Nevertheless, if I were to write in a café it would be a place like Les Parigots, a bistro/bar/café just off Place de la République. (Parigot is slang for Parisian.) There’s a back area with books on shelves that’s fairly calm but with enough distraction to remind a writer that he or she isn’t at home. The writer would also be well placed to watch food coming from the kitchen and clients going into the rest room, which could be just the spark needed to further some important work.

I imagined this post at Les Parigots while watching the waitress pick up two plates of hamburger-and-fries from the kitchen ledge. But I wrote it at home.

Les Parigots. 5 rue Château d’Eau, 10th arrondissement. 100 yards north of Place de la République, Metro République. Tel. 01 42 00 22 26.

The post Writing in cafés appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

It’s as though, olfactorily speaking, someone had flicked a switch in the City of Light. And what’s been revealed is the very life of the café: the aroma of coffee grinding in the morning, the scent of potatoes au gratin wafting in from the kitchen as lunchtime approaches, the smell of late-afternoon plate of frites across the room, the fragrance of a perfume at the next table.

Over the past few days I’ve visited a dozen of cafés, bars, café-bars, café-brasseries, and café-bistros to get a whiff of the Parisian café circa 2008.

Along with many specific scents I’ve found that the two most notable characteristics of café culture in Paris have actually been accentuated.

The first is that Paris has further solidified its position as a northernmost outpost for year-round café culture. With or without overhead heaters (sometimes more appropriately called head overheaters), some Parisians have always been happy to sit on the terrace of a café even in the gray of winter. Outdoor seating is even more popular now that the indoor smoking ban has sent smokers onto the open-air terraces, where smoking is permitted.

The second is that while the economic life of Paris, as other major cities, tends to drive diversity of commerce and of neighborhoods (and hence of neighborhoods themselves) into extinction, there remain in any quarter a wide diversity of cafés, café-bars, café-brasseries, and café-bistros. Their smoke screen removed, cafés and bars now seem even more diverse. And many actually seem a bit more congenial now that the subtle, restrained, long-denied smoker-nonsmoker tension of the past few years is gone. (Disclaimer: I am a nonsmoker.)

According to an INSEE (French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) report based on 2005 data, about 25% of the adult population in France are regular smokers, defined as those who smoke at least one cigarette per day. (This is considered about average among European countries.) The percentages peak at 40% for men 25-34 year old and at 33% for women 18-24 years old before gradually decreasing thereafter.

I was therefore particularly interested in sniffing out the affect of the smoking ban on eating and drinking establishments in the happening quarters in eastern Paris—the 3rd, 10th, 11th, and 20th arrondissements.

Here are seven diverse cafés and bars of character, notable stops for travelers wandering the sights and neighborhoods of eastern Paris morning, afternoon, or evening.

1.   11 a.m. Café Justine

96 rue Oberkampf, 11th arrondissment. Metro Parmentier or St-Maur. A on map.
What better place to get a whiff of new Paris than among the icons of the previously smoky 20- and 30-something hang-outs on Rue Oberkampf in the 11th arrondissement. Café Justine is one of a number of spaces in this once-gritty neighborhood whose rickety wooden tables and gravy-colored walls became alternative hangs about a decade ago. Café Charbon, Café Mercerie, and Le Mécano Bar are others. No longer alternative or trendy, they are a now part and parcel of the upbeat mainstream of eastern Paris. Though their true calling is as evening restaurant-bars, the area is attractive for travelers of any age who are into daytime neighborhood wandering, perhaps with lunch in an Asian restaurant in the nearby Belleville Quarter (See Food & Drink: Southeast Asian Restaurants in the Belleville Quarter). Stopping by Café Justine for coffee this morning I find a mildly musty and homey old-grill smell. A sleepy waitress dresses the tables for lunch. Toward noon, a vague, warm, appetizing odor creeps into my consciousness. Little by little I discern a hint of grilling meat, broiling cheese, and a note of garlic. The smell comes fully into focus as the barman hangs the chalkboard announcing the day’s special: carré de porc fermier à la crème d’ail, garniture gratin de penne.

