Le Petit Ney is a literary café which organises an evening of board game fun on the 1st Saturday of each month. Come at 7 p.m., bring your own game or use one they have there. Most games are for teens through adults, and admission is free!
They serve dinner, too…call or email to let them know you’re coming! This sounds like a fun way to get to know the real Parisians.
Le Petit Ney
10 avenue de la Porte Montmartre
75018 Paris
Tél : 01 42 62 00 00
Fax : 01 42 62 12 41
E-mail : lepetitney@free.fr
Sunday, March 25, they will turn their clocks ahead one hour in France. Be sure to plan accordingly!
Citing irregularities in the cuisine under a new chef, Michelin has demoted the very famous Taillevent restaurant, considered by some to be the best restaurant in Paris, from three starts to two. Taillevent isn’t convinced there’s a real problem, but is determined to meet the challenge and become the three star restaurant it knows it is.
From the International Herald Tribune:
The other restaurants promoted to three stars this year were Pascal Barbot’s Astrance, in Paris; Le Meurice, run by Yannick Alléno, in the namesake hotel in Paris; the Pré Catelan, with Frédéric Anton as chef and owned by hotel company Accor, in the Bois de Boulogne, west of Paris; Lameloise, in Chagny, in the eastern region of Burgundy; and Pic, in the southeastern city of Valence.
Leaving Paris and a bit of her heart behind
Susan Spano, LA Times
With new horizons at hand, our correspondent celebrates the city, its fantasy and its realities.February 18, 2007
Paris — THE French may rail about Hollywood’s global domination, but they have a soft spot in their hearts for vintage American movies, as anyone who watches French television knows.
Channel surfing here has given me such pleasures as the 1949 John Ford western “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” which takes on a whole new dimension when the Duke is dubbed in French.
One night not long ago, I landed in the middle of the 1957 Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn musical “Funny Face,” set in the French capital, with songs by George Gershwin. When Astaire and company launched into the number “Bonjour, Paris,” I ran for a pen and jotted down this lyric: “All good Americans should come here to die.”
All good Francophiles understand that sentiment, but it took on special significance for me because, after three years in Paris, I’m about to leave. I’m headed for new horizons in Asia, firmly believing there’s life after the City of Light. But before I go, I wanted to share a few more secrets about Paris.
Every little girl or every woman about to go to Paris for the first time should see the movie “Funny Face.” It is the stuff of Parisian dreams.
In “Funny Face,” Hepburn stars as a beautiful beatnik — she even does a quasi-Martha Graham modern dance number featured recently in a TV commercial for the Gap — and Astaire plays a fashion photographer, based on Richard Avedon, who gets her to come to Paris as a magazine cover girl. Hepburn wears tiny black shirts and slacks when she philosophizes with French intellectuals in smoky cafes and dons Givenchy for the fashion shoots.
Critics said Astaire looked too old for Hepburn. Boy, did they not get it. May-September romance is a Paris specialty. If you want to see how hot it can be, consider the tryst scenes between old Uncle Edgar and the pretty young American Isabel in Diane Johnson’s novel “Le Divorce.” In the 2003 movie based on the book, French actor Thierry Lhermitte played Uncle Edgar; he was too sexy for words, just not old enough.
French is helpful; ph-h-h-t is more so. You can study at the Alliance Française or register for the Sorbonne’s Cours de Civilisation Française, a one-year program that has been attracting American students to the Latin Quarter since 1919. But unless you learn how to do what I call a French raspberry, you’ll never be able to communicate with authority in Paris.
I call it a raspberry for lack of a better word. It involves pursing the lips and emitting a puff of air, like the instrument used in glaucoma tests. A shrug of the shoulders generally goes with it.
What does it mean? “Obviously.” “You must be kidding.” “These vegetables are wilted.” “Why should I clean up after my dog?” There is no precise translation. It’s useful on almost any occasion, and the more you do it, the more French you feel.
It’s all a matter of taste, and some are just better here. We have shallots in America but don’t make full use of them. They are called échalotes here and seem to be bigger than the ones in the U.S. (Conversely, French onions seem smaller than the American version.)
But what to do with an échalote?
Although I didn’t learn how to make soufflé or blanquette de veau during my time in France, I did figure out that échalotes are the secret ingredient of a perfect vinaigrette. Chop one fine, along with some fresh parsley. Add high-grade olive oil and ordinary wine vinegar (no fancy stuff, please) in 3-to-1 proportion. Then put in a teaspoon of prepared Dijon mustard. (I use Maille, a common brand here.) Whisk it, pour it on a salad and toss. If you can find sucrine lettuce, a sort of baby Romaine, nothing else is needed: Voilà, a classic salade verte.
