Paris

After leaving our rental car at the train station in Tours, we boarded a very crowded train for Paris. We arrived late afternoon and made our way to our very cute Airbnb in the Eighth arrondissement, an area I hadn’t spent much time in before. We were exhausted after a long day of travel, so for dinner we stayed local and had a cheap Lebanese meal nearby the apartment. When we got home, we cracked open one of the delicious natural wines that we picked up at Le Sot D’Ange while we were staying at La Jagée.

On Sunday morning we’d planned to go back to one of our favourite spots from our last visit to Paris, Holybelly. Truly the home of the finest pancakes on earth. Despite unbelievably heavy rain, the line for Holybelly was ridiculous. We had a quick coffee at a coffee shop that doubled as a beautiful design and homewares store, before having breakfast at Blackburn.  The vibe was teetering towards Faulty Towers, with new wait staff still learning the ropes and an understaffed kitchen drowning under the influx of weekend brunch orders. But, it was good enough to keep body and soul together (as S Power would say).

We continued the greatest hits tour on Sunday evening, eating dinner at the bar at Buvette. It somehow manages to have a much softer, calmer vibe than its New York counterpart (perhaps due to the French capacity for patience that Kerri and Kerry were telling us about) and the food is better too. We had a delicious cauliflower gratin, a salty potato, lentil and smoked trout salad and hachis parmentier. Dan and I go in for tiki drinks and I think it’s safe to say that piña coladas are our thing so after dinner we were happy to return to another favourite from our last trip, Dirty Dick’s.

On Monday, we were determined to get our fill of pancakes so we headed back to Holybelly. We thought we were sure to avoid a line by by going for a late Monday lunch but we still waited 10 minutes or so for a table. Even so, it was very much worth it. You always worry going back to a favourite spot if it’s going to live up to expectations. The pancakes I remembered were so impossibly good that I was certain we were setting ourselves up for disappointment by returning but they were so! good! Ridiculously good. Paired with an oat milk piccolo, we were so happy to be back in Paris. (In fact, we ended up going back to Holybelly three times during our stay). I love the area around Holybelly, and we spent lots of time here during our stay, revisiting Du Pain et des Idées for my favourite croissants in Paris, and La Fontaine de Belleville.

We were enjoying hanging out in familiar spots so much that we decided to extend our stay in Paris. We’d originally planned to visit for only a few days, but we ended up staying for almost two weeks, seeing some new things, revisiting old favourites and doing lots of cycling. With the luxury of a long stay, we didn’t feel much pressure to go sightseeing. Instead, we got to take it easy, and do lots of exploring in the area around our apartment. We had a late breakfast one day at Léandrés after spending the morning attempting to bring the apartment’s hot water heater back to life (we finally succeeded). The empanadas we had were fine but the cakes were delicious. We had a chocolate banana loaf and a carrot coconut loaf. The latter was served with a slick of barely sweet cream cheese frosting on top. Such a genius idea. Other highlights included lots of cheese from Fromages et Ramages, wine at Comestibles et Marchand de Vins, and coffee from Cuillier Abbesses.

Mostly, we spent our days doing a lot of walking and cycling. We discovered Le Petit Grain, a lovely little boulangerie that we went to after a supremely disappointing lunch at a Vietnamese cafe. They make a fantastic lamington (what a thing to stumble across in Paris). From there, we walked to Père Lachaise Cemetery, a Parisian tourist staple that neither of us had ever been to before. Another lovely find of our stay was Mokonuts. I loved the walk to this spot – there are so many interesting shops nearby, and we picked up delicious pastries around the corner at Blé Sucrée (although they didn’t displace Du Pain et des Idées as my favourite in Paris) – and the vibe is lovely. The light is beautiful, and the food was delicious.

On Friday afternoon, after lunch, vintage shopping (Thanx God I’m a VIP is great!) and lots of walking, we found ourselves at one of our favourite stops from our last trip to Paris, La Barav. It’s a wine bar with a wine store attached. You can choose a handful of wines by the glass or a bottle from the store and they’ll serve it to you in the bar. It’s super low key and friendly and our experience this time around was just as nice as it was in 2016. We tried an unfiltered wine from Greece (delicious and the sommelier asking me it was ok to try a non-French wine was very funny) and a natural wine from Alsace. We drank our wine with rilletes for Dan and a whole steamed artichoke for me. We decided to split a baba au rhum for dessert and it was so good we ended up skipping dinner and ordering a second round of baba au rhum.

Bar Hemingway is another place we loved returning to. It must have some of the most expensive cocktails in Europe – 30 euros each – but for that you get a great vibe, lovely service, delicious snacky things like toasted almonds and olives, and great drinks. This time I had a whiskey, apricot and bitters cocktail. Served with a cherry, my favourite thing, it’s one of the best cocktails I’ve ever had.

On our last full day in Paris we caught the subway over to the 11th to try a sandwich place called Chez Aline that Dan found. This turned out to be one of the best meals we had on our travels; I think about it often! Each day they offer a handful of baguettes, a few salads salads, and dessert – all pretty simple and a bit messy but so delicious. Dan had a baguette with mackerel rilletes and pickled cabbage, I had one stuffed with thinly sliced chorizo and the most incredible tortilla, and we shared a bowl of rice pudding with vanilla and citrus for dessert. It’s not glamorous – the pudding was served in a plastic pink bowl – but even Dan, self proclaimed rice pudding sceptic, loved it.

We were lucky to have incredibly warm autumn weather, so from Chez Aline, we walked over to the Promenade Plantée.  We had planned to walk from there, to the Pantheon, through the Luxembourg Gardens, and finish our day at the Musée du Quai Branley. But it was so hot, we reversed course and headed for the air conditioned museum instead. I wrote a paper about this museum as an undergrad, so it was great to visit for the first time. The space, and particularly the gardens are lovely, and it doesn’t really seem to be on the tourist trail so it was so quiet.

From the museum, we walked into the Seventh, picking up treats from two more spots we’d enjoyed back in 2016 – Aux Merveilleux de Fred for insanely light meringue and cream puffs, and Sadaharu Aoki for macarons (the yuzu – so good!).  From here, we actually jumped on metro hoping to make it to the Pantheon before it closed, but we were too late. Still, we had a really nice evening, walking back to our apartment past Notre Dame and through the Marais.

On our final morning in Paris, we had breakfast at Holybelly, picked up lots of pastries from Du Pain et Des Idées, and then headed to Gare du Nord to jump on the Eurostar – we were London bound!