You take a colleague to a kosher restaurant. They politely ask why there is no parmesan on their pasta. You say “It is bassari.” They nod. They have understood nothing. Fair enough.
Three words are enough to understand almost any kosher restaurant: bassari, halavi, pareve. Here they are explained for a newcomer, without a lecture. At the end, how Keila uses them to organise addresses.
Bassari, halavi, pareve: the short version
Kashrut separates meat and dairy. They are not cooked together or eaten in the same meal, and crockery and utensils are separate. Hence three groups:
| Word | What it means | What is on the menu |
|---|---|---|
| Bassari | Meat | Grilled food, burgers, shawarma, couscous with meat. No cheese or cream. |
| Halavi | Dairy | Pizzas, cheesy pasta, lasagne, cream desserts. No meat. |
| Pareve | Neither meat nor dairy | Vegetables, grains, eggs, fish depending on custom. Compatible with either. |
In practice, a kosher restaurant chooses a side. It is meat or dairy. Pareve food fits everywhere: salad, chips, sorbet, coffee with plant-based milk. The Paris textbook example: Kavod, on rue Jean Mermoz, has one address for each side, as described in kosher restaurants in the 8th.
Why choose? Because separating meat and dairy means two sets of pans, two worktops and sometimes two kitchens. For a restaurant, it is much simpler to do just one, and do it well. If you see a place advertising both, it generally means two separate areas, and it is best to ask how they are organised.
What changes for your guest
If you take someone who does not eat kosher, the main adjustment is avoiding an unpleasant surprise. Tell them beforehand:
- Meat restaurant: no cheese on the burger, butter on the bread or cappuccino with cow’s milk. Desserts are pareve, so often dairy-free.
- Dairy restaurant: no meat at all. But fish, pizzas, pasta and gratins, with cheese back on the menu. Lasagne can finally be lasagne.
- Want both? That means two meals, not one. A steak and tiramisu do not follow each other in the same kosher dinner.
A small survival tip: if your guest absolutely wants cream in their coffee, choose dairy. If they dream of a rib of beef, choose meat and warn them about dessert. Nobody has really ever been disappointed by a sorbet.
What if your colleague is vegetarian? A dairy restaurant gives them much more choice. If vegan, look instead at places declaring themselves vegan, covered in our vegan and vegetarian selection in Paris.
Pareve, the friend that goes with everything
Pareve means neutral. Neither meat nor dairy, nor anything containing either. It is the category that makes life possible: pareve cake can finish a meat meal, margarine replaces butter, and plant-based cream replaces cream.
Two qualifications, though. Fish is pareve, but some traditions avoid serving it on the same plate as meat. A pareve dish cooked in a meat kitchen may also be treated as meat according to custom. If this matters to you, the right answer comes from the restaurant or its supervision body, not a blog. Including this one.
What about waiting between meat and dairy?
This is the question that starts after-dinner debates. After meat, people wait before eating dairy. How long? That depends on family and community traditions, and we will not decide for you. Remember that your cousin refusing ice cream after shawarma is not being difficult. They are being consistent. So are you when you turn down cheesecake at the end of dinner.
In the other direction, from dairy to meat, the rules are generally more flexible. Again, everyone follows their rabbi and customs.
For a restaurant, this has a very practical consequence. A meat restaurant knows customers will not have a dairy dessert, so it takes care over its pareve desserts. A dairy restaurant knows people often come for a light lunch or fish dinner. The kosher category also suggests the kind of occasion you might choose it for.
How Keila filters bassari, halavi and pareve
In the Explorer tab, filters include a kosher category section with four choices: Bassari · meat, Halavi · dairy, Pareve and Category not specified. Select one and the list and map update together.
Where does the information come from? For the 106 addresses with documented certification, from the official Beth Din de Paris directory, which classifies each restaurant as meat or dairy. For the others, from kosher directories listing the address, cross-checked where possible. As of 5 October 2026, the Beth Din de Paris directory classifies 86 of the 106 certified addresses as meat and 20 as dairy. Certified dairy addresses are collected on the dairy restaurants page. Pareve as a restaurant category is almost absent: logically, few places define themselves that way.
What if we do not know? We say so. Category not specified is a full option, not a hidden gap in the list. An address without a category never magically appears when you filter for meat. You would rather have fewer results than false results, and so would we.
A kosher category is not certification
An important point, and one Keila is particular about: knowing a restaurant is meat says nothing about who supervises it. The category describes the menu. Certification comes from a body, with a date and scope. A restaurant may be described as meat with no supervision known to Keila, while another is dairy under a recognised body. The word on the menu does not tell you which situation you are looking at.
A listing displays both separately, with their source. We explain certificates in Beth Din, Lubavitch: how to read a kosher certificate, and our whole approach is on the methodology page.
To put it into practice, see where to eat kosher in Paris, district by district, updated lists by location, or go straight to keila.app: the app is coming soon to the App Store.