2. Noon. Le Saint Amour
2 avenue Gambetta, 20th arrondissement. Metro Père Lachaise. B on map.
Le Saint Amour covers the gamut of eating and drinking titles as it presents itself as café, brasserie, bistro, and wine bar. But I think of it especially as place to sit before or after visiting Père Lachaise Cemetery, whose side entrance is a few yards away. The row of tables by the window, behind the marble wall, used to be hidden from everything in the bar area but the smoke. Absent the smoke, the windows seem especially clear as I look out to the wide intersection where boulevard meets avenue is a reminder of urban planning circa 1850-1860, captured along with the swelling umbrella-carrying bourgeoisie in Caillebotte’s La Place de l’Europe, Temps de Pluie. Absent the smoke—and the coal and horse dung of Caillebotte’s time—the smell at this edge of Le Saint Amour is that of exhaust-dampening rain on the City of Lights, perhaps the most Parisian of all fragrances.

3. 4:00 p.m. La Pierre du Marais
51 rue de Bretagne, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Temple. C on map.
As the major market street in the northern part of the Marais, rue de Bretagne is as much a place to sit as it is to food shop. La Pierre’s indistinguishable décor is livened by a kindly if discreet staff, particularly in the off-hours of mid-afternoon. When a friend and I enter, La Pierre smells mildly of the remnant of grilling meats from lunchtime and of cleaning products. The waitress, taking our inquisitive sniffing as a compliment, informs us that she’s known as the best table cleaner in the joint. I’m trying to distinguish some other fresh, polite smell when my friend confesses that he may have put on too much cologne, Issey Miyake’s L’Eau Bleu d’Issey. A family of English travelers enters, occupying tables nearby, and before long the cologne is lost in the smell of frites being delivered to their table.

4. 6 p.m. Le Léonard
57 rue de Turbigo, 3rd arrondissement. Metro Arts et Metiers. D on map.
Sitting at a window table close to the bar used to be a rather smoke-intensive affair at Le Léonard, a laidback corner café decorated with declinations of Leonardo’s Mona and located a block from the brilliant Musée des Arts et Métiers, the National Museum of Technical Innovation. The barman and waiter appear so blasé as they wipe glasses or clear tables this late afternoon that I apologize for disturbing them to order a hot chocolate. I smell the smoke of a cigarillo wafting in through an open window panel to the terrace. At about 6:30pm the bar area fills with the scent of melted cheese on the croque monsieur that’s been set in front of a man two tables over. The couple of 20-year-olds making out on the other side of the bar don’t seem to notice.

5. 7 p.m. La Patache
60 rue de Lancry, 10th arrondissement. Metro Jacques Bonsergent. Open daily 4:30 p.m.-2 a.m. E on map.
What a wonderful surprise to discover that La Patache, a little bar by the hipster heart of Canal Saint-Martin that I’d always associated with a haze of smoke, smells of the wood that’s burning in the stove in the middle of the room. Who’d have known? With its woody smell, wood paneling, well-disposed barman, provincial preserves on shelves by the hearth, and servings of cold plates of regional victuals, this is the kind of place that you can imagine stepping into out of the tundra in winter.

6. 8 p.m. Le Petit Chateau d’Eau
34 rue Chateau d’Eau, 10th arrondissement. Metro Jacques Bonsergent or République. Closed Sunday. F on map.
Le Petit Chateau d’Eau always seemed like such a friendly, confidential bistro-bar whenever I’d walk by in the evening, so when I finally enter with a friend and take a seat at the central booth I am amazed to find that the place smells of lilies. Huge bouquets rise to either side of our booth. The waitress tells us, “I’ve always liked the looks of them, I just could never smell them.” But without any competition from smoke the smell is so strong that they may have to start buying less fragrance flowers. The atmosphere in this old bistro with its bygone tile walls and gravy-colored ceiling and zinc countertop is otherwise as chatty, amiable, and easy-going as I’d imagined. We’d intended to stay only for a drink, but the sautéed potatoes and slabs of beef and veal that were served to a table looked so appetizing that we ordered the same (a good call on our part). After we’d ordered, my friend went out for a smoke—which was a first for me and which I find far less offensive than someone walking away to speak on their cell phone.

