Berthillon

The house that gave Paris the word for the category: opened in 1954 by a baker who reinvented himself as a glacier, still made on Île Saint-Louis by his descendants, with named ingredient sourcing and a production cap the family has kept for seventy years rather than scale past. It is also the origin point of Lionel Chauvin, whose own shop directly tests whether that training produces something different once he leaves.

What to order
The vanilla and the fraise des bois (wild strawberry) sorbet, both named by Muriel Berthillon as the house's technical benchmarks in her interview with France-Soir.

What we know

On-site production, Wednesday to Sunday, in the atelier at the back of the shop, per the founder's granddaughter's own account on the house site
Raymond Berthillon's founding move was to sell pure-fruit sorbet at a time when sorbets were usually made with egg white, per the house's own history page
Named ingredient provenance from a 2015 interview: wild strawberries from Malaga, mandarins from Sicily, cream from Normandy, per Muriel Berthillon's own words to France-Soir
Capped, deliberately small daily production (about 1,000 litres a day across roughly thirty flavours made per day, out of 75 in rotation across the year), per the same interview
Traditional closure during school holidays, instituted by the founder's mother-in-law so the family could rest, still observed as stated on the current site
A current (2026) Paris ZigZag 'best of' round-up of 11 Paris glaciers does not include Berthillon, worth noting as a finding rather than a verdict

Status: open
Address: 29-31 rue Saint-Louis en l'Île, 75004 Paris
Maker: Muriel Berthillon (granddaughter of founder Raymond Berthillon), with her father Bernard Chauvin and her son Lionel Chauvin's generation historically involved before he left to found Enzo & Lily
Opened: 1954
Website: berthillon.fr/
Last checked: 2026-08-21

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