Travel Tip: Eating Out In Paris On A Budget
This is Paris and it is raining, which is as it should be. Paris rain is not as the rain of other cities. It is softer, benevolent. It caresses, rather than soaks.
Perhaps the main reason I come to Paris is because of the food. Not that I am a true gourmet. More a gourmand. It is perfectly possible to spend an arm and a leg on food in Paris. I am still in a state of shock after paying $17.50 for a single glass of beer. Granted, I was sitting on the pavement on the Champs Elysees and granted, I could have sat there all day. But I am still in shock. Normally I steer well away from such high-priced nonsense.
When you go to Paris – and you should go at least once in a lifetime – make your own discoveries. I am assured it is possible to get a bad meal in Paris. It simply has never happened to me. At the following restaurants you will only get great meals.
First and foremost, La Crémerie Polidor. If it was good enough for Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Andre Gide, Jack Kerouac, Paul Verlaine and Paul Valery, it is good enough for me. For lunch yesterday I had the plat du jour, which was cassoulet in the classic style. It cost $10.
This restaurant has never heard of nouvelle cuisine. Its style of cooking is still firmly embedded in the twenties. (In fact, it opened 20 years earlier.) As are its decor and standard of service. And the fact that it does not accept credit cards.
With my meal I had a pichet, a small jug, which is about a third of a bottle of Chateau Magondeau, a Merlot, which has won a Medaille Concours Agricole and is generally well spoken of. A full bottle would have been silly, but a pichet at $10 was just right. This system of serving excellent wines in less than bottle quantities is splendidi. In most restaurants you can have a carafe of house wine, which normally will be singularly nasty and probably will have come from Algeria or Morocco and be chemically treated. Sometimes you can detect that someone are the grapes first. You can drink it at a pinch. But you have to be desperate.
Food Lover’s Guide to ParisA step up from that is réserve maison, or réserve du patron. This is much better and very drinkable. At the top in quality and price are the wines which qualify for the title vin delimité de qualité supérieur (VDQS), or appellation d’origine controlée (AOC). These can be truly splendid wines, but can be pricey and a bottle much too much to drink for one person.
Some restaurants serve great wines by the glass or small jug and the good ones get the Coupe de Meilleur Pot, which is a much-coveted award. This means that you can sample the grand wines of France – and grand wines, indeed, they are - without doing dire damage to either your wallet or your liver.
The best places to experience this superior plonk by the glass are in bars run by the Ecluse chain which keeps expanding. Originally there was one Now, I think, there are five bars. On offer are Bordeaux wines by the glass, some of them grand cru. These bars also have, beyond argument, the best chocolate.
Back to Polidor for the moment. The ideal time to go there is around 1.30, when the first mad rush is over, but the atmosphere is still there. They don’t accept telephone bookings.
Paris by Bistro: A Guide to Eating Wel
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