7. 11:30 p.m. Le Pop In
105 rue Amelot, 11th arrondissement. Metro Saint Sébastien Froissart. Open 6:30 p.m.-1:30 a.m. Closed Monday. G on map.
Rue Amelot is a quiet street that whispers “Discover me” to those who venture off nearby Boulevard Beaumarchais. Among an eclectic choice of cafés, bars, and restaurants, young smokers now crowd like paparazzi outside Le Pop In on a Friday evening. I feel magically mature and alien as they part so that I can enter this tiny, spirited watering hole. I order a pint and notice the smell of smoke on the coats of two young women standing near me by the bar and then the smell of beer on the breath of the guy standing next to me as he shouts to his friend heading to the room upstairs: “You could at least say hello.”

© 2008, Gary Lee Kraut

The post The New Fragrance of the Paris Café appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

It’s a new Dunkin’ Donuts, across from the Wishing-Well Laundromat and from a Lukoil gas station, diagonal to a 7-11. Within 100 yards there are three barber shops, a hairdresser, a pizzeria, an Italian restaurant, a small bank, an old-style American café serving breakfast and lunch, the Hall of Frames frame shop, and Common Cents Cleaners. The fire department and the hardware stores are nearby in one direction, the post office and a veterinarian in another.

This is the American equivalent of that favorite French travel scene whereby one stops in a café in a village in, say, the Loire Valley, and is in awe at how French everything is: the waiter, the cashier/owner, the coffee, the conversation (at least the tone and expressions if you don’t understand the words), the way people greet each other and say good-bye, the bakery next door, the wine cellar nearby, the butcher shop, the 12th-century church with the metacarpal of a local saint in a side chapel, village hall, the monument to the dead of WWI, WWII, perhaps the War in Indochina, the gas station, the ANPE unemployment office.

So here I am at the West Trenton, NJ, equivalent of that French village scene. People, place, and me among and within them, having coffee and a toasted coconut donut.

By the counter there’s a plastic Christmas tree with donut decorations and donut boxes and coffee cups as gifts at the base. Three people are working behind the counter: a woman in DnD yellow, a woman in DnD pink, a man in a blue sweat jacket. They probably arrived not too long ago from India. They speak halting, cheerful English with the customers and a distant language with each other.

I step around the “Caution Wet Floor” sign, marvel at the array of donuts, and order a toasted coconut donut and coffee with milk. I comment that there was a closed gas station on this spot last time I was here. “Same owner,” says the man in blue.

I pay and take my coffee and donut to a seat at a table by the window.

The woman in pink and the man in blue are serving customers who enter one every minute or so. There’s never a line since each takes a cash register when necessary, something that’s unimaginable in France. The people behind the counter are always smiling and friendly and greet everyone as a regular. Perhaps they are.

A stout woman is buying gift cards at one register when a policeman stops in for coffee “cream, sugar, and put some extra sugar in there.” The tall, chesty cop tells the stout woman, “Great choice, beats wrappin’ gifts.” The woman now tells an earnest story of how she knows a bunch of women who occasionally meet at Dunkin’ Donuts. She says to the man in blue, “I bet you’ve never sold anyone fifteen $5 gift cards before.” The man smiles and says, “Many friends, very good.” The woman continues with her story, telling how some of those friends live in Trenton, others in Ewing, one in Lawrence, one across the bridge in Pennsylvania, but they always meet at Dunkin’ Donuts.

“Lots around,” says the cop. He looks up at woman in pink, “Did you put in extra sugar?”

“Yes, sir” she says with a smile. “Extra sugar for our friend.”

Taking a sip of my coffee I realize that the man in blue put sugar in mine, perhaps even extra sugar. I go up to the counter to get another cup. He’s busy with the gift cards so I tell the woman in pink that I only wanted coffee and milk.

“You just want milk?”

“Yes, just milk in the coffee.”

“No sugar?”

“Right.”

“Just milk, right?”

“And coffee.”

“Ok. Coffee and milk, no sugar.”

