“Given the choice between four perfectly acceptable movies, they invariably opt for a walk through the Picasso museum or a tour of the cathedral, saying, ‘I didn’t come all the way to Paris so I can sit in the dark.’ They make it sound so bad. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but this is the French dark. It’s…darker than the dark we have back home.’”
David Sedaris
Is there any city with more of a mystique than Paris? It’s all romance and delicious food and great wine and stylish people and butter. It reaches the point that you are nervous to go out of fear that it won’t live up to the expectations. It didn’t help that I had just watched the “France” season of the Chef’s Table — every restaurant had better be as magical as each of these, I kept thinking.
Luckily, any country that loves food as much as France will be worth the trip. “One truth I’ve learned after living here for over a decade is that people really like to eat,” said David Lebovitz. “The outdoor markets are crowded, lines snake out the door at bakeries, and cafés and restaurants are packed — even on Tuesday evenings — in spite of la crise (the economic crisis — this was in 2014).” I travel to eat, so all the better.
And eat we did. We were coming from Germany on the train and called a restaurant I had been wanting to eat at on the way, and luckily they could fit us in. So we dropped our bags off at our Airbnb, ran to the restaurant, and immediately had a great meal. It was one of those restaurants where the chef makes whatever he feels like, but it was all delicious, and it doubled as a wine shop so you could select what you wanted to drink from the shelves (every so often they would reach over you to grab a bottle, one of those things that you decide is quaint and great when you are traveling). We went to La Poilane bakery and ate bread and punitions cookies under the Eiffel Tower, ate crème brûlée at the cafe where Amelie worked, snacked on escargot next to some shouting Japanese businessmen, and tried so many macarons. That’s not even counting my favorite part: just sitting at a bistro and watching the world as we ate croque monsieur, drank wine, ate crepes, drank wine, ate onion soup, drank wine, ate pate, and drank wine. Of course, we also did all the touristy stuff (as if visiting Amelie’s cafe wasn’t touristy), including the Louvre, Notre Dame, Versailles, and E. Dehillerin.
Randomly, two of my coworkers were also in Paris at the same time, and one of our coworkers lived in Paris, while another coworker and friend came in from Berlin, so a group of us got together for dinner at Bistro Paul Bert, where we laughed and drank and laughed and drank some more. I had the steak au poivre, which I now make at home every so often in an Americanized version with smoked peppercorns and bourbon.
Myself, my friend Matt, and the friend from Berlin — Katie — also took a day trip to the Champagne region to, what else, drink more wine. It was harvest season, which is no doubt why the first small winery we stopped at seemed slightly annoyed at first that we had interrupted their quick lunch as massive containers of grapes kept coming in. But they warmed up once we started drinking and buying wine. A visit to their cozy family cellar was quite a bit different from the seemingly endless underground cellars at Taittinger, where a tour starts with a screen coming down and austere looking models welcoming you to the “House of Taittinger.”
The last night in Paris was the best, as Matt, Katie, and I sat on the Seine drinking some of that Champagne, eating chocolate and baguettes and cheese, and smoking loose cigarettes Katie bought from some guy so we could feel cool.
