Temperatures in Paris were approaching 41°C when Erwan Leo opened Le Butter this summer. Wildfires were already sweeping through France, and the city was quiet—especially in the less touristy 8th arrondissement, a wealthy area near the Eiffel Tower known as the “golden triangle.” The last thing it seemed to need was a shop selling nothing but butter. “We were so worried about the fridges,” says Leo, the 34-year-old owner. “We didn’t think anyone would even show up.”
Two months later, in September, I visit Le Butter, the first shop in Paris dedicated entirely to selling butter. It’s a charming, photogenic spot nestled between a wine shop Leo opened eight years ago and a café famous for being blown up in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Inside, there are candy-striped walls, small shopping baskets, a shelf of Instagram-friendly butter merchandise (knives, hats, tote bags), and two double fridges holding 50 different types of butter. It’s much cooler today; the fridges hum at a precise 3°C. The past few months have been busy—so busy that Leo has had to install a bench for people waiting outside and a retractable barrier to manage the queues.
Outside, I find a group of butter fans comparing their purchases. Among them is Clifford Yellen, a 66-year-old Italian-American chef and consultant who has bought in bulk—”only the pure stuff, salted.” He opens his paper bag to show me several packets, vacuum-packed for his flight home. “We chefs have a real thing about butter,” he says. He usually eats Italian butter, or the famously creamy Hokkaido from Japan.
Inside the shop, tourists from Brazil and Korea gather around a glass display case on the counter, where staff serve quenelles of wild garlic butter on wooden tasting spoons. The tasters then try raspberry and chocolate flavours. “I call Le Butter an ice-cream shop for butter!” Leo says with a laugh.
Different varieties at Le Butter, Paris. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian
And while British tourists have been banned from bringing French butter to the UK since 2025 to prevent the spread of farm animal diseases, as a nation we also revere butter. Earlier this year, the Pembroke Club in Belgravia, London, placed an ad in Country Life magazine for a butter sommelier, seeking someone who could confidently “curate our butter assortment and assist in training staff using our silver butter trolley.”
For those who can take butter home, there are entire Reddit threads discussing the best way to transport it by plane (frozen, vacuum-packed, ziplocked) and where to buy it. Guided by one, I head to La Grande Épicerie de Paris to see its famous “wall of butter,” where 150 types are sold. The two most popular varieties, according to staff, are Le Beurre Bordier and Beillevaire. Like most good French butters, they have a fresh, rich flavour with tangy depths—likely due to their high butterfat content and the grass-fed cows they come from.
Even high-end butter is relatively cheap, and right now, in this “little treat” economy, spending €8 on a wheel of butter sprinkled with fleur de sel feels more manageable than buying a decent bottle of wine. The latest trend, Leo says, is people serving butter the way they would cheese after dinner, on boards with crackers. “It’s also cheaper.”
While I’m reporting from Paris fashion week, my Instagram becomes a parade of luscious butters laid out on event tables with great loaves of bread, or pounded and piled into small hills as centrepieces. I watch influencers biting into whole sticks of butter, or being served plates of medjool dates stuffed with slivers of the stuff. It’s at once beautiful and grotesque.
It has even become a material for food artists. Laila Gohar, the American-Egyptian artist, treats it like marble, and once carved it into a fragment of MichelangeDavid. During a design festival, food artist Imogen Kwok built a foot-high cone from whipped butter and foraged herbs. View image in fullscreen. Laila Gohar’s fragments of Michelangelo’s David, carved from butter. Photograph: Laila Gohar. It was the threat of shortage that turned South African journalist Safia Patel, 35, into a self-described “butter hoarder” who now collects and categorises it. At home in Istanbul she keeps cooking butter, eating butter and “ornamental” butter (too precious to eat), the last of which she stores in her freezer. Her love of butter comes from her grandmother, who ate it in thick, cold slices on bread. But it was during the pandemic that she realised how much it really meant to her. She’d buy Lurpak locally in Istanbul – but as the pandemic wore on, it became harder to find. “Once things returned to normal, I began coercing people into bringing me butter from around the world in case I ran out.” Most days she carries two or three portion-sized packs in her handbag, “just in case. Yes, it can get messy.” View image in fullscreen. Chocolate, pepper and date flavours sit among the salted and unsalted varieties at Le Butter. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian. The prettiness of Le Butter’s packaging has naturally made it a social media hit, which Leo describes as a double-edged sword. “Obviously, I’m grateful,” he says. “But it can also be overwhelming. The aim of the shop is to educate people beyond supermarket butter, and to serve the locals as well as the tourists. We can only do our best.” This fetishisation of butter is still quite divisive. “When it comes to food styling, some of what they do looks cool,” says Seb Myers of the restaurant Planque in east London. “But when you see a mound of butter – all that extravagance for the sake of a photo? I’m quite squirrelly with food. Waste is my big thing.” In restaurants, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been served butter shaped into little salted coins or whipped into something dippable. Bread and butter are still one of the most valued moments in a good meal. And as Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential, “If you eat at any good restaurant, assume you’ve eaten a stick of butter.” View image in fullscreen. Buttery