The French have their salad course after the main dish. But many of my French dinner guests politely reject salad plates, preferring to eat their greens on the same plate that held the main dish, to sop up leftover juices. It sounds gnarly but is delicious.
A new view can change your perspective. I have never been a big fan of Montmartre, the ersatz bohemian neighborhood surrounding the basilica of Sacré Coeur on the Right Bank. To me, it always seems crowded and touristy, a Hollywood studio version of Gay Paree.
But I have just discovered that it is a sort of New Year’s Day place of pilgrimage for the French.
They sleep late that morning, then climb the steps leading to the church and stand at the railing looking over the most beautiful city in the world. From there you can see all the great landmarks, from the Centre Pompidou to the Eiffel Tower. It’s a fine way to ring in the new year (or a new day) and work off a hangover.
Coffee makes the world go round. Drinking java is as Parisian as baguettes and berets, though tourists quickly learn that ordering coffee with milk, or café crème, after breakfast time is something of a faux pas. At all other times, Parisians tend to drink high-proof espresso in a demitasse, known as a petit café.
Moreover, café crème is usually pretty bad here. I know an American expat who sampled it all over the Left Bank and found the best at Les Deux Magots on the Boulevard St.-Germain, served in two pitchers, one for the coffee and the other for the warm milk. It costs about $10 if you order it with a croissant, which is why I eat breakfast at home.
For people like me who drink their coffee with milk, it’s useful to know that you can order it any time in Paris without getting a French raspberry if you ask for a noisette, which is a petit café with steamed milk.
At better places a petite café or a noisette comes with a little chocolate bonbon. But you can’t always count on it, which is one of the things my sister, who lives in Brussels, notices when she comes to visit me. In Brussels, no self-respecting cafe would serve caffeine without a treat.
Of course, this is not all I learned by moving to Paris. I found, above all, that it takes time to break the ice and to get things done in France. The Gallic people simply cannot be rushed and are sticklers for correct procedure.
When I first got here I had nothing but trouble with the clerks at my local post office. I put myself through contortions too extraordinary to explain in order to get a carte de sejour, a residence permit allowing me to stay in France for three years.
Having a carte de sejour helped me open a French bank account, and these days I’m never asked to show the permit when I go to the post office to pick up mail. One clerk wished me every good thing for the new year.
Knowing I was a foreigner, my neighborhood greengrocer consistently overcharged me at first. Now she throws extra apples and tomatoes in my bag.
I will miss these people and my handful of dear French and American expatriate friends. I will miss having my sister come to visit me in my ideal little Left Bank apartment.
I will miss my hairdresser, Frank, on the Rue du Pré aux Clercs, and the flower peddler on the Rue du Bac whose breath always smelled of alcohol. I will miss Monoprix, the Arlequin movie theater on the Rue des Rennes — especially on Sunday mornings — and the winter and summer sales at shops along the Boulevard St.-Germain.
Of course, the “Funny Face” City of Light that shaped my dreams as a little girl never existed.
Today, the underclass suburbs of Paris are at times in turmoil, France has increasingly yielded to more cutting-edge art and style centers, and its politics seem deeply confused.
Maybe travel is about seeing how dreams shape up. Nevermind “Funny Face.” When I was a child and people asked what I planned to be when I grew up, I always said I wanted to be Chinese. I don’t know what that was about, but I’m going to find out.
It seems we’re all thinking about hot chocolate these days! Along with my recent entry of great places to get a great hot chocolates in my “Fun in Paris” section, I found this article in the LA Times. It lists many of the same spots as I do, as well as a few more. You can’t get enough hot chocolate in Paris!
When it’s cold, it’s haute
In midwinter, Paris struts its chocolate stuff — in settings as cozy and delightful as the luxuriously authentic fare.
By Elliott Hester, Special to The Times
February 11, 2007
Paris — WHEN winter set its chilly grip on Paris, I started scouring the rues and boulevards for my one true love: chocolate. Hot chocolate, to be exact. In France, the warm, rich, winter drink is known as chocolat chaud.
Unlike the United States, where warm milk is mixed with sweetened cocoa powder to create a “chocolate-flavored” drink, the main ingredient in chocolat chaud is real chocolate.
The thick, dark chocolate, imported from Africa or South America, boasts a cacao content of 70% or more. It is melted, blended with steamed milk or cream and served in porcelain teacups with a glass of cold water on the side. (The chocolate is so rich, you need occasional palate-cleansing sips.)
In Paris, Angelina is the place for chocolat chaud. On Rue de Rivoli across from the Tuileries Gardens, this antique tea room is all frescoed walls and gilded mirrors.
