The Paris Caffeine Chronicles: June 2026 Update

Last month, I spent three wonderful days in Paris with my family. Unlike on my solo trips, I didn't have a lot of time for coffee-shop-hopping all over the city (it was also really hot!) but I still visited seven great specialty coffee spots, mostly in the 6th arrondissement where we were staying.

48 Hours in Paris — A Summer Weekend in the Latin Quarter

I've been to Paris many times over the past four decades, but somehow it had been almost nine years since my last trip. Milestone birthday celebrations brought me back with my family last week and it was as though I'd never been away. We spent just over 48 hours exploring old haunts and pastures new — while trying to stay cool in the heatwave!

Five Coffee Day Trips from London

Although one day isn't enough time to spend in many of the cities I visit, it's definitely a good start. And if you choose a day-trip destination that has a good or growing specialty coffee scene, you can combine sight-seeing with coffee-shop hopping.

A September Long Weekend in Paris

September is perhaps my favourite month to visit Paris but although I dream of russet- and orange-hued leaves and bright, sunny days, the weather gods don't always smile on me. But sometimes they do and when I visited my friends last month, it was gloriously sunny and unseasonably warm; perfect conditions for a long-weekend trip.

Paris Specialty Coffee Guide — September 2017 Update

At the behest of my French friends, who moved into their beautiful Marais apartment a few months ago, I returned to Paris for another long weekend. I was treated to glorious sunshine and also visited six new-to-me specialty coffee shops and two favourites from previous trips. Many of the shops I visited featured guest roasters from outside Paris, so I got to enjoy a mini European coffee tour that took me from Bath to Berlin and on to Copenhagen.

Paris Specialty Coffee Guide — March 2017 Update

After being pleasantly surprised by Paris's booming specialty coffee scene during my weekend trip last June, I had quite the to-do list to work from when I returned last weekend. As our agenda for the weekend consisted mainly of eat–shop–caffeinate, I squeezed in visits to seven new-to-me cafés. I've added these to my Paris coffee map, which I created for my 2016 Paris coffee guide, where you will find more detailed reviews of Coutume, Télescope, Café Craft and Fragments.

A Paris Weekend in Spring

When I booked Eurostar tickets to stay with my friends in Paris last weekend, I didn't know that it would be the sixth city and fifth country I would be visiting in just over five weeks (see also: Cologne, Barcelona, New York, Boston and Padua, or just my travel section). 

Although my 8:31 am train from St Pancras on Friday wasn't prohibitively early, I was sleepy on the journey, especially given that the lengthy queues at security at St Pancras meant that I couldn't get a much-needed second coffee (not that there is anything decent on offer after security). All of this tiredness was soon forgotten when I arrived at Gare du Nord just before noon and stepped out into the Paris sunshine.

A Year in Leaps: 2016

Each year, as part of my year-in-review top five lists, I like to look back on some of the most memorable places I travelled to this year and, because I enjoy taking silly leaping photos in new places, picking out my favourite five leaps of the year is a fun way to do this. Alas, there were a few particularly memorable trips this year during which, for various reasons, I didn't get the chance to take a leaping photo; most notably, my recent holiday in Reykjavik, where a photo with the Northern Lights in the background would have entailed a 12-second levitation. Even in a leap year, I wasn't quite up to the challenge.

Paris: A Specialty Coffee Guide

UPDATE: I returned to Paris twice in 2017, once in March and once in September, each time adding a number of specialty coffee shops to my map.

The last time I was in Paris, back in November 2012, I was surprised to discover, after decades of mediocre coffee (or worse), that it was possible to get good specialty coffee in the city. Unfortunately, a hectic day trip meant I could only go to one coffee shop, La Caféothèque, a sprawling, characterful café in the southern part of the Marais.

A Great Weekend in Paris

My office is a five-minute walk from the Eurostar's London terminal in St Pancras and yet I take the opportunity to hop on a train to Paris for the weekend all too rarely. Before the ill-fated trip to the city I had planned for my parents last November, my last visit was in 2012 and that was only for the day. 

