Paris

julienparisIt’s hard not to find great food when visiting Paris, but if you’re looking for a truly authentic French experience, book a reservation at Julien Brasserie on your next visit. Located a bit “out of the way” in the 10th arrondissement, it’s totally worth the trek. Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis is rather unassuming, but once you step through the ornate brasserie doors, you feel transported through time – to the days of Hemingway, Dali and Picasso – greeted by the restaurant’s Art Nouveau charm. It’s just a beautiful room, with magnificently carved mirrors, a grand mahogany topped bar and an ornately designed mosaic floor.

I was first introduced to the restaurant by designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who said it was one of his favorite places and after eating there I can certainly understand his loyalty. The restaurant offers a reasonable prix-fixe menu (about 42 euros) which features several options – including starters like traditional onion soup au gratin, duck Foie Gras with seasonal fruit chutney and brioche bread, or scallops tartar and pink shrimps from Madagascar in lime and ginger; and main courses like Charolais beef tartar, Sole meunière, roasted duck breast from South-West France with Provencal vegetables, or Grilled Chateaubriand in béarnaise sauce.

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An excerpt from  "Hungry for Paris"

paris1.jpg Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut glass).

The editor was unyielding, so off I went. The stale-smelling dining room was mostly empty on a winter night, and though the young mâitre d’hôtel was unexpectedly charming and gracious, I was more interested by my friend Anne’s gossipy accounts of a recent visit to Los Angeles than I was by the menu.

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paris_france-interior.jpg When was the last time you ate something that made time stop and took you back to your childhood? Berthillon  in Paris is a dreamy ice cream shop on the Isle St. Louis that will do just that...They make the World’s best hot fudge sundae, period!

There are so many choices of ice cream and sorbets, that are all freshly made in-house. The ice cream case is filled with colors and texture like a Tiffany’s jewelry case without the armed guard. Most well-heeled patrons can hardly decide, pointing, discussing and trying small spoonfuls. Not me.

I always have Tahitian Vanilla, full of tiny crunchy seeds and I always have three "boules." Next comes the chocolate sauce, Valhrona of course, just the right temperature, not too hot just perfectly warm, served with a small pot filled with extra sauce. The whipped cream is from Normandy and piped onto the sundae by a bright red, hand-operated, vintage cream dispenser that makes a perfect but not too perfect rosette on the top.

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sorza_collage1a.jpgThe Isle St. Louis is like the Nantucket of Paris. One of the ancient islands in the middle of the Seine, with Notre Dame at its tip and many picturesque bridges connecting it to the Left and Right Banks, its narrow streets are quaint and relatively free of traffic, with a concentration of shops and galleries; therefore, it tends to be much populated by Americans, who don’t seem to have been discouraged either by the metro strike or by the plunging dollar from flocking there.

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IMG 0908It was hard not to take it personally.

The moment my mother and I stumbled off the plane onto Parisian soil this past June, the city was getting away from itself in a most unusual way.

Too-close-for-comfort terrorism alerts were being issued to Americans traveling to France. Torrential and relentless downpours of rain were pummeling the streets. The Seine was flooding to a historic level. A strike by transit workers and airport employees was looming. Unseasonably cold temperatures were forcing us to forego wearing the Paris-style fashions we had dreamily packed in our matching luggage sets. And, in an emergency act of protecting its antiquities from drowning, the Louvre had the nerve to close its doors - literally as we were arriving at the ticket booth - rendering us unable to so much as snap a prized selfie of us surrounded by hundreds of other tourists snapping selfies of themselves snapping selfies with Ms. Mona Lisa.

Frankly, the City of Light was looking more like the City of Uh-Oh, and I’m fairly certain my mother wanted to cry. After all, this was the highly-anticipated mother-daughter trip she’d been planning for a year now. A vacation to celebrate our triumphant survival through a previous year of abysmal woes. A vacation that had already been postponed once and had a lot riding on it emotionally and spiritually. A vacation that, at this point, seemed would have been better spent in the Bahamas. Or Trenton, New Jersey.

It was a hunk of meat that turned things around for Mom and me.

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