deliciousness at Planque, London. “That’s partly because it starts the meal,” says Myers, who takes his butter pretty seriously. “If someone serves you an ice-cold pat of butter, you know you’re not in for a good time.” His restaurant is a play on Parisian bistronomy, so “it’s in almost every dish.” They use Beillevaire butter demi-sel sprinkled with flakes, sliced and well tempered. He keeps it in “a cheese fridge for a week to slow-mature it.” For cooking, it’s Douceur de France (they get through 10kg a week in cooking alone). Pravin Nayar runs Castle Farm restaurant in Somerset, and makes his own: “We like butter to be the hero product when we do supper clubs.” The key, he says, is how you serve it: room temperature, sprinkled with salt. “The way I see it, bread is just a spoon for butter.” Remember when butter was considered bad? After all those anti-saturated fat health campaigns, consumption hit a historic low by the late 1990s, with the average Brit consuming just 2kg a year. The perception around it seems to have shifted, although with 50% saturated fat – and I say this with love – butter is not exactly a superfood. “The heart-health advice hasn’t changed,” says Tracy Parker, a registered dietitian and an adviser for the British Heart Foundation. “If you’ve got high cholesterol, or your diet already leans heavily on saturated fat – think fatty meats, pastries, cakes, biscuits – then you should probably reconsider how much you’re eating and whether you could swap it for something like olive, avocado or nut oil.” Butter is fine in moderation, th”Just a light scrape on your morning toast, and if you’re mindful of everything else you eat, you’re probably fine,” she says. So why has butter become fashionable again in our health-obsessed culture of 2026? Parker believes it’s tied to the anti-ultraprocessed-food movement. “UPFs have been linked to health problems like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease,” she says. Butter, by contrast, is seen as a preindustrial, farm-style product. “People see butter as natural, and therefore better than something like margarine,” she says.
My family of four goes through a pack a week. Is that a lot? Not really. In the UK, we eat just over 3kg of butter per person per year—about enough for a modestly buttered slice of toast each day. That’s nothing compared to Belgians, who consume 8kg, or the French and Danes, who eat almost 9kg per person per year.
Many people I meet in Paris still believe in the French Paradox: the idea that they can eat butter and cheese without having the same rates of heart disease as other nations. One of the most popular flavors at Le Butter is chocolate—a nice twist on the traditional after-school snack (known as le goûter or le quatre-heures) of dark chocolate squares, salted butter, and fresh bread. The fact that cardiovascular disease is the second leading cause of death in France probably won’t change this much. “It’s something we eat every day,” says Leo. “I don’t check my cholesterol—I don’t want to know.”
I, on the other hand, have familial hypercholesterolemia, a fairly common genetic disorder that causes very high levels of LDL, or “bad,” cholesterol from birth. When I tell Parker, she responds with a polite “ah.” I’m not overweight, but at some point I’ll need to go on statins; I also come from a long line of heart attacks. After we talk, I comfort myself with a slice of buttered rye toast, knowing I should probably reconsider my life choices too. But like so many people, I love butter.
For Patel, one pack of butter stands out from the rest of her collection: a half pack of Kerrygold from 2019, frozen ever since. “I keep it partly as insurance, in case I run out. But also because it’s reassuring—it reminds me of a different time.” She loves her work, but her dream job is to run a dairy farm. “Or at least go to Paris, to that shop, and eat all that butter.” Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Heres a list of FAQs about the butter boom ranging from basic to more advanced questions
The Basics
1 What exactly is the butter boom
Its the sharp rise in butters popularity over the past decade or so After years of being avoided as unhealthy butter has made a comeback as shoppers and cooks rediscover its taste and rethink earlier warnings about saturated fat
2 Why did butter fall out of fashion in the first place
Starting in the 1960s and 70s health guidelines blamed saturated fat for heart disease Butter is high in saturated fat so many people switched to margarine and lowfat spreads
3 Why are people buying butter again
A few reasons the real food movement favoring natural ingredients over processed ones newer research questioning the old saturatedfat warnings the popularity of lowcarb and keto diets and a general backlash against heavily processed foods like margarine
4 Is butter actually healthier than margarine
Not necessarily Butter is natural but high in saturated fat Margarine is processed but often contains healthier unsaturated fats The better choice depends on your diet and health needs many nutritionists suggest limiting both and using olive oil more often
5 Whats the difference between butter and margarine
Butter is made from churned cream an animal product Margarine is made from vegetable oils and water often with added flavorings and colorings to mimic butter
6 Is butter bad for my heart
The evidence is mixed Butter raises LDL cholesterol but recent studies suggest its overall link to heart disease is smaller than once thought Most experts say its fine in moderation as part of a balanced diet
7 How is butter made
Cream is churned until it separates into butterfat and buttermilk The butterfat is then washed salted and shaped Thats it for basic butter
8 Whats the difference between salted and unsalted butter
Salted butter contains added salt which boosts flavor and extends shelf life Unsalted butter lets you control the salt in your cooking and is preferred in baking
9 How should I store butter
In the fridge wrapped tightly it keeps for months It can also be frozen for up to a year A butter dish on the