Mindful of this, I headed off on the 18:01 Eurostar from St Pancras on Friday to stay with friends in Saint Germain. With news of floods and strikes, I was worried that I might be jinxed, but the train pulled into Gare du Nord a few minutes early, without any evidence of disruption.

The Caffeine Chronicles: La Caféothèque, Paris

France in general and Paris in particular are surprisingly bad at doing certain basic necessities. Like pizza. Or coffee. Even when I was a caffeine junkie but not a caffeine geek, it was hard enough to find a double espresso or double mac that wasn't scalded and bitter, let alone an artisanal coffee-based beverage. Knowing the French for macchiato — une noisette — helps, of course. 

Before my birthday Paris trip on Wednesday, then, I decided to do some quick research. I did find a few possibilities (most of them owned by expats) and was able to pay a visit to La Caféothèque in the 4ème, just north of the Île Saint-Louis.

A la recherche de macchiato perdu: La Caféothèque, Paris

La Caféothèque is a Guatemalan-owned coffee shop, which offers coffee from a huge array of different countries: once you have picked your coffee type, you can pick your vintage. Although the coffee of the day, a Costa Rican blend when we were there, was 50 cents cheaper, I opted for a noisette with one of the Guatemalan coffees. 

When in a Guatemalan coffee shop... The descriptions on the menu and the fact that there was an illustration of an Aeropress were good signs, and when the coffee arrived a little while later, it was very good. 

My noisette had slightly more milk than I usually prefer but it still tasted great — the blend I chose was chocolatey, rich and smooth. In short, it looked like a macchiato you might find in London or New York, rather than the usual Parisian offerings.

Impressive noisettes / macchiati

The coffee shop itself turned out to be surprisingly cavernous. Near the entrance is a big roaster, where you can also buy beans or ground coffee to take away, and then you proceed through a labyrinth of rooms, some with comfy armchairs and sofas, some with tables and chairs. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon so the Mac posse were obviously taking a break, but there seemed to be a mix of tourists and locals.

They definitely take their coffee seriously here. About time!

There wasn't time on Wednesday but during my research, I found a few other potential venues for quality caffeination in the City of Light: Coutume Café in the 7ème, which I believe is Franco-Australian; Gocce di Caffe in the 2ème; and the American-run Merce and the Muse in the 3ème. Let me know if you've been to any of these places — or any other places for a truly great macchiato in Paris.

La Caféothèque. 52 rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, 75004 Paris (Métro: Pont Marie or Saint-Paul). Website.

One Day in Paris

What better way to celebrate entering the last year of my third decade than by hopping over to Paris for the day? The last time I was in Paris for my birthday was in 2005, when Dad had wanted to surprise Mum for her birthday, which is the day after mine, so he flew her over for the day. The Bro and I, meanwhile, took the Eurostar over the night before, staying at Moniseur E's flat, before rendez-vous-ing with the parents in the Jardin du Luxembourg just before lunch.

There was no overnight stay this time — just a very early start, which was worth when it means you can be strolling along the Canal Saint-Martin by 11.30. Before that, though, there was the excitement of a birthday gift on the Eurostar. As well as Prince Charles, BBC Radio and the Top 40, I also share my birthday with Eurostar, who were celebrating their 18th and giving out bottles of champagne to the fastest two 14 November babies on the train. Thanks, Eurostar!

Top: Canal St-Martin; Louvre by night. Bottom: Birthday gift from Eurostar;
posing on the canal; the padlocks of Pont des Arts

Paris was very chilly yesterday. It was also grey and foggy — the opposite of the bright sunshine I had seen in the forecast. This meant a trip up the Eiffel Tower was out, but a long wander along the canal and through the Marais was very much in. 

We ate lunch at Merci, a hip lifestyle boutique on the boulevard Beaumarchais. After perusing the pretty, colourful scarves and the beautiful and (occasionally) useful homeware products, it was lunchtime and luckily Merci also has a couple of cafes and a restaurant. I ate a delicious pesto risotto with bresaola and parmesan at the latter, saving enough room for a mid-afternoon chocolate éclair from Miss Manon in the Marais. 

I was also keen to prove that it is actually possible to get a decent macchiato (or noisette, as they call them) in Paris, and La Caféothèque, on rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, did not disappoint.

