickier. Plus a single line with a ballpark price, so you know roughly what to expect.

Where the prices on these pages come from

Prices aren’t the point here: the guides are about where to buy a product and what it’s called in French. So each product gets just one line with a rounded price, a date and the source, and no tables. We don’t write down “approximate” prices off the top of our heads.

That line is built from the prices on product pages in online shops selling Russian food, captured on 17 October 2026 in a single check. Delivery rates come from the shops’ delivery pages. The test baskets we used on 6 October to work out delivery from Katucha and AKHTAMAR can’t be repeated, because the sites have closed them to robots, so those figures carry the date 6 October 2026. We don’t quote supermarket prices, and for Montpellier we have no online prices at all.

Bought tvorog or buckwheat this week? Post it in the Vibe South of France community chat on Telegram: city, shop, what’s on the pack. That’s how we know what’s really on the shelves right now.

What only the chat knows

Addresses change slowly, shelves every week. Sometimes the shops post in the chat themselves. On 30 December 2025 Épicerie Victoria on rue Fontenille in Montpellier announced a tvorog offer there: buy five, get the sixth free. And in July 2026 members recommended La Belle Russie on boulevard Louis Blanc for medovik (honey cake) and Napoleon cake, and spotted yeast dough for pirozhki there too.

The chat has 700+ Russian speakers who live in the South, and news of where fresh tvorog has just come in reaches it before we have time to update this page.