The most popular menu item is Chocolat à l’Ancienne dit “Africain” (traditional chocolate the African way). Made with pure chocolate from the Ivory Coast, it’s as thick as hot fudge but delightfully bitter.
In 1802, Dalloyau began serving pastries and chocolate to adoring Parisians. Since then, the patisserie has expanded to seven Paris locations that sell a combined 55 tons of chocolate each year.
Dalloyau’s amber-lighted tea room, on the second floor of the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré boutique, is often filled with French women wearing full-length furs. They sip chocolat chaud made with rich Colombian chocolate.
Café de Flore, in trendy St.-Germain des Prés, gets my vote for best delivery. The Chocolat Spécial Flore is mixed with a bit of caramel. This semisweet blend comes in a silver pitcher served on a silver platter. A decorative potholder with which to lift the searing-hot pitcher is tucked inside the coffee cup.
Steps away at Les Deux Magots — where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir reigned over a postwar intellectual crowd — the Chocolat des Deux Magots à l’Ancienne is to die for. The devilishly rich serving is the equivalent of two cups.
A few blocks east, in a rustic tea room on a hidden cobblestone lane, L’Heure Gourmande serves bitter Chocolat à l’Ancienne that’s among the best I’ve tasted. The ingredients remain a mystery because my waitress and her manager have sworn an oath of secrecy.
Le Flore en l’Île is my favorite hot-chocolate haunt. Poised on the western tip of Île Saint-Louis, the dining room provides awe-inspiring views of Notre Dame Cathedral. The Chocolat Chaud à l’Ancienne is not blended, as tradition would have it. Instead, melted chocolate (78% cacao) is served in a short silver pitcher and steamed milk in a tall silver pitcher. Voilà! I can blend to my taste buds’ desire.
Les Cakes de Bertrand is in the old Bourdaloue chocolate factory, down the hill from the basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. This cozy tea room accommodates only 30 guests. But the Chocolat Maison l’Ancienne, like so much of the chocolat chaud in Paris, sends me to heaven with every chocolaty sip.
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(INFOBOX BELOW)
City of Light and dark chocolat
To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 33 (country code), 1 (city code for Paris) and the local number.
1. Les Cakes de Bertrand, 7 Rue Bourdaloue 75009; 40-16-16-28; http://www.lescakesdebertrand.com . Open noon- 5 p.m. Mondays, noon-7 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 9:30 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturdays, noon-6 p.m. Sundays. Hot chocolate $7.80.
2. Angelina, 226 Rue de Rivoli 75001; 42-60-82-00. Open 8 a.m.-7 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Hot chocolate $8.50.
3. Dalloyau, 101 Faubourg du St.-Honoré 75008 (six additional Paris locations); 42-99-90-00; dalloyau.splio.fr. Open 9 a.m.-7:30 p.m. daily. Hot chocolate $7.80.
4. Le Flore en l’Île, 42 Quai d’Orléans, l’Île Saint-Louis 75004; 43-29-88-27. Open 8 a.m.-2 a.m. daily. Hot chocolate $7.25.
5. L’Heure Gourmande, 22 Passage Dauphine 75006; 46-34-00-40. Open 11:30 a.m.- 7 p.m. daily. Hot chocolate $8.85.
6. Les Deux Magots, 6 Place St.-Germain des Prés 75006; 45-48-55-25; http://www.lesdeuxmagots.fr . Open 7:30 a.m.-1 a.m. daily. Hot chocolate $8.10.
7. Café de Flore, 172 Boulevard St.-Germain 75006; 45-48-55-26. Open 7:30 a.m.-1:30 a.m. daily. Hot chocolate $9.10.
— ELLIOTT HESTER
Zucchero is certainly Italy’s best-known rock export, and very popular in France. He sings in Italian, English, French. His sound is mostly soul/bluesy, but his voice is like honey. If I were in Paris on February 27, I would RUN, not walk, to see him perform. If you can’t make it, he did come out with an album in the last few years of duets with famous musicians from around the world, including Sting and Cheryl Crow.
The Olympia
28, boulevard des Capucines 75009 PARIS
Metro : Opéra
RER : Auber
telephone number : 01 55 27 10 00
Price: 50 - 56 euros
This is a vital question when traveling to Paris in February! Great hot chocolate (“chocolat” or “chocolat chaud”) is plentiful in Paris. Just about anywhere you sit, you will enjoy a rich, amazing cup of steaming hot chocolate that will make you forget all about the watery, weak concoctions we are sometimes served at home.