Cheeky afternoon snack in the Place des Vosges

After a little more strolling, a little more (window) shopping and a lot more trying to keep warm, we ended up at Le Bon Marché, my favourite Parisian department store. I just about managed to resist buying some beautiful bedding, which was exactly the colour I have been searching for, but which was also way over my self-imposed budget. 

A consolatory steak-frites at Le Relais de l'Entrecôte, one of the Parisian originals of my favourite Marylebone steak-house, Le Relais de Venise. I say "consolatory," but the steak and accompanying fries were both excellent.

This only left time for a brief amble over the Pont des Arts and back to Gare du Nord, via the Louvre and its pyramids. I love to walk through there at night when the lights are on and there aren't many people around. And then I was back in SOTR by 11.30, after a tiring but very fun birthday.

Two Days in Paris

Technically, I only spent 24 hours in Paris rather than two days (and those 24 hours were infinitely more pleasant than the two days spent there by Julie Delpy and Adam Goldberg). Leaving work slightly early to hop on a Eurostar to Paris is very exciting indeed, especially for a Tuesday. 

You arrive in Paris 3h15 later (with the time difference) but that's OK because Parisians eat and go out later anyway (we ate at Les Editeurs, a favourite of mine near Odéon). Besides, they have such powerful heaters that you can eat dinner and sip your wine on the terrasse (well, pavement, anyway) even though it's March and still pretty nippy.

Giant leap in front of the Louvre, 2011

On the second day, a relatively early start is needed if you want to do a full Bex Tour. I like to walk a lot and I walk pretty fast so we managed to cover the 8.5-mile route shown below, starting in the 6th arrondissement and with stops for coffee, lunch and crêpes) before catching the métro from Trocadéro to Sevres-Babylone for a visit to Le Bon Marché (my favourite Parisian department store, although surprisingly disappointing on this occasion). 

Finally, as it started to get dark, we ambled back through Saint-Germain — unlike much of the rest of the city, which was pretty dead, Saint-Germain was as heaving as ever.


View A Paris Perambulation in a larger map

There was just time for a quick dinner at Kong, where the 360-degree views over the Pont Neuf and the river are wonderful (as long as you book a table with a view) and the fillet steaks are perfect. And yes, I went there before the Sex and the City finale was filmed there. The time difference, of course, works in your favour on the way back so you can take a Eurostar from the Gare du Nord at 9.15 and be back in London for 10.30 p.m. local time.

The map shows the 8.5-mile route that took us from about 11 until 5.30, including the aforementioned pit stops. We weren't hurrying but I do tend to walk quite quickly, although there were also plenty of stops for photographs. If you're less familiar with Paris, you should definitely factor in more time or perhaps cut off either the Marais segment or the Eiffel Tower segment. 

Even so, the route manages to take in many of Paris's most famous sights (the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre) and many places that are a little further from the beaten track. I've also included the places where we ate, drank and caffeinated, as well as a number of my favourites from previous trips.

The leap that started them all - April 2008

Of course, you don't have to make a fool of yourself by leaping in front of the Louvre (or the Eiffel Tower) but it is a lot of fun and for me, almost three years ago, it started a hobby. Besides, everyone else is too busy taking silly photos of themselves to pay too much attention to the girl who thinks she's really a five-feet-ten volleyball player...

When in Paris (Part 2)

Sundays in France used to be pretty boring — all of the shops and most of the museums, monuments and other attractions were closed and so options for entertainment were generally limited to a long lunch followed by a long walk. 

Luckily, some shops do now open on Sundays, as well as various exhibitions and so on but, more importantly, the tradition of le brunch is now more ubiquitous in Paris than anywhere else in the world (spawning a verb bruncher as well as the extension — drunch _ which is the meal you eat at 3 or 4 p.m. soon after you wake up after returning from clubbing at about 7 a.m., therefore encompassing breakfast, lunch and tea). Not every Sunday in Paris is quite so Sunday-like anymore then:

1. Bruncher. We went to Little Georgette, Monsieur E's favourite brunch spot, just off the place du Marché St Honoré, a square populated almost entirely by restaurants and bruncherias. 

