FAQ: So, I have three days in Paris (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) and I want to eat…..

9 August 2010 by John Talbott    1292  
FAQ: So, I have three days in Paris (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) and I want to eat…..
FAQ: So, I have three days in Paris (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) and I want to eat at bistros around my hotel at night that are reasonable and have no American tourists and serve locavore (substitute vegan or traditional or whatever) food. Oh, and I don’t speak any French and am not going to make a fool of myself by trying out my high school level words. Answer: Sure, dear reader, I can rip off a dozen like that without thinking. Not! You’d be surprised how often a query like this shows up on my blog, in my mailbox or on the websites I hang around at. There’s a commonly held assumption that I and my fellow Paris food bloggers know all sorts of secret places we eat at but don’t tell anyone else about. That may have been true in the 1960s when Craig Claiborne ruled the world, but the internet has put an effective stop to that.  So I rarely answer such requests, but I have a food writer friend who does and his advice is nearly always the same.  Which of us is more helpful? Let’s take apart the FAQ like we were taught to parse a sentence. I have three days: OK, your time is limited and you want to use the days you have in the best way possible – that’s reasonable. Saturday, Sunday and Monday: Ah, here we have a problem. French folk take time off during the week and unlike many American restaurants, their places are not open 7/7. So this means digging out one’s list of places open Saturday, Sunday and Monday as well as school holidays, national holidays and August. I want to eat at bistros: Agreed, Paris bistros are neat, cool and traditionally where folks have been going for good grub since 1815, when supposedly the post-Napoleonic Ruskie troops said – “bystro, bystro” for “quickly, quickly”.  But what you and your American restaurateur friend think is a bistro and Claude Lebey (cf Le Petit Lebey des Bistrots Parisien) or Thomazeau and Ageorges (cf Au Vrai Zinc Parisien) do may be worlds apart.  Indeed, one reader of mine said he was looking for “that bistro look” when he meant “that brasserie look.”  Nowadays the word bistro is like trattoria; it’s a word that means, as Humpty Dumpty put it, “…what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”  Most of us have trouble differentiating bistrots, cafes, bars and restaurants if we’re honest with ourselves. around my hotel: Here’s where I begin to get my back up and draw the line. I realize you’ve been waiting hours in line to get into the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, etc., hours going inside Versailles, etc., and hours trekking from one to the other and at night you want to plotz at your hotel and rest your tired dogs. But Paris, while big in population, is small because of its public transportation (a Socialist idea I’m sure, whoops, it’s over a century old) accessibility and it is literally only a minute and a half between each Metro stop and thus easy to be all the way across town in 20-30 minutes. that are reasonable: Sure. Agreed. No problem. But what is reasonable for you in New York or Santa Monica or Alberquerque or Tuscany may not translate to Paris. Bottom line, have a number in mind. and have no American tourists: Oh my Goodness, of course not. You’re a dreaded “tourist,” but Zeus help you if you fall in with other heathens. And of course, the bistro should be terrific and popular with the locals yet be totally off Americans’ radar screens. Actually, there is a solution to this and it’s to read the French critics and bloggers or expat bloggers before the New York Times, whatever is the contemporary equivalent of Gourmet (may it R.I.P.) and/or yearly guidebooks (except for the Michelin which lags 2-3 years behind Le Fooding, Pudlo or Lebey) come out. and serve locavore (substitute vegan or traditional or whatever) food: Jeez, next you’ll be telling me one of the four of you is afraid the French use goose and duck fat to fry stuff in without telling you, another has a nut allergy, a third won’t eat fish of any species that may be declared endangered in the next decade and the fourth needs his food cut up for him/her. Oh, and I don’t speak any French and am not going to make a fool of myself by trying out my high school level words: OK, line crossed here. One must learn to say Bonjour, Comment ça va?, Merci and Au revoir. Now was that so hard?  And anyone who cooks or reads food mags knows most French cooking words – poêlée, frites, à la vapeur, cru or sautée and what’s meat and what’s fish (a quick shortcut – all fish is cod). And unspoken behind all this is what is revealed by naïve high-schoolers who write university professors and ask them to essentially write their papers by asking them, for example, which geologic era is of most interest to them and why.  The implied message is “I’m too busy to go to the (what?) Library or Google, viaMichelin, etc., this stuff; you do it, you’ve got lots of time on your hands.” One final note: Often you come up with just the right suggestions but then learn that the questioners’ budgets won’t support dinner at night (3 times the noon) prices but only lunch. Bottom line to the FAQ: So, I have three days in Paris (Saturday, Sunday and Monday) and I want to eat at bistros around my hotel at night that are reasonable and have no American tourists and serve locavore (substitute vegan or traditional or whatever) food.  Oh, and I don’t speak any French and am not going to make a fool of myself by trying out my high school level words. 1. There are none such. 2. Try your search engine. 3. Read prior threads, questions, blogs; we’ve discussed…
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