yes, really salad. of all the pastry, crepe, macaroon, champagne goodness on offer, I went for salad, and after all the heavy Christmas eating we had done in the Netherlands, this was needed! But the most wonderful French find a way of making even salad rich and tasty. Dominating the vegetables on my plate were honey croutons topped with grilled slices of goats cherve - 3cm's thick, lardons of bacon, toasted walnuts and fried slices of potato. I was in a very happy place! And sharing a creme brulee with the lovely Katherine....ahhh Pari! It was a lovely finish to a stroll around Montmartre, which was still adorned in Christmas lights, little market stalls and plenty of Vin Chaud!
But the following morning it was time to leave all my salad dreams behind and focus on our real mission in Paris; to eat pastry and lots of it!! As we started our leisurely stroll across the city to Notre Dame to start our fist day of eating (cough) sorry, sightseeing we stopped at a boulangerie with loads of 1st place signs in the window (for what I couldn't tell you but it's a good sign) and bought our first Pain au Chocolat. That was it, I was never leaving Paris!! They just make amazing pastry. I don't know what it is. If it's the cows eating different grass and producing different tasting butter or the fact that the French have no sense of heart disease guilt when sprinkling the bare amount of flour needed to hold the pastry together over the square meter of butter that goes into one croissant, but they just taste amazing. We were very happy little chickens!
So Pain au Chocolat was closely followed by much needed coffee, followed by crepes, followed by more coffee (espresso cause the one thing they don't understand is coffee other than espresso), followed by a baguette for a nibble, followed by more coffee and then a gorgeous beef stew with a lovely bottle of bordeaux!! Oh and then there were the macaroons.... words.... just amazing. Lucky thing we walked for the entire day hey!!
One of my food highlights in Paris is going to sound like a travesty but we'd read about this Pink Flamingo Pizza place in our guide book and having a teensy bit of a flamingo obsession I insisted we seek it out. Sadly the night we first tried to go there it was shut. We later realised we were just too early, turns out the Parisians don't dine out at nanna o clock!
But! our fortune changed on researching and realising they had a few stores around Paris, so the next night we walked a very long street in Marais braving what became a constant drizzle that we just got used to and our persistence (my dad calls it stubbornness) was rewarded! If the Mighty Boosh guys opened a series of theme restaurants, it would be like this! It was, well, tre cool. But not in the Paris way, in a indie rock kids love it but are too cool to admit it way! After fetching our own beers from the fridge, borrowing the bottle opener off the blond afro'd staff (we're still debating if it was real or a wig) we chose several pizzas to share because I refused to commit to one flavour. Highlights included the Basquiat (as if I could not order this one!), with proscuitto, figs and gorganzola, then there was the duck and goats cheese (oh lord we ate some duck in paris), the eight hundred cheese la cantona, and some vegetable one that I had no time for! We also could have had the Bjork (salmon), but I had to be a little polite and let the others choose some too! To finish was strawberry cheesecake and raspberry and basil icecream which I got so loudly excited about my fellow diners allowed me to have the only one that was left. I totally shared...some.
So yeah, I went out for pizza in Paris. No Regrets!
From that point on there were crepes, and crepes, and then crepes. There is just nothing like a steaming nutella crepe from a street vendor in the drizzling rain!
Then there was New Years Eve. Our wonderful host in Amsterdam and traveling companion Anne spent lots of time researching somewhere nice for dinner for New Years Eve, just near the tower so we could duck over for midnight. This was dining out! I've not been closer to needing my stomach pumped from over eating in my life!
Dinner was a 6 course set menu with champagne and wine.
We started with champagne and canapes closely followed by foie gras baked in pastry with fig jam (despite my hesitations about the ethics of foie gras), followed by a spring vegetable minestrone, followed by roasted duck breast with fat chips, followed by apple sorbet served in a martini glass doused in a double shot of whisky (!good lord! as if we weren't tipsy enough), followed by chocolate fingers filled with 3 different flavored ice creams with 3 different coulis on the plate, which after the whisky I couldn't tell you what they were, one was mandarin I think.... followed by coffee and..chocolates. Cause we needed more chocolate!
I'm surprised the floor didn't cave in sending us into the laps of the diners seated on the ground floor!
At the start of the night, champagne and canapes! Still looking very perky!
And then our faces when second desert arrived. Note the look of I'm so full but i'm totally going to do this!
And then it was time to stretch our bellies and we walked town to visit this little beauty for midnight. Sadly for us little Aussies the French aren't into fireworks but we were caught up in the amazing atmosphere, and we even almost saw a riot!!
So many more street crepes, macaroons and baguettes later it was time to leave Paris for Eastern Europe. And sure the French are unaccommodating and often rude and Paris is expensive, but it's just magical despite. I just. Love it. Perhaps next time I will explore further, Champagne, Bordeaux, so many more places to taste!
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