Parisian brunch is like an American brunch on steroids — it's not just a matter of having a really big pancake dish washed down with coffee and OJ; instead, it's a multi-course meal, involving a pre-main course pudding as well as a post-main pudding, in the case of Little Georgette. 

They offer various different brunch options, all wittily titled. We went for the, "Georgette chante, Born in the USA," option, consisting of: (N)espresso (or other hot drink), freshly squeezed OJ, "house cakes" (chocolate cake and lemon cake, randomly served instead of bread to keep you going until the main course), bacon cheeseburger (burger and cheese were excellent; the bacon, not so much), and a pudding (we had mini US-style pancakes served with a shot glass of slightly warm Nutella; you could also opt for cheesecake, fruit salad or ice cream). 

Brunch don't come cheap in Paris, compared to the price of, say, a two-course dinner. Our selection was 25 euros each! Luckily, I hadn't eaten breakfast and probably won't be eating dinner so it wasn't such bad value for a whole day's worth of (very unhealthy food).

2. Promener au bord de la Seine. Having brunched, we attempted to walk off some of the calories, down through the Louvre and across onto the Left Bank, which was pleasant in the afternoon sunshine, although the incompetent mass tourists did get on our nerves. We ended up strolling all the way over to the Grand Palais for our culcha injection and then back along the Champs Elysées to Monsieur E's house. Paris is a very walkable city, both in terms of its size and its attractiveness; it is thus a shame to see so many tourists spending their entire visit on a coach tour.

3. Visiter Shakespeare & Co. OK, so it's now become a ginormous cliché to visit the famous Left Bank bookshop but they do have a good selection of books, including some American editions with interesting covers or bindings and a wide variety of second-hand things. It's just a shame that the number (and size) of the American tourists in the shop make browsing more difficult than it ought to be. Plus, the sales assistants tend to look at you down their more-cultured-than-thou noses unless you a) buy something suitably intellectual and/or b) speak in your best RP.

4. Voir une expo. The Grand Palais is the Crystal Palace of Paris, only it is still standing and currently holds a range of cool exhibitions in its grand, glass-roofed building. We went to see Le Grand Monde d'Andy Warhol, which was very well done and interesting. We wished our parents had known Andy in the '80s and had commissioned him to do a portrait of us. Having purchased my art yesterday, I refrained from purchasing a blue-toned print of Jackie O and one of a generic, blonde American woman from 1976, who bore a strong resemblance to Mrs Don Draper.

Adventures in Cocktails

I think I have found the Parisian equivalent of Employees Only: the Experimental Cocktail Club, located in the up and coming Montorgeuil ("mountain of pride") neighbourhood. 

Walking down rue Saint-Sauveur, you come across a building with a plain blue sign but no text. Apart from the bouncer, it could be anywhere or nowhere and the windows provide no clues from the inside. 

Once the bouncer has determined that you are cool enough to enter, you walk through the door and through the red curtains into a small, funky bar with a small number of tables, a few lucky people perching at the bar and many more 20- and 30-somethings crammed into the remaining elbow room.

The cocktails were impeccable. The bar, being experimental, offers a menu with a selection of 11 experimental cocktails (although the brilliantly stocked, mirrored bar allows the skilled bar staff to whip up almost anything that might take your fancy). I started with a Bee's Kiss (being B, of course): Appleton VX Jamaican Rum, cream, organic honey, "poivre long concasse d'Indonesie" (some kind of Indonesian pepper). I then moved on to the Old Cuban (pictured: Havana Club aged 3 years, Champagne, Ginger cordial, fresh lime juice, fresh mint, cane sugar and bitter truth aromatic).

Monsieur E went for the Rye Tobacco Sour, which sounded horrible (containing tobacco liqueur, rye whiskey and egg white, among other things) but tasted pretty palatable. 

On my to-try list for the next visit are the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Unusual Gin and Tonic (not actually that unusual — it just uses Hendrick's gin, freshly squeezed lime and a slice of cucumber--but how cool is the name?), although the menu changes every year so I might have to find something else by then. 

The vibe of the bar, the quality of the cocktails, its discreet exterior and intimate, stylish interior are all worthy of Employees Only. I would almost certainly have walked past both without a second glance had I not been guided there. 

