You know how much I love food, so I think it should be obvious to you that food was a major part of our vacation to Paris, one of the most gastronomically famous cities in the world. We had a ton of culinary triumphs… and a few disappointments.
Woot! Woot!s
Croissants Framboise. Near our hotel was an adorable pâtisserie; we stopped there multiple mornings on our way to the day’s activities. Carla occasionally ordered a pain au chocolat, which is her pastry of choice. But I went for the croissant framboise. Not only are they GORGEOUS, they are delicious and not overly sweet – just the right amount of raspberry jam. I have no idea how the pâtissiers ensure that they are still fluffy and airy, despite the jam, but I am very grateful to them for mastering the trick.
Jus de Pomme. On special occasions, we allow Carla to order soda with dinner. In the US, she chooses a Shirley Temple or root beer. Since Shirley Temples and root beer aren’t really French, she decided to branch out and during our trip discovered a passionate appreciation for jus de pomme. She enjoys apple juice once in a while in the States, but the French jus de pomme is different and wonderful. It seems to be fresh squeezed; even the juice in bottles seems closer to fresh-pressed apples than the thin brown liquid we call apple juice here at home. Carla loved it. She ordered it everywhere.
Holy Belly Café. Shockingly, there came a time when we grew weary of croissants. I know; it was a surprise to all of us. Fortunately, my husband had found a little breakfast place we could go to instead. It was an American-style breakfast place, and all the wait staff spoke American English (our server had a Southern accent), and Carla was able to get pancakes and scrambled eggs. The food was delicious, the bathroom was clean, and we all got a little fix of “home” that was a nice change-up from the French restaurant usual. (On a non-food note: Carla wore her Weezer T-shirt the day we went to Holy Belly and the server gave her a thumbs up and then cued “Say It Ain’t So” on the restaurant sound system for us all to enjoy. Top notch experience, highly recommend.)
ChocoStory Brussels. The only museum we visited on our day trip to Brussels was the chocolate museum. It was a cute, kid-friendly, museum, slightly on the shabby side, but informative. I enjoyed learning about the planting and harvesting of chocolate, and was surprised to discover that there are multiple types of cacao pods. The best part, though, was the live chocolate-making demonstration at the end. Our chocolatier was adorable and charming in every way – he even spotted me lifting my phone to photograph him and gave me a grin – and he gave us a super speedy demo of how to make molded, filled chocolates. The specialty of Brussels is called praline, which is both the name for the molded, filled chocolate and also the name for the filling. The filling is a paste made of sugar and either hazelnut or almond. We each got to sample one of the chocolates on our way out of the museum. I would say it took us about ninety minutes to go through the museum. We arrived around ten in the morning, and even on a beautiful sunny Saturday, we were able to walk right in without waiting in line. We passed the entrance later that afternoon and the line stretched out to the street.
Au Bourguignon du Marais. This cute little restaurant was the site of one of the best meals of our entire trip. My husband and I each got the signature boeuf bourguignon and it was out of this world delicious. The wait staff was attentive and friendly, and allowed us to order everything in French, which was very gratifying.
La Corde à Linge. I have already waxed poetic about our trip to Strasbourg. It was such a charming city, I would return in a heartbeat. We found a little restaurant smack in the middle of our Rick Steves walking tour that had outdoor seating on the edge of a canal. I had spaetzle with mushrooms and a glass of local Riesling; both were delicious, and it was so pleasant to sit outside in the sunshine.
Zen. Listen, Carla was a trooper when it came to the food. She didn’t complain, she ate what she could, but she wasn’t a huge fan of many of the dishes at the restaurants we picked. So my husband tracked down a Japanese restaurant that served things she might eat, and eat she did. She had a filet of teriyaki salmon, a bowl of white rice, and two bowls of edamame. That may have been the only vegetable she ate the entire time we were in France. The restaurant was well worth visiting just to get her to eat, but the food was also delicious!
Sir Winston. One of Carla’s can’t-miss events of our trip was to see the Eiffel Tower sparkle. At dusk, the whole tower sparkles every hour on the hour for five minutes. We had timed tickets (6:30 pm) to the Arc de Triomphe one night, and we’d hoped that dusk would fall during our visit… but the timing worked out to be later than we thought (the first sparkle didn’t happen until 8:00 pm). This meant that our dinner plans needed to change. We found a restaurant that was a mere three-minute walk away from the Arc de Triomphe and managed to get an 8:30 reservation. It was a late dinner for sure, but the food – a mixture of Indian and British flavors – was extremely good and the location was perfect.
Amorino. My husband and daughter are big ice cream fans, so we stopped at Amorino several times during our visit to Paris. (We even went twice on our last day in Paris.) The gelato is decent, and there are some fun flavors – my favorites were the orange blossom, the passion fruit, and the raspberry – but the best part, I think, is that the staff make each ice cream cone into a lovely little flower with as many as three flavors apiece. Carla got chocolate and raspberry every time.