But who makes the best? Of course, that is a question of taste. Here are a few addresses that won’t leave you disappointed:
Angélina
226 Rue de Rivoli, 75001
Metro: Tuileries or Concorde
This is the perfect stop after a visit to the Louvre or the Tuileries gardens. Their world- famous hot chocolate is served with a bowl of hand whipped cream. The chocolate (“à l’Africaine”) is so thick and rich you can stand your spoon in it. Although there is sometimes a line and the service can be a bit harried bordering on cold, it’s worth it if you love chocolate. I would say it’s definitely a “must do” while in Paris, at least once.
Open every day from 9 a.m. – 7 p.m.
La Charlotte de l’Isle
24 rue St. Louis en L’ile, 75004
(Ile St. Louis)
Metro: Pont Marie
Coming into this salon de thé is like entering the home of an eccentric relative. The walls and tables are covered with a collection of dolls, art, and other items belonging to the owner. And the hot chocolate is just perfect. Many have claimed this is the best hot chocolate in the city.
Ladurée
75 Ave. des Champs-Elysées, 75008
(also: Place de la Madeleine)
Metro: Franklin D. Roosevelt (or Madeleine)
Not only is the setting like stepping back in time, the macaroons (made with almond paste, not with coconut) are to die for, and the hot chocolate is rich and flavorful and just what you need to keep yourself energized while shopping the “Champs”.
Open every day, 7:30 a.m. – 12:30 a.m.
1728
8, rue d’Anjou, 75008
Metro: Concorde or Madeleine
This is a terrific and exquisite 18th century salon de thé and restaurant near the Place de la Concorde and the Place de la Madeleine. During the day, it serves excellent hot chocolate as well as pastries by Paris’ most famous pâtissier: Pierre Hermé.
Salon de thé opens at 2:30 p.m. and serves until 7:30 p.m.
Louvre staff strike over stress
Most visitors to the Louvre want to see the Mona Lisa
Staff at Paris’s Louvre museum have gone on strike, demanding a bonus for the stress of looking after the Mona Lisa and other popular masterpieces.
Access to the museum was made free for visitors after strikers blocked access to ticket desks, reports say.
The Musee d’Orsay was also shut after attendants there stopped work.
Attendants are demanding a bonus they say other categories of staff have been offered, and because they suffer more stress being on the floor.
“The stress is clearly linked to the number of visitors”, one Louvre attendant, who did not want to be named, told the AFP news agency.
“What’s unbearable is the constant hubbub of the crowd, especially in the really popular rooms like the one with the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo.
“On Sundays, when the museum is free, it is even worse. There can be 65,000 visitors on one day. It’s unbearable and even sometimes dangerous.”
‘Managing the flow’
Staff in the hall leading to the Mona Lisa - which most of the visitors to the museum want to see - said they spent much of their time reminding the public that flash photography was banned in the room where the painting was displayed.
“Sometimes you just blow your top,” one staff member said.
Christelle Guyader, of the union staging the strike, said: “When the number of visitors gets so large - we had more than 7.5m in 2005 and 8.3m last year - with no increase in the number of attendants, and when more and more rooms are opened, then our work is reduced to simply managing the flow.”
Management at the Louvre said that only a small percentage of the museum’s attendants were on strike and that it was “having little effect”, AFP reported.
Paris Confidential
By CAROLINE WEBER
Published: February 4, 2007
Years ago, while strolling through a Parisian flower market, I was accosted by a man with a posy in his hands and a poem on his lips. “Here are some fruits, some flowers, some leaves and some branches,” he declaimed, quoting the poet Paul Verlaine, “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” At which the stranger dropped his bouquet, unzipped his pants and presented me with an organ quite different from his heart. In Paris, I reflected as I hurried away, the boundary between lyricism and squalor is as fragile as a rosebud, and as permeable as a man’s fly.
With “Paris: The Secret History,” Andrew Hussey shows that it was ever thus, as he sifts through two millenniums of history to expose the dark side of the City of Light. Addictively readable and richly detailed, the book recounts “the story of Paris from the point of view of … marginal and subversive elements in the city,” those “insurrectionists, vagabonds, immigrants, sexual outsiders, criminals … whose experiences contradict and oppose official history.” For Hussey, a biographer of the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, these elements make up an essential part of the Parisian landscape. Following the poet Jean de Boschère, he emphasizes the “endless play of polarities — shadow and light, past and present” — that give the city not just its charm, but its edge.
Such an approach comes as a welcome corrective to the “cliché and commodity” that, Hussey rightly notes, mark most contemporary representations of Paris: “The Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame are all part of a global visual culture, a Disneyfied baby language that distorts and destroys real meaning.” This book seeks to restore “real history” by replacing “the kitsch tourist version of the city” with far grittier imagery.
