French cuisine is famous all over the world, and French dishes are cooked and served everywhere, including Norway. Along with the dishes, their names have been borrowed, undergoing spelling, phonetic and semantic changes. Since French names of dishes and products have been penetrating into European languages for several centuries, many of them are not perceived as borrowed by the speakers of these languages. The article examines the place of French loanwords in Norwegian culinary discourse: the use of such vocabulary in home cooking and its functioning in cafés and restaurants. Purist sentiments have always been quite strong in Norway, which is explained by the history of the country and the Norwegian language. This fact also manifests itself in relation to the culinary vocabulary, which contains a significant number of borrowings mainly from the French language. A comparison of borrowings of this kind found in Norwegian with borrowings into the Russian culinary lexicon, which has experienced the exceptionally strong French influence, demonstrates that both in quantity and composition these lexical-semantic groups in the two languages are comparable. The English translations of Norwegian words in the paper show that often the same French lexemes were borrowed into English, too. As for the composition of Norwegian culinary designations of French origin, these are nouns (mainly names of products and dishes) and verbs (designations of food processing methods). French substantive borrowings have entered everyday Norwegian long ago and firmly, and the finely developed French terminology of food processing is widely used in the professional discourse of chefs. Cafés and restaurants are visited to satisfy hunger in a festive atmosphere, an element of which is the French names of dishes. The desire of purists to eliminate French loanwords from the Norwegian culinary vocabulary is hardly realisable. In the field of cookery, however, the translator’s false friends are revealed.