Temperatures in Paris were nudging 41C when Erwan Leo opened Le Butter this summer. Wildfires had already been tearing through France and the city was quiet, particularly in the less touristy 8th arrondissement, a flex-your-wealth area near the Eiffel Tower known as the “golden triangle”. The last thing it needed, you would think, was a shop that sold loads of butter.
It’s a quaint, photogenic spot between a wine shop that was opened by Leo eight years ago and a cafe famous for being blown up in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Inside there are candy-striped walls, little shopping baskets, a shelf of Instagrammable buttery merch (knives, hats, totes) and two double fridges containing 50 different types of butter. It’s a lot cooler today; the fridges purr away at an exacting 3C.
And the past few months have been busy – so much so that Leo has had to erect a bench for those waiting outside, and a retractable barrier to manage the queues. Outside today, I find a gathering of butter fans comparing purchases. Among them is Clifford Yellen, a 66-year-old Italian-American chef and consultant who has bulk-bought “only pure stuff – salted”.
He opens his paper bag to show me multiple packets, vacuum-packed for his flight home. He usually eats Italian, or the famously creamy Hokkaido from Japan. Inside the shop, tourists from Brazil and Korea are gathered around a glass display cabinet on the counter where staff dispense quenelles of wild garlic butter on to wooden tasting spoons.
The tasters follow it with raspberry flavour, and chocolate. And while British tourists have been banned from bringing French butter to the UK since 2025, to stop farm animal diseases spreading, as a nation we, too, revere butter. Earlier this year, the Pembroke Club in Belgravia, London, placed an advert for a butter sommelier in Country Life magazine, looking for someone able to confidently “curate our butter assortment and assist in training staff using our silver butter trolley”.
For those who can take butter home with them, there are entire threads on Reddit discussing the best way to transport it via plane (frozen, vacuum-packed, ziplocked) and where to buy it. Guided by one, I head to La Grande Épicerie de Paris to lay eyes on its famous “wall of butter” where 150 types are sold. The two most popular varieties, according to the staff, are Le Beurre Bordier and Beillevaire.
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