Meet Silvia
How Did a Mexican Woman End Up Showing People Around Paris?
I came to France with a plan. Well… three plans: earn my MBA, learn French and travel as much as humanly possible.
I left Durango, Mexico, and landed in Rennes in 2008 speaking exactly zero French—so clearly, one of those goals needed immediate attention.
The plan did not include creating food tours in Paris. But here we are.
After Rennes came Marseille, followed by Paris in 2010. I spent seven years working in consulting and electronic payments for French and international companies—which is exactly as exciting as it sounds.
I have always been intensely curious, and moving to France gave that curiosity an entirely new world to investigate. I wanted to know why things were the way they were: why eastern Paris was considered more populaire, what a neighborhood market could tell you about the people living around it, why the arrondissements were numbered in that strange spiral and why everyone at a Paris café seemed determined to sit facing the street.
So I did what I always do: I paid attention, asked questions, read, listened and collected the stories and little details that helped France—and especially Paris—make more sense to me.
Eventually, I became the person friends and visitors called when they wanted to know where to eat, what they were looking at or why something in Paris worked in that very particular French way.
Somewhere along the way, all that curiosity turned into Frenchxican.
Why Frenchxican?
The name brings together the two cultures that have shaped me. It is also quite literally who I am: Mexican by birth and, for the past ten years, proudly French too.
Mexico gave me my roots, my warmth and the belief that food is a love language, inseparable from hospitality.
France gave my curiosity endless material: food, history, rituals, objects, neighborhoods and all those little details hiding in plain sight. Paris still gives me new things to notice, investigate and get ridiculously excited about sharing with someone else.
Frenchxican grew from that combination: Mexican warmth, French food, Parisian curiosity and my slightly obsessive need to understand what is happening around me.
Today, I create and personally host food and cultural experiences in the Paris neighborhoods that have become part of my life, along with private experiences shaped around the interests and curiosity of my guests.
Frenchxican now travels both ways across the Atlantic. Alongside my Paris experiences, I also host a small-group journey to Mexico City during Día de Muertos season, sharing the food, traditions and places I love in the country where everything started for me—with more destinations to come 😉
All my life, my family and friends have told me that I talk too much—hasta por los codos, as we say in Spanish. I never imagined that one day people would actually pay me to do exactly that: talk and talk about some of my favorite subjects—Paris, food, history and every fascinating detail I cannot keep to myself.
So come hungry, wear comfortable shoes and bring your questions. I will bring the food, the stories and apparently, plenty to say. And when we say goodbye, you will leave with something else too: a new friend in Paris.