What I enjoy about this kind of sit-com dialogue is that it’s exactly the kind of dialogue I might have in, say, Portugal or Italy, except that over there I’m trying to communicate in the language of the server whereas here the server is trying to communicate in the language of the customer. Witnessing this type of dialogue repeated over and over with customers at the DnD I’m impressed by how patient both the server and the customer are in getting things right.

Furthermore, the clientele is so diverse that you’d think they’d come from central casting at Sesame Street. Every minute or so the door opens to let in a different character: African-American, Asian-American, a man from the subcontinent, Italian-American (I saw the flag sticker on his pick-up), a black boy and his white friend, jeans, chinos, a suit, sweats, skirts, sneakers, boots, loafers, running shoes, fat, less fat, big hair, middle-aged blondes, a midget, two nuns (one orders coffee with hazelnut cream, the other black, both small). They arrive in pick-ups, SUVs, a Buick, a Taurus, a Honda, a Grand Cherokee. They order donuts, coffee (always with a version of my conversation above), hot chocolate, gift cards, caramel lattes. As the white boy and his black friend turn to go the woman in pink says she has a gift for them, and she gives them a couple of donuts.

No one who enters takes a seat. Just me, the guy who grew up around the corner enjoying the local scene at DD the way one might enjoy that village café in the Loire Valley.

Then a man takes his coffee and newspaper and sits down at the next table. He’s in his 60s, short, round, full head of gray hair. Looking at the front page he says something about the economy. I concur. He keeps his head down to the news, barely ever looks over to me, just keeps making comments, and each time I concur.

Now this is traveling! Tonight I’ll be testing another French restaurant in Philadelphia (my fourth so far this month), but a melted goat cheese salad and duck and overpriced pinot can’t be half as good as this.

I get another donut, glazed.

© 2008, Gary Lee Kraut

The post Dunkin’ Donuts and that cute little village in the Loire Valley appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

I love the clichés of seaside and countryside travel in southern European. Sitting in a seaside café I’ll let the whish of waves against a pebble beach draw me into a Mediterranean daze. And pausing by a bubbling fountain on a hillside village I slide easily into a “year-in-Provence-under-a-Tuscan-sun” frame of mind. But having arrived in Toulouse, the queen of southwest France, and taken a seat on its central square, I know that at heart I’m a city traveler.

I enjoy discovering a city rich in architecture, museums, street life, and cultural events, where the trick isn’t to see it all but to explore it at my own pace. And mine’s a pace that requires frequent sitting. As far as I’m concerned, a southern city is only as great as the cafés between the sights.

Call it sight-sitting, tour operators need not apply.

Any exploration of Toulouse naturally begins on Place du Capitole, the political, historical, and cultural heart of the city as well as of France’s landlocked Midi-Pyrénées region, which stretches north from the Spanish border. Lingering in any of the half-dozen cafés around the square provides a luxuriant introduction to the two characteristics that most distinguish Toulouse: the brick and the accent.

In a country otherwise associated with constructions in stone, Toulouse has conjugated its local orange-pink brick into a surprising array of religious and civil monuments, including the 18th-century façade of Le Capitole, the building that lords over the city’s central square, housing City Hall and the Toulouse Opera.

Anywhere you sit you’ll hear the song of Toulouse’s easily recognizable, if difficultly understandable, brand of a southern French accent. I asked several Toulousans to describe it and came up with the following Zagat-like description: “our registered trademark,” “a soft stuttered delivery ending in an open-ended Occitan song,” “bright and easy,” “a verbal reflection of the brick itself.”

I was visiting in June, when the wind here hesitates between Atlantic (about 180 miles west) and Mediterranean (about 100 miles east). Arriving from Paris in the late afternoon at the tail end of an Atlantic drizzle, I took a seat within the cozy Belle Epoque interior of Le Bibent, joining a klatch of perfumed shoppers having tea.

By early evening the Mediterranean was asserting its rights on the Toulousan sky, so I later returned to Place du Capitole to see (seated, of course) how the color of the brick changes with the sky. To my eyes it never quite hits the pink note that has given Toulouse its nickname “la Ville Rose,” however it does have a bright terra cotta twinkle in the right light. I had an aperitif at Le Florida, one of the square’s most popular cafés and a clear reminder at that hour that Toulouse has France’s second largest university population after Paris.