The author duly strips even the city’s best-loved monuments of their “Disneyfied” patina. Notre-Dame, he writes, stands on “a place of Druidic sacrifices and pagan worship,” and “long into the 16th century” was the site of “an orgiastic, four-day saturnalia … often ending in murder and group sex.” The Sacré-Coeur basilica, built by the French government in 1873 on the very spot where it had brutally suppressed a workers’ uprising three years before, “represents the grim victory of the forces of social order over the oppressed.” In 1889, Parisians saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower as “almost certainly a bad omen,” and compared the structure to a “suppository.” The Place Dauphine — the deserted triangular square alongside the Pont-Neuf that Henri IV named for his son in the early 17th century — has since been known as “the clitoris of Paris.” With tidbits like this, readers will never look at Paris the same way again.
At its best, Hussey’s offbeat, irreverent approach also challenges received wisdom about French history. When tracing the larger political developments that shaped the city, he offers up many hair-raising, hilarious details. In 613, an early Frankish queen was “found guilty … on the charge of the murder of 10 kings. Her punishment was to be tied to a camel for three days, and to be beaten and raped by anyone passing by.” Why a camel? I have no idea, and Hussey offers no hypotheses. The factoid, though, amusingly illustrates the otherwise banal truism that “the Franks excelled at terror.” In much the same way, the author enlivens his remarks on the succession crisis of 1137 by noting that Louis VI’s heir “had been killed in an accident with one of the wild pigs which roamed the streets of Paris.” Who knew? Hussey did, and he is unstinting with his unforgettable trivia.
His care with basic historical facts, however, is not always so impressive. Writing about the Reign of Terror, Hussey refers — more than once — to the new regime’s quasi-executive organ, the Committee of Public Safety, in the plural, but there was only one such committee. Less trivially, he says that this body “quickly became a law unto” itself after its inception in the spring of 1793. While it was extremely powerful, it coexisted uneasily with the Committee of General Security and the Paris Commune, both of which also wielded considerable power. And Thomas Carlyle, one of the 19th century’s best-known chroniclers of the Revolution, was not “an Englishman” but a Scot.
Other missteps are also jarring. Notwithstanding his desire “to make my own maps of the city,” Hussey would have done well to stick to the grammatically correct names of the landmarks he catalogs, like the Palais du Luxembourg, which he calls “the Palais de Luxembourg.” When committed by a tourist asking for directions, this is exactly the sort of gaffe that inspires Parisians to claim they’ve never heard of the place.
Further, the author’s meditation on the sordid underbelly of classical-age Paris would have benefited from a mention of Michel Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization,” which famously showed that by 1656 one in a hundred of the city’s inhabitants languished in mental asylums. Similarly, when Hussey notes that in 18th-century Paris underground booksellers fed the public’s “appetite for politics and porn,” one misses a reference to Robert Darnton, who wrote three influential books on the subject. These works are all indispensable guides to the city’s “secret history,” and their absence is palpable here.
Still, Hussey makes an invaluable contribution by debunking the myth that Paris’s history is “a repository of all that is finest and most magnificent in the human spirit.” For this city is far more than the sum of its grand boulevards, quaint side streets and picturesque structures rising high above the Seine. It is a place where one medieval power broker “hung his enemies up by their penises”; where during the religious massacres of the late 16th century and the revolutionary purges of the late 18th, the streets ran red with blood; where the Second Empire’s most gifted poet, Charles Baudelaire, ordered his steak “as tender as the brain of a little child”; where the populace, during sieges both foreign and domestic, subsisted on rats, dogs and dead men’s bones; where “80,000 Jews, from all over France, had passed through” en route to the Nazi death camps; and where, as recently as the fall of 2005, suburban riots disrupted the country. Hussey does not comment on this last episode, but he includes a photograph of three agitators — all young men of African descent — facing off with invisible authorities against a backdrop of burning wreckage. Far crueler and more complicated than its picture postcards imply, Paris has always played host to outsiders and outlaws. In this respect its past, as rewritten by Hussey, may well hold a key to its future.
“D’Artagnan!” is a stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers” is a great introduction for children to the literary masterpiece.
With a simplified plot making it suitable for young audiences, the director also ensures the essence and wit of the original will be retained.
Swordfights, action-packed scenes, heroes and vilains, humour, and music combine to create a play completely free of violence.
Perfect for children 4 and up (and at that age, it doesn’t matter if they speak French, they will enjoy it anyway!)
NOUVEAU THEATRE MOUFFETARD
73, rue Mouffetard 75005 PARIS
Metro : Place Monge
Information : 0143311199
Full price : 9 Euros