Monsieur E and I were lucky to secure at least half a bar stool each so that we could perch while we soaked up the atmosphere (not to mention the random juices and splashes of cocktail that would occasionally fall from the shaker in the capable hands of the hot, Colombian barman (everyone says that).

When in Paris (Part 1)

When in Paris, there are certain things one must do, even if it is a somewhat grey and drizzly, if warm, May day. From today's agenda:

1. Acheter le petit déj à une boulangerie. Luckily, the boulangerie at the foot of Monsieur E's building is one of the best in Paris and so we bought a croissant (me), a pain au chocolat (Monsieur E) and some delicious baguette and ate breakfast in his (then) sun-filled living room.

2. Visiter les monuments célèbres. OK, so we didn't actually go in or up them, but we did watch the vast crowds of miserable-looking tourists queueing outside the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame in the drizzle earlier and took some more (also obligatory) leaping photos.

3. Traîner au Marais avec tes copains hipsters. The Marais doesn't look its best in the rain but it's still a fun place to hang out and there are more Bex-friendly shops there than in most other parts of the city. We wandered in and out of many almost identical boutiques all offering overpriced, minimalist-chic clothes in a wide variety of neutral colours. I didn't buy, of course. I did, however, buy when we got to Yellow Korner, an art and photo gallery with an interesting concept: the art is all by a variety of up-and-coming artists and you can buy each image in a range of sizes, from an A4-size, ready framed print to a 150X100 cm image ready-mounted on an aluminium back. Each one is "limited edition" so there are only about 500 copies of each one. I went one better because the 50x40 piece I bought was numbered 1 of 500.

4. Manger des crêpes. As the rain started to come down more heavily, we ducked into Crêperie Suzette for some lunch (I actually had a chicken-nuts-egg-pesto-romaine salad instead of a crêpe but this is acceptable). Of course, this being Paris, the two waiters made a concerted effort to ignore us, failing to take our order for almost 30 minutes, even though several "regulars" came in, were seated immediately and were then brought their food before they had even had to wait to receive a menu. Never mind; the food was good and the crêperie was dry.

5. Qu'ils mangent des macarons. Ladurée is generally agreed to produce the best macaroons in Paris, so we stopped into the Left Bank branch for an afternoon snack. Although I was tempted by the pretty pinks, yellows and oranges from an aesthetic point of view, I was always going to choose the caramel (filled with a little of salt-caramel) and praliné options (two mini macaroons allows you to sample more flavours than one big one; it also makes you feel less greedy, I find). 

6. Après la tombée de la nuit. We're off for dinner (to an Italian, this being Paris...), followed by glamorous cocktails at either the Experimental Cocktail Club or the Chacha Club. Being Paris, the cocktails will be very pricey so it's probably a good thing that each one will no doubt be obscenely strong. Errors will certainly result...

Yellowcumpinky-Blue

Thanks to my grandfather, I believed that yellowcumpinky-blue was a colour until about 1991. So, I was excited when, on a visit to the treasure trove that is the stationery basement at Gibert Jeune in 1990, I picked up a highlighter that had yellow, pink and blue nibs so you could vary your highlighting colour depending on your mood. (Naturally, aged six, I had plenty of important documents and papers to highlight). If you took off all three lids at once, you could theoretically highlight in the mythical colour known as yellowcumpinky-blue. 

Of course, anyone who has ever painted will know, the closest real colour to yellowcumpinky-blue would probably be dishwater grey or muddy brown. And here was the hard lesson I learned: just because three colours are pretty by themselves, it doesn't mean that mixing them will make something pretty. 

I started thinking about this past disappointment because of this blog post I read recently, which reads something like, "there's probably no magenta. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The blogger explains, "The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence." Excluding yellowcumpinky-blue, the obvious answer, she writes, is magenta (a rose by any other name would look as pink). Maybe I just spent too much time with my Crayola set but I was wondering where Burnt Sienna, Chartreuse and Turquoise were. Of course, sienna, burnt or otherwise, isn't a neatly defined part of the spectrum of visible light (although I learned from the Crayola website that Burnt Sienna is one of America's top 50 crayons, its "celebrity" is Billy Crystal and its "music" is Brown Eyed Girl) and so it doesn't count a proper, fully fledged colour.

