When it comes to making food, the right tools make all the difference. A dull knife, a thin pot with hot spots, and trying to make do with a microwave when you really need a conventional oven are the kind of inconveniences that keep Grubhub and DoorDash in business. To cook with enthusiasm and joy is much easier with the proper batterie de cuisine, as the French call the arsenal of kitchen utensils, pots, and pans. And, let’s face it, dinner tastes better when eaten on something other than paper plates and plastic cups.

So save some extra room in your checked bag the next time you visit Paris. Two shops within steps of each other in the former Les Halles district of Paris sell everything you could possibly need for a well-stocked kitchen—and everything you’d need to serve dinner.

Professional chef or amateur cook, E. Dehillerin has you covered

E. Dehillerin (18-20 rue Coquillière; +33 1 42 36 53 13; edehillerin.fr/en/) is Paris’s supreme kitchen store. As the firm advertises beneath its trade symbol of a feisty rooster, ‶Le spécialiste de matérial de cuisine depuis 1820.″ You read that right. E. Dehillerin is celebrating its bicentennial as the go-to shop for cookware in the city that is practically synonymous with haute cuisine. It was Julia Child’s favorite store in Paris. The legendary Auguste Escoffier was a friend of the family.

While you can purchase a set of breathtakingly expensive copper pots and pans here, E. Dehillerin actually feels like an old-fashioned hardware store. Wooden shelves reach from floor to high ceiling, pots and pans dangle overhead, and narrow aisles are packed with small bins containing every size of knife, chocolate mold, tart pan, or terrine you can imagine in your most fevered gourmet dreams. It is at once paralyzing and humbling. Paralyzing because the choice is so broad, humbling because you swiftly realize that you will never actually need 98 percent of the goods for sale.

We do not need any more sizes of tart pans, cake pans, or terrine molds. No do we actually need more pots and pans, however tempting the array of short-handled frying pans that double nicely as roasting pans.

But we did succumb on the knife front, opting for a store-brand ‶office″ knife with a 9 cm blade instead of the more common 7 cm. Light and sharp enough to shave with, it is the perfect knife to mince a shallot down to the root or peel a ripe tomato without dipping the fruit in boiling water. Moreover, we’re delighted to report after a month of heavy usage, it holds an edge very well. A little pricier than kitchen-store paring knives, it set us back all of €15.

From pots and pans to plates and glasses

The dining room version of a hardware store is Verrerie des Halles (15 rue du Louvre; +33 1 42 36 80 60; verrerie-des-halles-paris.fr/). A mere newcomer (since 1946), the shop supplies glassware and tableware to bars, restaurants, and hotels.

Dishes emblazoned with the names of top Paris restaurants decorate the shop window, but you don’t need to order by the hundreds. Verrerie des Halles sells a lot of stock goods to all comers at prices that seem absurdly inexpensive.

By the time we visited, we had already spent some significant time in Paris and had observed that much of the time, a half liter was exactly as much wine as we should split at a meal. We knew this in theory from home, where we often share two standard bottles across three nights. But it is altogether too easy to be overly generous with a pour into unmarked glasses. The best solution is to do as the restaurants do: use a half-liter carafe.

After admiring the myriad of glassware on the display shelves, we finally found a 0.5 litre carafe with a discreet fill line. We asked the price, and promptly misunderstood the answer as ‶thirty euros.″ We swallowed hard and figured it was exorbitant, but what the hell? OK. He then reminded us that ‶les soldes″ were in effect. Not only was list €3 instead of 30, he gave us 20 percent off.