Well, Poodleful, as the modern homemaker eats in restaurants almost as frequently as she eats at home. (Who, on a daily basis has time to cook when you don't get off of work until 5:30 and your children have 7:30 bedtimes?).
And, being a modern homemaker, her professional life calls for her to often have expensive lawyer type lunches too. So, she believes that restaurant reviews are just as important to Martha-types as recipes. So she will begin with some Parisian restaurant reviews. (Poodleful is really not a francophile-she swears..she is a poodle, yes, who likes to bake tarts, yes, and has recently been to Paris, but she swears that this will NOT be a francophile blog.)
Poodleful and Clancy went to Paris recently to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary. It was a wonderful trip without the children. We stayed in an apartment in the 10th arrondissement, which was perfectly located--away from tourists, interesting working class neighborhood within walking distance of the Marais.
After extensive research and an honest assessment of our budget (medium, enough money to eat where we wanted, but not enough to go to any Arpeges) I determined where we would eat. I try not to use recommendations from the guidebooks because they are always full of tourists. Nothing against tourists, I just hate to always go to restaurants that have the "tourist buzz". So thank you Pim, Chocolate and Zucchini and Chowhounds. The restaurants that I believe you must eat at if you are traveling to Paris anytime soon are as follows:
L'As du Falafel. L'As du Falafel, located in the Marais has been reviewed and praised rather extensively. And, all of the praise is very well deserved. L'As du Falafel is located on a narrow Paris street surrounded by diamond stores and other falafel restaurants. Get there early, and grab a seat in the restaurant and watch the cooks make the falafels.
I ordered a standard falafel. They brought me an extremely large pillowy pita stuffed with a mountain of food. I began to eat it and the best thing was that every bite is different. You begin with the cool lettuce and tomatoes/onion/herb salad on top and as you keep eating you encounter warm hummus and the hot falafel. And the whole thing is drenched with a yogurt sauce. I covered mine with warm (flavored not temperatured) spicy harissa from a ketchup bottle on the table. The whole thing costs 5 euros.
Le Comptoir du Relais. Le Comptoir is really really good. We could not procure a dinner reservation (unsurprisingly) so I gave up on the idea of eating there at all. Then one day, Clancy and I were walking around the left bank when we ran into it. We weren't hungry however, so we decided to stop and have a coffee. Clancy ordered gazpacho, so we could try something. During the day, Le Comptoir is a bistro that takes no reservations. A family came and sat beside us (they were really cute with their two kids) and they ordered something very quickly, in French.
Moments later (well, probably not moments, this is Paris, minutes...hours...) the waiter returned with a tin bucket full of different kinds of sausages. Knives were stuck in the sides of the sausages (all cured, dried sausages several feet long) and you could just cut off as much as you liked. The dad started to cut off bits of different sausages for his wife and two sons, and before long his friend and his friend's little scottie dog joined them. Of course the dog loved the sausage too.
Our gazpacho was delicious. It was very thin and soupy, with small peeled yellow an red grapeseed tomatoes hidden in the bottom. I love peeled tomatoes, they taste so good and are so pretty, all covered with spidery veins. The best part was that there was a lot of garlic prepared in several different ways. It was sliced across lengthwise, and some of it had been fried, some was baked and some was pickled.
We ate at Le Comptoir several more times and everytime it was excellent.
The best restaurant was the one right at the end of our street. It was a little neighborhood cafe that was always packed with locals. When we first arrived, all bleary eyed and jet-lagged we went there after dropping off our luggage. We ordered three pates, and a salad. The salad was very special, it had warm elements and cold elements (bacon, eggs, frisee, lettuce pickles onions) and was covered with a mustardy vinaigrette. The three pates were delicious also. Even though smoking is no longer allowed in French cafes, everyone smoked and the management didn't care.
Well, time for a telephone conference.
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