The Great Parisian Plate Debate

12, Place Italie, 75013
Tel. 01.43.31.19.86

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.

The café itself strikes me as one of the dime-a-dozen places in the city, meaning if you live nearby it’s a great place to snatch your morning espresso or evening alcoholic fix but lacks the cache to entice anyone living more than an arrondisement away. The interior / exterior was all very typical but pleasant; the place is pure middle of the road, but really I put that error on the head of Dan and I. This place is like the French equivalent of Applebee’s – you go there to get a decent, middle of the road spread and nuts to the atmosphere.

The Café de France experience was made slightly more exciting by the actions of a solitary pigeon, who kept strutting and flapping about on the awning directly above our table. Drinking a bottle of cheap wine is made that much more exciting when done under threat of a single pigeon bombardment.