Breizh Café. My husband had heard about a particular type of food from Brittany, which is a northwestern region of France, called galettes, which are a Breton-style crepe: the crepe itself is made with buckwheat flour and has typically savory contents. He found a restaurant in Montmartre that serves galettes, and after we visited Sacre Coeur and did our Rick Steves walking tour of the area, we got a table for lunch. I’ll admit, I wasn’t particularly interested in the food; I’m not a crepe girl to begin with, although I might be tempted with a lemon curd crepe on occasion. But I dislike eggs, and the galettes all seemed to have eggs in them. I ended up ordering a Breizh roll with mushrooms (I asked for it sans oeufs, but the server and/or chef ignored that request), which was kind of like a crepe rolled up and cut into circles. It was tasty, don’t get me wrong; just not my thing. My husband LOVED his galette. And I loved the green salad I got on the side. It was EXACTLY the kind of salad I love the most: fresh, bouncy green lettuce with a light vinaigrette. Simple and delicious and perfect. My husband and I also both enjoyed a bottle of cider, which was tart and fizzy. (Sadly, Carla did not enjoy her crepe with Valrhona chocolate; the chocolate was too bitter.)
Bottle Tops. Being thirsty Americans, we bought a pack of bottled water from the local supermarket (Monoprix) to keep in our mini fridge. The bottled water – in fact, all the bottled beverages we encountered – have lids that remain attached to the bottle when open. This is a fantastic innovation in plastic bottle technology and I wish it would make its way to the US. (Not that I want to encourage plastic bottle usage.)
Monoprix. We had a couple of late nights where dinner in a restaurant wasn’t possible, so we stopped in at a nearby Monoprix to grab some pre-made food. While it wasn’t the best food I’ve ever had, it was nourishing, and it was very simple to microwave and eat at our hotel. What I really want to tout are the tomatoes. My kid found a fresh tomato each time we went to Monoprix, weighed it and applied the appropriate sticker on her own, and then ate the entire tomato like an apple when we returned to our hotel.
Ladurée. You know we ate well and widely if I had to think about whether to include Ladurée on this list at all. But in the end, I decided it had to make the cut. Ladurée macarons are the best in the world. We each chose two flavors (I think I picked passion fruit and raspberry) and gobbled them up the instant we left.
Womp Womps
Salads. Heading into our trip, I was so excited about the salads. My primary memory of visiting Paris with my mother was the salads: simple bowls of fresh butter lettuce, lightly dressed with vinaigrette. I was ready to eat ALL the salads. And… I didn’t find any! Occasionally, I was able to order a salade verde on the side of my main course, but for the most part any salads on the menus were fussy things with a bunch of ingredients I did not want to eat. I JUST WANTED LETTUCE. One afternoon late in our trip, when I was feeling veggie-starved, we went to a place called Angelina’s so my husband and Carla could sample the famed drinking chocolate. We stood in a long line, we endured a very stereotypically snooty waiter. My husband and Carla ordered drinking chocolate and pastries. I ordered a salade Caesar. On the menu, it came with chicken. I did not want chicken, I just wanted lettuce. So I ordered it without chicken. The waiter was wholly unamused. I ordered in French and he repeated my order to me with a conspicuous question mark at the end of it. Then he repeated it in English, just to be sure. No chicken. When the server brought the salad, he seemed quite nervous as he set it down in front of me: This has no chicken, okay? Has no one in Paris ever heard of a vegetarian??? (I am not a vegetarian, but they do exist!) It was fine, but not great. But it was pretty much the only salad I encountered until we went to the Breizh Café. Where did all the salads go?!
