A word on French food

It is extremely difficult to be hungry when walking in Paris. Crepes, panini sandwiches, bakery goods, and ice cream assault the senses from every direction, and the markets and cafes draw you in like a siren song. The most difficult task for me was to save enough room for the traditional 3-course dinner at the end of the day. It was well worth the effort when I succeeded, however.

I am not a fan of French cuisine in the US: the high prices, small portions and vertical stacking are not exactly my style. However everything is quite different once you actually go to France. The 3 courses and baguette bread for 11 EUR make a tasty, filling and relatively inexpensive meal (especially taking into account the astronomical food prices at grocery stores). The dishes are attractively prepared with high-quality ingredients, but do not elevate form over substance.

The most frustrating thing about eating here is making sense of the menus, which use such fancy and obscure terminology that even the French diners around us often had trouble understanding them. I took to ordering dishes with the largest number of unknown items, hoping to be pleasantly surprised and generally succeeding, although none of the dishes were quite as exotic as their titles. For instance a dish consisting of lettuce, stake and potatoes had at least six words I could not decipher, even with the help of Tonie, who spent a year in France and is rather fluent in the language.