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"Food comes first, then morals" said Bertolt Brecht in "Die Dreigrossschenoper." He obviously visited Paris before we did, but it is as if he read our minds. We were looking forward to real baguettes, real pain aux raisins! Would the boulangerie/patisserie still be there at the angle of rue de la Mare?

Bread is the staff of life

Not good for the waistline

It was. As our taxi pulled up we saw that the bakery we had so often visited in 1999 had not been a victim or progress or retirement. We were soon sampling their wares: Our host, landlord, and friend, Veronica, greeted us with a wonderful breakfast, a mixture of English and French cooking, just matching the cultural mix she has become. From then on we were on our own.

A small "supermarket"

Our first shopping harvest

Having said goodbye to Veronica we set off to fill our larder. We look for and take apartments because we enjoy having our own kitchen faciities. It means that we get to eat when we want, what we want (within the limits of our own skills and laziness). It means that we get to sample the local produce and food products that are available in whatever country we are in, not just the restaurant fare, which we like, but is often short on vegetables and salads. Thus we had to go shopping.

Within a short walk of our place we had the choice of Leader Price (two of them!), Mr Ed, G20, and Monoprix. A short walk farther was Champion. All are too small to really deserve the full name of "supermarket." French laws and Parisian regulations make it very hard to build a large supermarket in the heart of Paris. (There are a few on the periphery, and we visted them twice, once a Carrefour on the west side of Paris and once an Auchan on the east side of Paris.) The four mentioned vary from 1/4 to 1/2 the size of American/British suburban supermarkets. We preferred Leader Price and the Monoprix: The first definitely was a price leader; for products that we knew we wanted and we knew were there we went to it (this was about half the time). The second, Monoprix, was a little more expensive but had a better selection; we went to it most of the rest of the time.

Our third most frequented store, but in fact one we like the best was Lidl. We'd been introduced to it in Berlin and really liked the combination of value and selection and quality. So we sought it out in Paris. At first we thought there were none, but after a month a walk took us right by one. And then we found another, very conveniently situated on the route of Bus 26. That bus had a stop even closer than any of our neighborhood stores and came so often that it was very practical to take the bus to Lidl, shop, and return by bus in not much more time than it would take to walk to Monoprix.

About to Eat, Rue de la Mare

Our first home-cooked meal

More than half the days we ate in. Sitting at the dining table in the living room was very comfortable. We had a subscription to Le Monde. With it, or the television if something special was happening, and general conversation meals passed quickly.

Cheese Please Louise

We have to confess. Maybe it is obvious from what is already written: we didn't give in too, too often to our desire to buy all the mouth-watering things we saw in shop windows. We had a scale and we weighed ourselves almost every day. When the trend was too much the wrong way then we cut back. So, we didn't sample each and every cheese that we could have. But we did indulge ourselves in the good and cheap wine we found in Paris, just as we had in Berlin. While we liked what we found Gerry missed his Auslese.

The new "famous" Au Pied de Cochon

Paloma and Food. Yummy!

Gerry and Food. Yummy!

Jan and Dessert. Yummy!

We don't eat every meal at home of course. With visitors we entertained them chez nous and we headed out and sampled some of Paris's restaurants,

One of our walking tours with Paloma took us to and through the "new" Halles. It was once the wholesale food distribution center of Paris. As such it had many cheap, hearty restaurants catering to the market workers and their customers. Around 1975 the wholesale market was moved to much larger quarters at Rungis, on the south side of Paris. Les Halles was then redeveloped into an upmarket shopping area. On our visit we sought out one of the most famous restaurants, Au Pied de Cochon, and found that it had gone too far upmarket for us. We settled for a humbler restaurant down the street and had a very agreeable meal on their terrace. Three weeks later we wanted to repeat the experience but found that jack-hammers were at work outside. We couldn't bear the noise and went further on and fortunately found a pleasant bisto (although the food didn't quite match the atmosphere.)

Lunch, Place du Tertre, Montmartre

Dinner, Belleville Mauritian restaurant, with Remys

Lunch, rue Francois Miron

Sidewalk Cafe

We really mixed up where we ate. We had to go back to the Place du Tertre in Montmartre. There we found that Globalisation (or Mondialisation, according to the French) had taken its toll: At least two-thirds of the restaurants were obviously run by immigrants and a good half of them were Asiatics. Hardly the place where starving artists of the late 19th century ate simple meals and sold their works for a pittance. Here the painters were assembly-line masters: a painting that was just being started as you sat down to lunch was ready for you to carry away at the end of the meal.

A really traditional place, or so we would like to believe, is on the rue Francois Miron. This street is one of the oldest in Paris and has the oldest building not in ruins. We walked by one day on a tour of this area, crowded between Les Marais and the Seine and Gerry determined to come back. Without his picture, which has the street address, we might never have found it. The meal was good. And traditional: traditional tourist fare (but at least served by a man in the famous apron of a traditional waiter.

Music Festival Food

Some years ago Jack Lang was French minister of culture and he started a street music fair. Every band that wants to, and even those who imagine they are a band but really can't play, sets up shop in and around the Latin Quarter one night a year. We came out from seeing a great Comedie Francaise production of Rabelais to find we were in the midst of a giant crowd. Some quick observation showed that for our taste (in music) we were better off indoors with the actors. However, all tastes, even ours, were catered for by the food stands, which almost equaled the bands in number.

McDonalds, Stalingrad and Canal Saint Martin

Baguette Sandwich Shop with line extending outdoors

We also ate at our share of McDonalds — we like the taste, the convenience, and the bathrooms — but much more often we ate out of the nearly ubiquitous Parisian (and we suppose French) competitor: the baguette sandwich shop, or its cousin, the bakery that sold such sandwiches. And what is a baguette sandwich? It is a mini-submarine sandwich (aka a hero or sub) made from a 12-inch (rather than the standard 24-inch) baguette. The fillings, like American subs, can vary greatly, but the most common are a cheese baguette (with mixed cheeses or only brie) and a ham baguette, both garnished with lettuce and tomato. We would often buy them at the shop and take them to a nearby park or bench and enjoy the weather, the passing people, and our newspaper. In the rare case that a shop was not under our noses and responses from passers-by did not reveal the location of a close-by source, we would hop on a bus and ride until we passed an open shop.