One Egg, 8 Minutes 40 Seconds, €8.40: Paris's First Bar Dedicated to Œuf Mayo
Ter., a restaurant in Paris's 11th arrondissement, has turned the most humble of French bistro dishes—œuf mayo—into an entire bar menu. Soft-boiled eggs topped with miso, soy sauce, and nori hint at the former head chef's time in Japan, plus a fun numerical coincidence.
8 minutes and 40 seconds is the standard cook time for the eggs here. The clock starts the moment the egg hits boiling water, and it's pulled out with a still-runny yolk. The price? €8.40. This isn't the editorial team reading too much into things—it's a coincidence the restaurant itself points out. Even the menu pricing follows the seconds on the timer.
Ter., which opened in Paris's 11th arrondissement in 2023, took the most unassuming dish on the classic French bistro menu—œuf mayo, a hard-boiled egg draped in mayonnaise—and since May 2025 has turned it into a standalone bar menu of its own. Six versions rotate with the seasons, each serving 3 to 4 egg pieces, all priced uniformly at €8.40. One photo from the material shows homemade Espelette pepper mayonnaise paired with grilled Bigorre black pork ham—smoky, spicy, and toasted sesame notes layering together into the kind of bar snack that practically begs for a glass of natural wine.
Among the six egg variations, one is marinated in a mixture of miso, soy sauce, and dried shiitake broth, then served with pickled ginger and crispy nori. This isn't exoticism for exoticism's sake—the restaurant's first head chef had lived in Japan, and Japanese seasoning naturally found its way into a classic French bistro staple. Alongside it sits another version: Espelette pepper tarragon mayonnaise paired with Bayonne ham and trout roe.
"If you're going out to eat, you want something you couldn't whip up at home in five minutes," says co-owner Thibault Blanchard. "Œuf mayo is a French cooking essential—and that's exactly why deconstructing it is interesting." He makes it sound easy, but the kitchen process is anything but: the eggs marinate for two days, the pickled ginger sits for two weeks, and the duck confit slow-cooks for a full 26 hours until perfectly tender. What looks like a simple bar snack is backed by serious French culinary technique.
Ter. is located at 11 Rue Camille Desmoulins in Paris's 11th arrondissement. It's open Tuesday to Friday, 7 to 11 p.m., and on weekends from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and again from evening until 11 p.m. Closed Mondays.
