Paris Vacation 2018, Part 4

We overdid it again through the rest of Friday, but it wasn’t quite as bad as trying to hike up to Montmartre again. As we walked back from the Galeries Lafayette (with Julie already changed into her new sneakers) we found what was to be our go-to food for the trip—falafel.

I had read about the quality of the street food in Paris being quite high, and the excellence of the Middle Eastern dishes in particular. We watched a special on L’As du Falaffel that gave us a starting point, and, as it turned out, we never went any further.

The Rue de Rosiers is about fifteen minutes from our apartment, and we were hungry and footsore when we finally arrived. It’s in the Jewish quarter, and there are kosher bakeries and several temples, as well as much-newer looking fashion boutiques. L’As du Falaffel turns such a hot business for most of the year that it has two windows along the street about forty yards apart. Since we were there in the “dead season,” only one was open, but there was still a line stretching down the pavement with a man in a t-shirt and apron taking orders. There were probably four or five other falafel shops along this street, and I’m sure they were great too. The cooks were calling out to patrons, “Come to L’as du Falaffel, the best falafel in Paris!” and then being answered and argued at by the stands across the street, in what seemed to be a pretty good-humored bickering match.

Julie asked for a traditional falafel wrap and I asked for shawarma our first time there. It’s hard to say what exactly makes the falafel wrap so good. It starts with the pita, which is thick and chewy, and still warm. Then you have the vegetables, which are layered in at least twice—fresh tomatoes, diced cucumber, some lightly fried eggplant, and two kinds of pickled cabbage. And then the falafel itself is just perfect. It’s right out of the oil, perfectly spiced, and a magical texture. Every bite you take of it makes you think “this tastes like seventeen different things, and I can taste each one clearly, and they are all GREAT.” It’s all melded together with a creamy hummus-yogurt dressing.

I don’t want to undersell my shawarma, which was also delicious, but after tasting a bite of Julie’s falafel I went back to that for each return visit. There is a small eating area inside the restaurant that we went to, but since we (like most everyone else in line) got our food “a l’emporter” (which is cheaper than buying it to eat in the restaurant) we crouched on the curbside and took amazed bites with our plastic forks. As hungry as we both were, there was no impulse to wolf it down. This was too good to be rushed.

We made it back home to stretch out and retreat from the sun a bit, and then headed out again in the evening to check out Les Halles, an enormous (mostly) underground mall that used to be the city’s main market. We poked into this store and that (including a LEGO store, where we took some pictures for the boys of an enormous LEGO reconstruction of Notre Dame and the Hogwarts castle) and got some ideas for souvenirs, and then went home via Pierre Herme, the supposed champion of Parisian macarons.

These little cakes (cookies? What are macarons, anyway?) were each works of art on their own. Perfectly even, perfectly textured, and balanced with unbelievable flavors. We bought six of them and split each one on the balcony. Rose-litchi-raspberry, Passion fruit-rhubarb-strawberry, yoghurt-raspberry, dark Brazilian chocolate, hazelnut-praline, and pistachio. A little sweetness, then a lot of wine, and a movie were in order on Friday night. And you would think that we would have slept the sleep of the profoundly tired.

Friday night was probably the roughest night of sleep for the trip, and that was when we missed the air-conditioner we thought were going to have. Aside from this one hot night the weather was practically perfect while we were there. It may have sprinkled for ten minutes one of the mornings we were out, but that was the only time that it wasn’t perfectly sunny and upper seventies. If it had rained with any seriousness our walking-all-over-the-city plans would have been seriously compromised. (We did pack an umbrella, but still…)

Saturday morning was a pretty late start, and we decided to make an easier day for ourselves. We planned on getting breakfast out at Ble Sucre, which was going to be our “best croissant” destination. It was only a ten minute walk to get there, but the storefront was closed with a notice about how the staff was “en vacances” until the beginning of September. Phooey. We were going have to find the second-best croissant in Paris.

We wandered around until we stumbled onto the Marche D’Aligre, which turned out to be our favorite market experience of the trip. You have to have cash on hand to do anything at the Parisian markets, but it isn’t anything like negotiating a Middle Eastern market is supposed to be. There isn’t any bartering, every stall has a registered set of scales, and all the prices are clearly marked up front. (You do end up with a big pocketful of coins, since everything is priced so precisely.) We stopped at a boulangerie for some bread as well, and ended up going into a grocery for some wine, since the morning had turned into a grocery run.

We stayed inside for the rest of the morning, and then crossed over to the Left Bank for the first time. Our trip took us through the Latin Quarter (where the old Universities of Paris stood, hence everyone spoke Latin there in the Middle Ages) past the Pantheon to the Luxembourg gardens.

It’s hard to describe how one city “feels” different from another, but our afternoon in the gardens might have embodied most of what makes Paris feel like Paris. The gardens were busy, but in a quiet and slow-paced sort of way. It felt like everyone was out to enjoy the sunshine, and children were pushing wooden boats around in the enormous fountain below us. Couples laid in the grass reading books, women sunned themselves and carried on quiet conversations, and every once in awhile somebody pulled themselves up to go get an ice cream. The rowdiest thing we saw all afternoon was a friendly game of petanque as we walked out of the park.

It had been in our “while we’re in this neighborhood” plan to stop in at La Maison du Chocolat, a highly renowned chocolatier with multiple locations in the city. I did okay at speaking French while we were there. Usually whoever I was speaking with picked up on the fact that I was an English speaker even if I didn’t stumble over something, but I couldn’t make any sense of what the young man who initially greeted us was asking me. He smiled after repeating himself a second time and asked if I’d be more comfortable in English, and then asked again if we’d like to try a free sample.

Well, yes, of course we would.

This was good chocolate. This was EXPENSIVE, very tiny, very good chocolate. And we each had one sample, and then we had another. Just those two bites each probably cost ten euro. But boy, was it good chocolate. We ended up bringing a dozen home, and he offered us another sample each while we were picking them out, and then another sample after we’d paid up. He was a nice guy.

By now we were getting hungry. We had made plans to look inside Bon Marche (another big mall), but multiple hours on nothing except a few bites of chocolate was catching up, and we ended up picking a random restaurant that was our thumbs-down experience.

We had a did-not-translate moment about whether we were going to order food at all and sat there with just drinks for close to twenty minutes, and then when Julie’s croque madame arrived it was overdone and appeared to be made with offensively plain sliced sandwich bread. I had some pretty good potatoes dauphinoise and a pretty bad duck confit.

By a deliberate decision we cut the evening off on the early side to make sure we had our feet under us for the following day and to catch up on some lost sleep. We headed back along the Seine and decided to give some street food another shot, what with dinner being kind of a bust.

The French know a thing or two about making crepes. I got Nutella, Julie got cookie butter, and they were everything that dinner was not—hot, sweet, and memorable. You get them all folded up and wrapped up in a wax paper napkin, and as you get down to the last bite you get an extra big bite of all the filling that’s sunk down. So, as we walked back over the Seine towards our apartment, we had satisfied taste buds after all.