You Left Your Beret Behind and Your Croissant is Getting Cold
Paris
I have a complicated relationship with Paris. It’s where I was born, where my parents live. People tend to think that’s so glamorous, but really it’s much like visiting your parents anywhere. We grocery shop and have dinner at home. We run domestic errands: this trip we went to an overly perfumed furniture store to try out a new sleeper sofa for my sister. We ordered a new mattress for the guest room (I’m the guest in question). Of course, for all my complaining, I also get to visit some of the best museums in the world, marvel at functioning public transit, and walk walk walk because the streets are (mostly) flat and the scenery is always beautiful.
But I can’t suggest many restaurants or bars you might want to go to. The best meals I have in Paris are at home where my stepmother spoils us with four and five course dinners starting with apéros of Pineau de Charentes and hors d’oeuvres and concluding with an extravagant cheese board and Berthillon apricot and raspberry sorbet. Too bad you can’t get a booking chez nous.
Well that sounds pretty good. What’s so complicated about it? It’s not the private life in France that I struggle with. It’s the public life. (For more on public/private life in France, I point you to Walter Benjamin, whose fascination with the Paris arcades as blurring the line between public and private helped explain my fascination with them. More recently, Hannah Arendt grapples with meanings of public vs. private spaces.)
French bars and restaurants aren’t the most welcoming to the solo patron and my few friends in Paris are loads of fun, but there are nights I’m on my own. Unlike other parts of the world where you can sit at the bar or counter and perhaps strike up a conversation with the bartender or your neighbor, I find the French very closed off even though I speak French at a reasonable level of fluency. There’s just a greater sense of privacy—dare I say standoffishness—that makes me less motivated to venture out to Paris’s bars and restaurants on my own as I would do in most other cities. Instead, I break up my long walks with exceptional ice cream, an occasional eclair, and always one stop at the best falafel west of Tel Aviv in the Marais.
I go two ways on ice cream: Berthillon is the old classic. Somehow their sorbets are fruitier than the actual fruit they’re made from. The new(er) hotness is in the Marais—Une Glace à Paris—more modern flavors and beautiful desserts too. Bonus for being just far enough from L’As du Fallafel that you can grab a scoop after you’ve scarfed down your messy falafel (pro-tip: assume the falafel position—leaning forward while standing to eat—it’s about the only way to avoid dripping sauce on your shirt).
The highlight of my recent time in Paris was unexpectedly found in a suburb I’d never previously been to. My old friends and trusted Paris guides Thierry and Benoît suggested we meet in Pantin which I had to look up on a map—it’s about as far from our flat as you can go on the metro, but these two have never steered me wrong so without so much as a question, I headed to Pantin. There they guided me to canal-side drinks at Dock B which also houses an art exhibition space which featured “Future of Love”—a group show about sex, bodies, love, robots, and slow dancing. Paris has so much museum-art. It was great to see more contemporary upstart work.
Just down the canal, past a number of impressive murals, an old SNCF (French railway authority) warehouse and yard has been converted into La Cité Fertile, an open-air event space with rotating food vendors. The night we went was a celebration of African heritage including West African food stalls, loads of dancing, and a number of people rocking their Afro-futurist best (think Wakanda). Apparently the events are different all the time—the boys had been at a drag show there a few weeks before. It’s meant to be a temporary space, but to me it felt just like the fresh air Paris needs. I hope it’s still around next time I go back.
Since I’m not much help on Paris restaurants, I direct you to David Lebovitz’s Paris list. He’s an American pastry chef and writer who has lived in Paris for years. His recommendations are typically stellar and if you’re a baker, don’t miss his recipes.