The English language has very many words for colours — which is probably why Pantone and Dulux are so successful — far more than most other languages. But even when you look at the basic words for colour in a given language, there isn't any kind of cross-linguistic uniformity. English has a relatively high number of colour words but from the basic colour terms, we have blue, while Russian has dark blue and light blue, but not just plain blue. Some languages only have four basic colour terms, some have only two (the equivalent of "black" and "white" but "black" often means "things that are dark" or even "things of a certain texture").

If any academic work pushed me in the direction of linguistic studies, it was Berlin and Kay's 1969 Basic Color Terms, in which the researchers report a hierarchy of colours that allows you to predict which colours might be found in a language. Does our language determine how we perceive colour? Or does how we perceive colour determine our language? 

They found that the order was thus: two colour terms = black/dark and white/light; three colour terms = red; four colour terms = yellow or green; five colour terms = yellow and green; and then come blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey, in that order. This hierarchy is the reason I can never remember the order of snooker balls.

Berlin and Kay worked out these "basic" colours by having native speakers of different languages pick from a selection of coloured chips the chip that was, say, the reddest red (although no colour terms were actually used). Although speakers of a language might know different numbers of words for types of red (or be able to distinguish different numbers of separate colours within a class of reds), they generally tend to agree on the number of "focal" or basic colours. Mum and I still can't agree whether the bracelet I sometimes wear is green or yellow but most English speakers would probably agree that while this is green, this is yellow.

I found this topic fascinating and tried to weave it in to several essay questions in my final year exams, most notably my History of the Italian Language paper. I spent over a third of my essay on the evolution of the Italian dialects talking about how bizarre it was that some Italian dialects preserve an almost Latin-like system of basic colour terms (with one word for blue and for green) while in others, the word for blue does not exist, even though there was a perfectly decent word for blue in Latin. This meant that these dialects had carelessly manage to lose a basic colour term over time and this retrograde evolution was certainly not expected. (The 1980 study about this was published by Kristol in Language: Color Systems in Southern Italy: A Case of Regression.)

Speakers of those dialects of Italian would still be able to talk about the sky, of course, and about other blue things by using noun-based compounds: sky-coloured eyes, eyes like the sea, a chocolate-coloured jacket, etc. To some extent, we do the same in English, but we can at least say "sky blue" rather than "sky coloured"; alas, the latter isn't very satisfying when given in answer to the question, "What colour is the sky?" Conversely, answering "grass green" to the question, "What colour was the traffic light?" might seem to flout Grice's Conversational Maxim of Quantity: it doesn't matter how green or what kind of green the light was, only that it was green, most of the time.

This post has been a surprisingly tangential trip down memory lane and while I don't really care whether or not magenta is a "real" colour, I was interested to read Henrik Zollinger's 1984 paper in which he argues that turquoise may eventually evolve into a basic colour term; the references list a whole range of other turquoise-themed research. As turquoise is by far my favourite colour, I like this idea better than the Great Magenta Hoax.

Float Like a Papillon

Now that I have obtained the photos from Dad's camera, I have found my attempt to sail above the crowds at the Louvre.

Yes, people did stare at me, but at least I had a cooler and more original photo to take home from the day than they did (that means you, couple on the left-hand side of the photograph).

Parisian Pâques

It was great to have a bit of a lie-in this morning – well, until nine, anyway, at which point, I went on a run over Pont des Arts and through the Louvre, before heading back to the hotel for a shower and breakfast. 

The breakfast room at our hotel is a gorgeous, cloistered room in the cellar, which dates back to the 13th century – the ubiquitous Americans were impressed anyway. I was less impressed with my cappuccino but the pastries were good, even if the Earl Grey jam was a little too much for my tastes.

This being Sunday, most shops were closed so we went on a walk across Île de la Cité and then through the Marais and the Louvre and to Les Invalides. There were approximately 324,250 people trying to get into Notre Dame for the Easter Sunday service – in fact, there was a queue to get into the queue – so we just walked on through as quickly as possible, enjoying the bells, the bells.

