The Refugee Food Festival returns for its 11th edition, with the same recipe as always: culinary collaborations between cooks, refugees, and local gastronomy professionals. See you from June 6 to 28, 2026 in 12 cities across France, including Paris!
At the Refugee Food Festival table, in 12 cities across France and their surrounding areas, there is room for every grandmother’s recipe, every festive meal, every childhood dish. For more than ten years, 100,000 participants have come to experience something simple and joyful: meeting one another around the table and in the kitchen. Mutual discovery. Dialogue. Hospitality. Sharing. A France where there is a place for everyone. To give voice to this hospitable and open France, Michelin-starred chef Manon Fleury and actress, author, and director Aïssa Maïga are the patrons of the festival’s 11th edition, which is organized each year around June 20, World Refugee Day. From June 6 to 28, 2026, the Refugee Food Festival will take place in Bordeaux, Dijon, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Nice, Paris, Rennes, Rouen, Toulouse and Tours – as well as nearby, in Tende (06), Roubaix (59), Margaux-Cantenac (33), Orvault (44), Saint-Malo (35), Saint-Aignan (41) – to share life stories and blended recipes with those who make up France. In around a hundred restaurants, from bistros to Michelin-starred venues, as well as in school cafeterias, Crous facilities and Ehpad residences, in community spaces, guinguettes, rotisseries, chocolate shops… culinary encounters between refugee cooks and local chefs will lead to brand-new dishes for diners to enjoy. Through these encounters, the festival champions the idea that exclusion, mistrust, and fear fade when we learn to know one another! The full Paris program is detailed here! The patrons: Aïssa Maïga & Manon Fleury Aïssa Maïga Aïssa Maïga is a French actress, director, author, and producer of Senegalese and Malian origin. Discovered in Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako, which earned her a nomination for the César Award for Most Promising Actress, she has since built a career spanning auteur cinema, popular comedies, and international productions… “I grew up between several worlds and several cuisines: France, Mali, Vietnam. I was nourished by the idea that identity is never fixed, that it is built through movement, through encounters, through what we receive and what we share. Cooking is one of those very powerful spaces where all of this becomes tangible. It carries memory, sometimes exile, but also transmission, joy, creativity. It makes it possible to rebuild connection, even far from home.” “What moves me deeply about the Refugee Food Festival is the way it gives a place back to those who have had to leave their country, by valuing their know-how, their story, their perspective. In a world where we sometimes tend to close ourselves off, it reminds us that our differences are not barriers, but resources. And that this, too, is France at its most beautiful: a place where cultures meet, transform, and invent together.” Manon Fleury Having worked in the kitchens of Alexandre Couillon, Pascal Barbot, and Dan Barber’s New York “farm-to-table” restaurant, Manon Fleury’s choices reflect both her commitment to virtuous practices and her ambition for excellence… “The restaurant industry is a sector that hires; there are many vacancies all over France, and cooking is a profession that can help integrate people who have had to leave their country because it is a universal language. It is very interesting to bring together different ways of expressing oneself through cooking; it creates richness. You realize that one dish can have several interpretations, depending on the culture and, precisely, the language. By talking around the same dish, you ultimately arrive at a new recipe. That is the true face of France, and in the political context that is ours today, I am proud to support an initiative that highlights this openness.”
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Vincent Arbelet