The Great Parisian Plate Debate

Café de France opens its doors to the Place d’Italie down in the 13eme. Place d’Italie is a traffic circle, which means if you sit outside it can be quite noisy. However, it’s also a convergence of three metro lines and a shopping mall appropriately named Centre Commercial Italie…so it’s noisy, but with an entertaining pedestrian landscape.

Read more →

Set within the Gare de Lyon train station, the station with the completely unnecessary faux palm trees, the blue neon lights of the Le Train Bleu sign beckon you, urging you to pass through its doors and into an arena that appears unchanged for a century. Once inside those doors, consider me surprised if you are unimpressed.

Read more →

As it should be, the wine list at Côté Vignes dominated one whole wall. That’s right, one whole wall! The only place that usually has menus posted up in the dining room is a fast food restaurant, but I’m here to tell you that Côté Vignes did it much nicer than a Quick Burger joint.

Read more →

Le Paradis du Fruit suffers from its self-inflicted unfortunate name. By dubbing themselves the fruit paradise, they paint themselves into a corner from which it’s difficult to escape. Bring me a plate piled high with banana and mango, wreathed in an alternating pattern of strawberry and pineapple, and I’ll wonder why I’m dropping a twenty euro bill on something easily purchased from the market down the boulevard. If the waiter delivers a mere sandwich to my table, with nary a lemon wedge or some type of rich blueberry-based sauce, I’ll question the purpose of such a fruit focused moniker.

Read more →

I don’t get an opportunity to sip a full bottle of moderately priced wine under the elevated tracks of the Paris metro very often, so in that regard Le 15 Café was a success.

Read more →

Delmas is smart – they stack their chairs several rows deep along the café entrance, ensuring ample opportunity for people watching, enjoying the weather, or in my case quizzing Nick on how to get the best score on the bowling game that comes preloaded on our company phones.

Read more →