I then had a bit of a frolic when we got to the Louvre by getting Dad to take a photo of me leaping through the air with Les Pyramides in the background. Even though I made a complete fool of myself in front of about 5,000 tourists, we got a great photo. 

By this point, the sun went in and it was cold having lunch outside at a sidewalk café on the Boulevard St Germain before we went to Les Invalides for Mum to see the tomb of Napoleon. We then did a whistle-stop tour of the rest of the museum, which considered the outstanding role France has played in a range of different wars. I’m quite a history buff but even I start to get bored when faced with hundreds of essentially identical coats of armour.

Because it was raining and because it sounded like a cool thing to do, I then went to the tiny, old-fashioned arts cinema just opposite the hotel, that was, once again, like walking into a scene from The Dreamers; I saw Some Like It Hot, having missed The Apartment, which I finally finished watching earlier in the week and which was on at le petit cinema on Friday. I felt very cool, in my own mind if nowhere else.

There was just time for a quick jacuzzi, shower and internet before we went to dinner at Le Petit Zinc, a cool, smart brasserie near the hotel, where I had a beautifully cooked steak, although I was plagued with a migraine (probably due to last night’s excesses) so the bro and I only went out briefly afterwards to Café Mabillon for a quick cocktail (him) and Evian (me).

Paris in the the Spring

Despite staying in London on Friday night, it was still a bit of a mission getting up in time for the 7:30 am Eurostar. St Pancras was bustling and we went straight through passport control where the rest of my family had some breakfast but I couldn’t face anything more than a third espresso. I rightly guessed that although the Eurostar provided papers, it wouldn’t include the Grauniad. I slept half the journey and in no time, we were at Gare du Nord.

It was raining when we emerged from the metro at Odéon but our hotel wasn’t too far away and I walked past some old favourite shops and restaus on the way. The hotel (the Relais Christine) was really nice — with small rooms (quite big, I suppose, for Paris) but attractively decked out and with a view of the peaceful central courtyard.

We stayed just long enough to drop off the stuff before heading out for rue de Rennes for Longchamp and Le Bon Marché (Paris’s best department store). We had a quick bite of déjeuner at a café-bar; I was starved, having not eaten since dinner the night before and I relived my veggie days with an omelette nature (“Avec quoi?” / “Avec ouef” / “Et avec ca?” / “Et de la beurre?”).

I spent the rest of the day shopping while I still could (it’s unlikely that much will be open in France on Easter Sunday or Monday). The weather was typically spring-like — sunny one moment and then cold, windy and sleeting. 

Luckily, I was wrapped up against the elements, although I still needed to duck into the Café de la Mairie and the studenty News Café for coffee and for shelter. It always surprises me every time I remember how mediocre French coffee really is. Still, News Café looks out onto the Jardin du Luxembourg and the atmosphere makes up for the coffee.

All of my memories of Paris seem to involve the rain — this is probably because it was always spring or autumn when we went. I never really mind though; I’ve definitely romanticised it and if it makes my hair go curly then so be it. Maybe all of this is because of the scene from The Dreamers where Michael Pitt and Eva Green run through the streets in the rain.

Back at our hotel, we headed to the gorgeous cloistered spa in the basement. It was a lovely way to chill out after a long day of shopping and café hopping. Very relaxing indeed - oh, and a great shower.

We went for an aperitif at Café Laurent (the caipirinha didn’t have its ice crushed enough for my tastes but it was at least French — i.e. strong). We then headed down the street to the Rôtisserie d’en Face (CLOSED) where I had the most deliciously juicy roast chicken I’ve had in years, followed by a perfectly flaky vanilla mille-feuille for which I really didn’t have room.

After dinner, we went to Café de Flore — yes, it’s clichéd, yes, it’s massively overpriced and yes, there are a lot of other better cafes, but it does do great, thick, rich hot chocolate and for once there weren’t any Americans there. 

Once we’d said bonne nuit to the parents, though, the brother and I went to Les Editeurs, which is one of my favourite bars in town. It does really good cocktails and the whole café is in a literary theme, so the menu looks just like the old cover of a great work of literature. The walls are covered in books too – books and a huge clock, anyway…