French Food

You always hear about how wonderful the food in Paris is, but coming from the SF Bay area, I think we're really spoiled. We have so many choices at home, and the menus are varied and inventive.  Here, even though there's a cafe on every corner, they all serve almost exactly the same items.

Yes, the bread and pastries in Paris are delicious, but being someone who has to watch the carb intake, it's a challenge to find healthier options.  On top of that, all four of us are vegetarians, and it seems that almost everything on the menus, even the salads, have meat in them.

In the above photo, one morning for breakfast, we got this basket of bread and pastries to share.  A lot of the cafes serve these adorable tiny jars of Bonne Maman jam.  Bonne Maman jam always reminds me of my sister-in-law Frieda, because that's what she always buys (and now what I always buy, too).

And zut alor, the prices. Ohh la la!!!  Not only is restaurant food expensive, but the pricing structure is odd. You can get a meaty main course item for about 15 Euros, but then, a regular salad is also 15 Euros.  And a soda or a bottled sparkling water costs 5 Euros, which really adds a chunk to your tab.  (Tap water in Paris does NOT taste good.)

The salad pictured here was called "Top Model" on the menu, I have no idea why, but it was the BEST salad I've had since we've been here.  It actually had some exciting ingredients.  Usually, the salad is nothing but lettuce that hasn't even been torn into bite-sized pieces--talk about not getting much bang for your Euro buck.  This salad has "pamplemousse" (isn't that a surprising word for grapefruit?), which Parisians seem to like on all sorts of things.  The menu also said this salad had "soy beans" but what I got was bean sprouts. 

Along those lines, many of the terms we use in the US are not the same terms used here.  To us, "a la carte" means it's something on the side, but here, it just means it's on the menu.  An "entree" to us means the main course, but here, it means appetizer.

At first, we made the mistake of ordering "a cup of coffee", which here, means a teeny tiny cup of industrial strength espresso.

If we want a cup of coffee like we'd get in the US, my friend Rebecca told us we need to order either a "petite creme" or a "grande creme".

We noticed that some restaurants serve butter with their ubiquitous bread, while some do not.  Adrienne looked it up online and said that only higher end restaurants serve butter.  And even though Adrienne speaks French pretty well, and Steph and I can say the basics, asking for things like butter in French can be exhausting!  (And for our family members, we even find it exhausting to say them in English.  Lisa, are you laughing because you know it's true?) So more often than not, we just do without.

We still haven't gotten those "aux merveilleux" pastries made by Fred.  That's a MUST on our list today!