From Place du Capitole, the view down rue de Taur toward the brick lacework of the bell tower of Saint Sernin Basilica is an open invitation to discover one of France’s greatest churches from the Romanesque era. On the morning of day two I headed down that road and began my sight-sitting day with coffee and a view of the basilica’s back end from a table beneath the linden trees at Café St. Sernin.

Begun in 1080, St. Sernin Basilica is the country’s longest church still in existence from the Romansque period, which preceded France’s passion for Gothic monsters. The basilica’s enormity was principally a response to the throngs of pilgrims that came to venerate the relics of the city’s first bishop. As a medieval tourist attraction it further benefited being situated along major pilgrimage routes to some of the most revered relics in Western Europe at the time, those of Saint James in Santiago de Compostella in northwest Spain. Hundreds, even thousands, of pilgrims might circulate through St. Sernin’s five naves on a given day in the 12th and 13th centuries.

St. Sernin is more than a one-seat sight, so after visiting the interior I read up these medieval pilgrimages with a frontal view of the basilica from a snack bar café table beneath the ancient elm overhanging the courtyard by the Saint Raymond Museum. The St. Raymond Museum’s collection of antiquities speaks of an even earlier time as it gives glimpses of local civilization under Roman rule and during the several centuries that followed. Descriptions in English aren’t sufficient to reveal the significance of the objects to those who don’t understand French, but their beauty is apparent.

Toulouse’s second great church is the Jacobins Church, designed in 1230 and as much a monument to southern France’s Gothic architecture as St. Sernin is to its Romanesque. The Jacobins was built as the mother church of the Dominican order of preaching friars that was founded in the early 13th century by (Saint) Dominic. Dominic made a name for himself by preaching against a religion called Catharism, which had developed and increasingly flourished in the region in the 12th century. Catharism was a Christian off-shoot with Eastern influences whose system of belief refused the hierarchy and sacraments of the Church of Rome. The Church, finding its authority undermined and considering Cathars as heretics, initially fought back with words. When words failed, Pope Innocent III, in 1209, called for a crusade against the heretics, launching the Albigensian War. The bloodletting was orchestrated by French noblemen while the Dominicans led the accompanying inquisition, and together they wiped out the Cathars, whose final hill refuges can be seen when heading toward the Pyrenees.

Lit by daylight through beautiful stained glass, the Jacobins Church is split into two naves by seven stone columns that blossom to the ceiling like palm fronds. The relics of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) stand as the centerpiece in an otherwise attractively sparse church, yet nowadays, as with the relics at St. Sernin, those of St. Thomas are passed by with less interest than a third-rate Picasso.

No café gives an adequate view of the Jacobins, but the adjacent 14th-century cloister did just fine for me. A small entrance fee keeps it especially peaceful and calm as well as friendly, I found, since its rare visitors tend to smile at each other in passing as though they’d just discovered they belong to the same exclusive club of unhurried travelers.

Toulouse has three exceptional settings for art, beginning with the 14th- and 15th-century cloister and monastic buildings of another religious complex, the Augustins. This was the perfect place to end a day my day of medieval explorations. The brick walls and Gothic rib vaults serve as stunning backdrops for the Augustins Museum’s exceptional collection of medieval sculpture and religious painting.

Place Saint Georges, a block away, offers the cafés of choice for that area of the city—and, to judge by the crowds, for many other areas as well. On warm days and nights seats are so hard to come by that you’d think the city were about to stage an execution, as it did on this square throughout the 18th century.

Toulouse is the rare French city that you can visit for a few days without bothering to have a peek at the cathedral. St. Etienne Cathedral, a 5-minute walk from Place Saint Georges, is noteworthy primarily as an architectural junk pile. I visited it out of a sense of investigative responsibility, but less duty-bound travelers should feel free, instead, to take a 5-minute stroll in the opposite direction so as to continue sight-sitting from a café on Place Wilson. A good part of late afternoon can actually be spent trolling for dinner menus on Place Saint Georges, Place Wilson, and nearby Place Victor Hugo.