Brussels Frites and Waffles. One of the top reasons we chose Brussels as the site of a day trip was because Belgium is known for so many good foods! Chocolate! Waffles! Fries! We planned to do a lot of food enjoying while we explored the city. Our experience of the waffles and fries turned out to be comedically awful, in part because we felt some time pressure that resulted in us doing too much at once, in part because of the crowds, and in part because we overestimated the number of hands we possess. We walked all around the city, and had about an hour-ish left at the end of the day before we needed to get back to the station to meet our train. We’d been scoping out the waffles and frites situation all day, and we were ready to try them. Both waffles and frites are sold at little stands in the old town: you get your food and then walk around eating it. Lots of people were walking around eating waffles and frites; it looked simple and delicious; we wanted to join them. We got Carla a waffle first. The waffles come in two styles – regular and Liege style – and you can add on a wide variety of toppings. Carla got a waffle with chocolate and strawberries. So far, so good. The waffle is served in a clever little cardboard shelf, shaped kind of like an open bed of a pickup truck: wide and flat, with short walls on three sides. You get a little wooden two-tined fork alongside your waffle. The idea is to maneuver the waffle off the open end of the shelf with the fork, take a bite, repeat. But Carla’s waffle was so laden with toppings that she couldn’t move it by herself. My husband tried to help her, as we were fording the torrent of people to get to the frites place. I am feeling residual stress just typing this out. The frites come in cardboard cones, and are accompanied by the sauce or sauces of your choice. The frites cone has a tiny attached cup that holds the sauce (you can see some images on their Instagram page). It’s very clever – you can hold the cone in one hand, and use your free hand to dip fries into the sauce. Amazing. Carla wanted frites too, even though she was still struggling to eat her waffle. There were many options for sauces, and my husband and I each narrowed down our list to two. I assumed (foreshadowing!!!) that the sauces would be squeezed in next to one another inside the sauce dish. But no. One sauce goes into the sauce dish, one sauce goes into a tiny plastic tub. A tiny LIDLESS plastic tub. So all of a sudden, the three of us were trying to juggle three frites cones, two plastic tubs of sauce, and a waffle on a shelf. All while trying to leave the tiny frites shop, which was packed with a dozen people all trying to get their own delicious potato treat, and avoid being trampled by the relentless crowds. It was both hilarious – an I Love Lucy storyline in the making – and nerve-wracking. As soon as we stepped out of the frites shop – which is just a narrow room with a place for the line of frites buyers on one side and the counter behind which the frites are made on the other – I was ready to jettison my own frites because it was impossible to handle three frites, two plastic tubs, and a waffle at once. I think what happened was, I took two cones of frites and somehow managed to secure two plastic cups of sauce between my fingers and the frites (remember, the sauce cups were OPEN), while my husband held his own frites and helped Carla maneuver the waffle into her mouth. While he did this, I handed a frites cone to Carla, and then started scarfing my own frites, dipping frites and feeding them to my husband. My goal was less frites-enjoyment than ridding us of one cone of frites. When the waffle was done, my husband took over his own frites. It was still very difficult to eat fries while holding them and holding a lidless plastic tub. Our poor planning aside, the frites were amazing. However, if you find yourself in the same situation, ONLY GET ONE SAUCE. (The sauces were quite delicious, though. I got a truffle mayonnaise and a spicy mayo called pili pili. DELISH.) Is there anything that screams American overconsumption more than a family of three becoming overwhelmed by fries and waffles??? I don’t think so.
Brussels Beer and Kriek. While we were in Belgium, I wanted to try some of the famous Belgian beer, especially the kriek lambic. I’ve had Lindemans lambic here in the States, and I like it, and wanted to try another option. Well, I should have taken a page from my husband’s book and done my research, but I did not, and opted instead to grab a couple of beers and two bottles of kriek at random. They were not good. Not good at all. I made it through one small glass of one bottle of kriek, but could only taste the other one before I had to pour everything out. The beers were so bitter/sour I ended up pouring them out, too. My husband always kindly says that it’s good to TRY things, even if they don’t end up the way we expected, but I felt like I was literally pouring money down the drain.
Carla-Friendly Food. I knew Carla would struggle to find things she wanted to eat, and I was right. We’d been confident that most restaurants would offer burgers or steak, both things she eats. And we always chose restaurants with one or both items on the menu. However, even when she gamely ordered a burger, they were often undercooked to the point that she couldn’t eat them (despite asking for them to be bien cuit). She ordered steak a couple of times, too, but the restaurants we visited preferred fattier, more flavorful cuts of meat than she is accustomed to and so she would eat only a few bites. She didn’t complain or whine, though. Perhaps because we made up for what she lacked in dinner by always ordering dessert.
Chai Lattes. I don’t drink coffee, which is a hard line to hold in Paris. Especially because I still require caffeine or I get a terrible headache. Several cafes – though not all – offered chai lattes, so I was able to sample a bunch. Sadly (and this feels like true blasphemy), none of them can hold a candle to a Starbucks chai. (We did not go to a single Starbucks while in Paris, just FYI.) My best guess is that there is a tendency to use excessive milk in the Parisian chai, because they all tasted weak and overly milky. The best one I drank had lait du coco instead of lait normal, but it took me a while to figure that out and then not every café had lait du coco. When there was no tea to be had, I simply drank Coca-Cola Zero. Once, in desperation, I even had a café crème. Which I paid for by feeling jittery and anxious all day, yay.
As with our trip overall, the culinary wins greatly trumped the fails. We ate well, some might say gluttonously luxuriously. Carla did not waste away to nothing, and, in fact, ate more than just croissants. Not a lot more than just croissants, but more. I’m calling that a win.
