We had a fun and adventurous morning on our first day waking up in Paris. After my early-morning foraging trip, we went to two of the great old Paris department stores to look around and to pick up some macarons from Ladurée and Hermé for a taste test.
When we had the macarons in hand, we took the Metro back to our neighborhood and went straight to a place we had pre-selected for lunch. They’re supposed to have extra-good sandwiches, pizza, and coffee. Mmmm. We were really hungry, so we went straight there from Galleries Lafayette.
On previous trips to Paris, we had never done much planning about where to eat. We’ve had pretty good luck, (pretty great luck, actually), and we’ve had lots of fantastic meals there, but this time around we wanted to be better prepared.
Our favorite places to eat are the local bistros and restaurants that mostly serve people living in their immediate neighborhoods. But those places are usually small, and generally will have only one, maybe two seatings a night. People typically show up for dinner around 8:00 or 8:30 and stay for a couple of hours or more. They’re the only ones who would occupy the table they’re sitting at that night.
It works well for these restaurants because they know almost exactly how many people they’ll be serving each night, how much food to prepare, etc. The menu changes from day to day in many of these places, and depends on what looks good to the chef at the market that morning, so they only buy enough and make enough to feed a certain number of people each day. That’s part of what makes them so good.
The downside, at least for those who don’t know any better, is that having a reservation is almost a necessity. These places are booked solid every night, so if you’re walking by, you’re hungry, and you want to go in and eat, nine times out of ten you’ll be out of luck unless you have a reservation. The smaller the place, the more likely you’ll need a reservation.
We had done our homework this time around. We had a list of at least twenty places where we’d really like to eat – all more or less in our neighborhood. Not that we were going to try to go to all of them. It was just a list of really good-sounding options.
The place we went for lunch was on our list. It was tiny. There were some tables upstairs, some tables downstairs inside, and some tables out front. There was a big menu posted. Much of their business appeared to be take-out. Especially pizza’s and sandwiches.
When you’ve figured out what you want, you order at the counter, then find an empty table. The guy running the operation will bring your order to you when it’s ready. We ordered a salad, a truffle pizza to share, and some vino, then sat down at one of the tables out front.
It had been a pretty wild morning, considering the foraging, the Metro, and the goings-on in the department stores. We were feeling a little jet-lagged, too. It felt good just to sit down out and rest the old dogs. The weather was perfect – a few clouds, a little breeze, warm, but not hot.
The salad and the wine showed up first. The wine was from Sicily, and was very tasty. The salad was good. It was just a basic salad – nothing fancy – but good. The pizza showed up next. There was nothing basic about the pizza. It was incredible. One of the best pizza’s I’ve ever had. Since we had an apartment instead of a hotel room, we could have taken home leftovers. Too bad there weren’t any!
All fed and happy, we walked back to the apartment to take it easy for awhile. Hey, we should look at the goodies we bought and make sure they still look okay, eh? Oooooo… six macarons from Ladurée and six from Hermé. I put them out onto the kitchen table and took a picture. They looked quite delectable. But we couldn’t do a taste test now. We were way too full.
To be continued…
Photo Credit: The photo of Caldo Freddo is from https://thinkparisian.wordpress.com/category/paris-pictures/
