Paris je t'aime

Ah France.  In settling down to write this, I decided to do some deep method acting (well, it works for Daniel Day-Lewis) and have a French breakfast.  In the hotel where we stayed on our recent trip there, that involved fresh, crusty baguettes, echiré butter and those dollshouse sized pots of Tiptree jam.  Here, it involved frozen croissants and putting on Carla Bruni’s last album. Turns out croissants lose their internal structural integrity if microwaved.  Much like Bruni’s husband, if you replace ‘microwaved’ with ‘elected’.

Paris is my favourite place in the entire world. There are definitely cities that are cooler, more fun, easier and friendlier, but I like its standoffish, tired grandeur and superiority complex and feel at home there.  I almost never mention this, but it did actually used to be my home, and I found it impossible to be unhappy. Even when sitting in my unheated attic studio, with grass growing through the trendy jute flooring because of the damp (it looked like I was cultivating a weird Japanese garden in the corner), alone, stalking people I cared about across the Channel via Facebook and eating apple compote from plastic tubs meant for school children’s lunchboxes, I wasn’t truly miserable. 

Ian Fleming writes in A View to a Kill (a short story about Bulgarians in For Your Eyes Only, and almost nothing to do with Grace Jones) something along the lines that Paris is like a faded whore, doing the same tricks every time.  NB. Do not google this in the vague hope of finding the exact quote. In pretty short order you end up seeing that someone has written a blog called ‘Adventures of an Anglo slut in Paris’, which has basically ruined my morning.  Anyway, you can sort of see what Fleming means. You do the Eiffel Tower, get the great views from any of the central bridges, perhaps go up to Montmartre and pretend to be Amélie, or down to St Germain and spend 15 euros on a coffee hoping to be inspired by the ghost of Sartre. You’re always going to feel excited because it’s PARIS, but it’s really not doing anything new for you.

Which is why, when I went to Paris a few weeks ago with most of my sisters and one of their boyfriends, I was looking for something different. Being very much more Sartre than Amélie (especially in looks) I normally stick to the Left Bank, but a friend recommended a hotel in the Marais that turned out to be wonderful and this time at least, Paris did something new for me.

We were there at the peak of the weekend long panic about horse meat in food over here, and I like to think we did our bit to feel involved in the scandale via Sister number 4, who kept ordering ‘steak’ from 10 euro set menus in St. Michel.  I bet there’s enough horse DNA in her right now to get her banned from most UK supermarkets.  The 10 euro menus, though, are a great little thing to know about Paris. You’re not going to eat anything spectacular or life changing, and it’ll possibly involve quite a lot of the loser of the 4.15 at Deauville, but the fact that you can eat a passable paté or salad, ‘boeuf’ bourguignon and apple tart for 10 or 12 euros in the middle of Paris (the 5th arrondissment, mainly) constantly amazes me.

Also amazing was the obsession with American food. London has been in the grip of this burgers and fried dirty wings thing for a while but I didn’t know it had hit Paris.  To one side of our hotel was a diner called ‘Breakfast in America’ which is apparently very famous and managed, on a snowy, miserably cold Sunday, to maintain a queue of about 30 people lined up outside for 4 or 5 hours. Which is impressive. On the other side was something called ‘La Favorite’ that looked more like a café in the grand tradition, with that woven plastic bench seating outside, but inside was an American style brasserie.  We went here for dinner on the Saturday night after a disappointing rugby match at the Stade de France which culminated in yours truly falling under an RER train (not in despair, by accident) and Sister number 3’s boyfriend trying not to laugh for the entire journey back to central Paris.  Meeting up with said sisters (who in our absence appeared to have bought the entire contents of the make up shop, Sephora), we popped next door for supper.

 Inside, it was dark. Really, really dark, like that deep orange at the end of an evening when people are drinking brandy in the half light.  However, the atmosphere and food were perkier.  There were lots of groups of young Parisians having a really, really good time.  I spent a lot of my teenage years wearing black polo necks, cultivating various existential crises and developing an insidious smoking habit prior to my first trip to Paris and now it turns out now that these kids are HAPPY. Annoying.  We had burgers which were very good, all constituents present and correct, with that properly moreish (oh God, horrible word alert) mouthfeel that you need if you’re going to bother to eat a burger. Also, it was definitely beef, which was a relief for sister number 4, who by this point was starting to look a little long in the face. Sorry. With a bottle of nice Sauvignon Blanc it was about 25 euros a head, which is not a bad price to pay to discover a whole new side to Paris.

We stayed at the Hotel Emile, 2 rue Malher, 75004

We ate at La Favorite, 4 rue de Rivoli, 75004  

Tourists