On day three I left behind the monuments of medieval Toulouse to explore its unique assortment of brick mansions from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Toulouse counts dozens such mansions, so you shouldn’t hesitate to push open a large door, walk through the arched passageway, and glimpse the inner courtyard, where the height of a man’s wealth was measured by the height of the tower rising above the central staircase. The earlier of these homes reflect the remarkably rich period when the city flourished with the pastel trade, in which woad plants were cultivated in the surrounding region for a blue pigment then used in dyes throughout Europe.

The most impressive of these is the great Renaissance Hôtel d’Assézat (hôtel means a city mansion), begun in 1555, which was extensively restored in the 1990s so as to house the equally impressive private art collection of Georges Bemberg. The tremendous and eclectic collection of the Fondation Bemberg is especially rich in French Modernist works from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Impressionists, Pointillists, Fauves, and an astounding grouping 35 works by Bonnard). I’m also particularly fond of the characters revealed the Renaissance gallery, whose works include Lucas Cranach’s seductive “Portrait of a Lady,” and his playfully erotic “Venus and Cupid.” My need for an artful sit, catalogue in hand, was easily satisfied at to the tearoom (open May-Oct.) on the porch overlooking the mansion’s inner courtyard.

That afternoon I strolled across the river to Les Abattoirs, the city’s former slaughterhouse (1831), which has been successfully and surprisingly transformed into a contemporary arthouse. Its collection is devoted to currents since 1950, particularly the works of French, Italian, and Spanish artists. As with the Augustins Museum, part of the distinctiveness of Les Abattoirs is the unusual experience of viewing art against a brick background.

A more stunning view of Toulousan brick, however, lay just ahead. I came up it while crossing over the Garonne River on the elegant bridge Pont Neuf (1544-1662) on my way back to the city center. It was about an hour before sunset and the high terra cotta riverbanks, the water, and the lovers along the riverside footpath all sparkled in a spectacular natural light show.

For the first time in several days I thought about following the river or some other path into the countryside. I knew that within a two-hour drive of Toulouse I would find a stunning constellation of market towns, goose farms, castle ruins, abbey churches, gastronomic hideaways, and assorted villages set high and low along the meandering rivers.

But I still had more city sight-sitting to do, from a bench along the river.

© 2005, 2008 by Gary Lee Kraut

Useful Links

Toulouse Tourist Office. The Tourist Office is behind City Hall, just off Place du Capitole. Postal address BP 0801, 31080 Toulouse Cedex. Tel 05 61 11 02 22.www.ot-toulouse.fr.

Midi-Pyrénées (regional) Tourist Office. www.tourisme-midi-pyrenees.com. 54 boulevard de l’Embouchure, 31022 Toulouse. Tel 05 61 13 55 55.

American Present Post in Toulouse. 25 allée Jean Jaurès. Tel. 05 34 41 36 50. https://fr.usembassy.gov/embassy-consulates/toulouse/.

Americans in Toulouse, a service and social organization for “English-speaking ex-pats living and sharing the good life in Toulouse, France.”www.americansintoulouse.com.

Hôtel d’Assézat/The Bemberg Foundation www.fondation-bemberg.fr.

Les Abattoirs/Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, www.lesabattoirs.org.

Culture, Sports, Festivals

High culture: The Théâtre du Capitole presents opera, ballet, operettas, and recitals by nationally and internationally known performers. www.theatre-du-capitole.org.

Rugby: Southwest France is rugby territory. The professional season runs mid-August through May. For information about the local team Stade Toulousain and its schedule of home matches see www.stadetoulousain.fr. Place Saint Pierre is home to a scrum of rugby café-bars.

Rio Loco: Each June a joyous festival of music, theater, dance, and exhibitions honors a great river and the culture along its banks. www.rio-loco.org.

Piano des Jacobins: Each September, an international piano festival in the cloister of the Jacobins Church. www.pianojacobins.com.

Toulouse les Orgues: Annual organ festival in the first two weeks of October. www.toulouse-les-orgues.org.

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