|
| The best vacation address in Paris |
| Home page | Description | Availability | Terms and Conditions | Booking form | Contact us | Links |
A short block away from the apartment, on the rue de Bretagne, you will find a small indoor market called Les Enfants Rouges, dating from 1615 and said to be the oldest market in Paris. Clustered around this market and on nearby streets is a collection of cafes and food shops that offer some of Paris' finest food and wine - at entirely reasonable prices.
Adjacent to the market, for example, you'll find Boucherie de la Mairie, a shop on everyone's list of the city's best. The elegant ladies selecting dinner beside you in this exquisite shop look as if they might have been chauffeured here from some lofty redoubt in the 16th arrondisment; when you experience the quality and variety of M. Simonneau's meats and prepared dishes, you will understand why they have taken the trouble to come so far. (Try the little rabbit quiches on the counter, freshly made every day. Or ask the butcher to prepare a veal or pork roast, weighed, tied and decorated to your most exacting specifications)
Les Enfants Rouges market is on your right when you leave the butcher shop. The lady behind the first stand on your right sells the best escargots au beurre in Paris. Her little treasures are sold in markets and specialty food shops throughout the city; you can enjoy them at your doorstep, every day of the week. Take them home in their vacuum-packed package; in five minutes you will be an instant Frenchman, gulping down snails with the best of them. And because you'll be in the privacy of your own apartment, you don't have to worry if the butter drips down your chin.
In front of you is Ahmed, who sells prepared Moroccan dishes. A friend who recently returned from Morocco tells us that these dishes compare with the best food in that country; the dish in the first picture is a lamb tagine (a kind of Moroccan stew), and one of the other tagines is poulet au citron, the national dish of Morocco, a kind of braised chicken made with olives and preserved lemons.
The market has a superb fishmonger, a bio (organic) vegetable stand and a man who sells his own range-raised ducks and chickens. Next to the bio poultry man, on Sundays, is a man who sells bio butter and cheeses. (Try the little packages of Neufchatel, or the hand-made butter. These are treats you will find nowhere else, even in Paris.)
I like all of the vendors in Les Enfants Rouges, but If I had to choose one particular favorite, I would choose the Traiteur Italien, the Italian Caterer.
If you have spent any time in Italy, you know that Italian food in Italy is quite different from what might be called "American Italian food." Italian food in Italy only occasionally includes tomato sauce; Italian food in Italy is, at its best, light, intensely flavorful and almost vegetarian.
Welcome to the Traiteur Italien. Everything here is cooked by hand, right on the premises; everything - at least everything we have tasted, and we know the menu pretty well - is light and intensely flavorful. The concoction to the left of the young lady in the picture, for example, is a torta di spinaci, a spinach torte. If you show up at the right time, you can watch Pino make it up, stirring the eggs and spinach and ricotta into the flour with his right hand, the old fashioned way, taking his time to get the consistency just right. And as you watch him create his 2' wide masterpiece, you'll feel as if you have died and gone to cooking school in Italy.
Stop here for your morning or afternoon coffee (Illy, of course: they serve only the best, and at less than half the price elsewhere in Paris.) You can also stop here for snacks or a light lunch, and when you've finished your lunch, you can pick up your dinner here, too: Try their fresh, home-made ravioli (we are partial to the spinach and ricotta, but in the Fall the squash is also outstanding). Cook them in boiling water for 3 minutes; then serve them with melted butter or olive oil and grated parmesan, perhaps accompanied by a salad from the Cours des Halles, right outside the market, a shop that sells superb produce, always in perfect condition. If you have a sudden craving for an interesting variety of lettuce, therefore, or early strawberries, or flawless peaches, or perhaps an exquisite, perfectly ripe melon, this is the place for you.
When you come out of the market, check out the pastries a few doors down the street at La Fougasse. (We don't want to overdo the superlatives, but we cannot avoid mentioning that the little quiches here are as good as the best we have ever tasted.) Then go next door to M. Jouannault's cheese shop, where you will find a selection of cow, goat and sheep cheeses second to none in the city. You can also pick up your ostrich eggs (huge) or quail eggs (tiny) without even leaving the premises.
It is unusual, even in Paris, to find a collection of food shops where the quality is so consistently high and the prices are so consistently reasonable as they are on the rue de Bretagne and in the Marché des Enfants Rouges. If you were to do all of your food shopping here (and by the way, there is a fine little Franprix supermarket right next door to the Cour des Halles for staples like milk, paper towels and soda water) you would eat spectacularly for your entire stay in Paris; and you could do it all within a block of home. The market is at its best and liveliest on Sunday, when there are often vendors who come only for that day. All markets in Paris are closed on Monday.
Les Enfants Rouges is a wonderful indoor market; but maybe you'd also like to visit an outdoor market. On Thursday and Sunday mornings, you can take your shopping basket (we keep one in the apartment) about 15 minutes down the Blvd. Du Temple towards the Place de la Bastille. Take the 20 or 65 bus to the Bastille; on the other side of the Boulevard Beaumarchais is the Marché Richard Lenoir, perhaps my favorite outdoor market. Vendors come to Richard Lenoir from all over France with a tremendous variety of produce, from wild ducks and other game in the autumn to superb veal throughout the year. There are also about a dozen fishmongers (take a little tour before you buy; prices vary considerably); and many stands where the owners make their own particularly delicious specialties. You can find home made sausages from the Auvergne, for example, or little home-made quiches, or home made rabbit pate, or any one of several dozen other specialty foods. (We particularly like the chicken sausage made by the poultry vendor nearest the Place de la Bastille; and we are mad for the tzatziki - a kind of near eastern yogurt/cucumber sauce available at the Near Eastern stand on the other side of the market. We'll leave you more specific names and locations in a notebook in the apartment.)
You may be beginning to think, enough about food: let's talk Culture.