The midnight market in Paris you've never heard about
The Earful Tower: Paris
Oliver Gee
4.8 • 794 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you ever heard of Rungis? It's the world's largest wholesale food market, it provides all the Paris markets and restaurants with their fresh produce, and you can find it near the Orly Airport.
Or can you?
This place may as well be top secret. Only the vendors and restauranteurs can access it - yet it's as big as a village. Every night, at around 2am, produce sellers (like fishermen and cheesemongers) open their doors to the eager buyers, who charge in and negotiate prices for the goods.
And even though it's closed to the public, I got an invite to make this episode. My invite came from April Pett who runs April in Paris tours, check her out here: https://www.aprilinparistours.com/
Big shout out to market vendor Jaad who took us around and whose laughter echoed through the halls of Rungis all night.
You can find more about the market here (but remember, it isn't open to visit to the public). https://www.rungisinternational.com/
Here's the replay of the short live video we made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeiII9gqlZo
And the rest of our pictures are on social media, the rest of my videos will be for the members, only. Links below.
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Music: Pres Maxson
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody. My name is Oliver G. This is the Earful Tower podcast coming to you from a Paris |
| 0:07.2 | that is finally sunny again and beautiful. Oh, what a time to be alive. But this episode's |
| 0:13.5 | talking about something a little bit outside of Paris. You're going to hear a story about my |
| 0:20.6 | very, very late night slash very, very early |
| 0:25.0 | morning visit to the Rangis fresh produce market. So if you never heard about it, you're going to |
| 0:31.3 | get the whole brief as we go through this episode. But basically, imagine the place where all the restaurateurs and market |
| 0:40.3 | vendors get their fish, cheese, flowers, meat, all this kind of stuff. It's the biggest |
| 0:45.6 | fresh produce market in the world, apparently. And thanks to April Pett, who runs April and Paris |
| 0:52.3 | tours and a long-time friend of this podcast, I had my invite. |
| 0:57.8 | So this isn't a place you can typically go. It's just a place we happen to get into, and I brought |
| 1:02.9 | the microphone along to take you with us, basically. So that's what you're going to hear in this |
| 1:08.6 | episode. You're going to hear from me. You're going to hear from April on the scene. You're going to hear from Jad, who was our guide and a market vendor himself. And part of this was we filmed a live YouTube video. Just a quick one, 15 minutes or so. You can see the replay on YouTube already, and it's on the show link notes below. |
| 1:28.3 | But I don't think I need to say any more than that to give you the gist of where we're going today. |
| 1:33.3 | I think you're going to like it. |
| 1:34.3 | This is a cool way of seeing behind the scenes where the food that we eat when we're in Paris comes from. |
| 1:40.3 | And as usual, this show is brought to you by the lovely members. |
| 1:46.8 | Don't be one of those people who email and say, |
| 1:48.9 | I've been thinking about being a member for a long time. |
| 1:52.1 | Take my words now as your cue to do it today |
| 1:54.4 | because this show can only improve with your help. |
| 1:57.9 | So substack or Patreon, both memberships are the same. |
| 2:00.7 | I want you there. |
... |
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