Ptipois

Sushi restaurants in Paris generally serve grilled eel. Nodaiwa on rue Saint-Honoré even specializes in that. Otherwise, you'd have to go to a large fishmonger and even there it is not easy to find. Try the African market streets around Chateau-Rouge or the Chinese markets like Tang, they might have it.

When you get off the RER at Saint-Michel the station is directly connected to the Métro, no need to get out or buy another ticket. Just follow the METRO signs direction "Boulogne", you will reach the platform of the Cluny-La Sorbonne station. Ségur is six stops away (should not be more than a 5-minute ride. Riding the escalators from Saint-Michel to the métro station would take about 10 minutes). When you buy your RER ticket at CDG, it includes one metro fare, which enables you to reach any métro station in Paris. Going to Ségur for the Saxe-Breteuil market should be OK, but I don't recommend you try to go any further if you have little time. Saxe-Breteuil is a "classic" market, it has some nice stalls but I think it's more interesting for fresh products, vegetables, fruit, etc. It is more a "bourgeois housewives" market and not so pretty as Maubert. Maubert has a few artisan stalls, olive oils and vinegars, and there's a great cheese shop on place Maubert (a permanent shop, not a market stall). I should point out that, unless my memory fails me, they vacuum-pack cheeses for people who have to take planes. The oils stand is (as far as I know) the only place in Paris that sells salted anchovies from Roque in Collioure. You will definitely have more to see if you stick to the Saint-Michel/Maubert neighborhood than if you go to the cold, impersonal quartier of Saxe-Breteuil. Maubert is one of the oldest areas in Paris. Notre-Dame cathedral is right next to it. The streets between place Maubert and the Seine are some of the oldest in town, with some buildings dating back to the 13th century. And on the way to Notre-Dame stands the oldest church in Paris; when you get off from the RER you're facing the Roman therms, etc. That area is nice because it allows you to see so much in such a small space. And the market is really nice.

Get on the RER and get off at Saint-Michel/Notre-Dame. You'll find yourself on the boulevard Saint-Germain-Boulevard Saint-Michel crossing. Take Saint-Germain to the left (looking uphill), walk along the Cluny park. Cross rue Saint-Jacques, walk on to Place Maubert, you'll find the marché Maubert, which is one of nicest (and oldest) markets in Paris. Have lunch nearby at Le Pré Verre (tel. (33) 1 43 54 59 47).

I don't think I agree with this, though I admit there are exceptions. French products that will be of higher quality when used in Thai cooking are not many. I can think of beef, oysters, mussels, and not much else. Canned coconut milk is a satisfactory substitute for milk extracted from fresh, ripe coconut that has not travelled thousands of miles in a plane, but it will never equal it. Frozen freshwater fish or shrimp are not the real thing. Mangoes, as Pennylane says, do not travel well. The same can be said about most fruit, vegetables, herbs, as good as Thai imports are. Pork still tastes like pork in Asia. Asian pork dishes are not easy to duplicate in France, since pigs are bred to be as lean as possible, which produces a tasteless and watery flesh. There is a world of difference between pork satay bought on the street in Thailand and the same recipe made in a French restaurant. And I will not mention bananas, grassfish, grilled mackerels, sausages, chillies, etc. Even poulet de Bresse in Thai or Chinese dishes clearly does not make it. It is both too fatty and too tough. The farm-raised chickens I had in Guangzhou were both leaner and tenderer, with a delicious, wholesome taste. I have noticed that when good Chinese chefs in Paris made steamed whole chicken with scallion-ginger sauce, they used Landes chicken, which is much closer to the Chinese equivalent.

Dishny, as was discussed in another thread, is nice but not outstanding. Again I'll mention the very nice little vegetarian restaurant right in front of Dishny. (Always full.) I'm sure there are other interesting places in the La Chapelle-Faubourg Saint-Denis area, but I know only few of them. Ganesha Corner is still a very nice place. It's fun to read the old posts of this thread... Sounds like centuries ago. No good ethnic restaurants in Paris except North African? Vietnamese better in London? I have to agree with fresh_a that the situation of Indian-Pakistani restaurants in Paris is dire. I never understood all the fuss about Yugaraj, volaille de Bresse or not. Every time I ate there it was just as bad as anywhere else. When I want good Indian food in Paris, I cook it myself, or I go to La Chapelle (where the food is South Indian or Sri Lankan). There were a few decent eateries in passage Brady years ago, including a very nice South Indian snack shop, but I think they all have given way to touristy, crappy joints that churn up fluorescent tandoori chicken and post relentless waiters outside to lure people in. When you enter the passage from boulevard de Sébastopol to get to the Velan grocery market, you practically have to walk over a dozen of them before you can reach the store. Again, I believe that if you really like Indian food and live in Paris, you have to learn Indian cooking.

Visiting the colleagues is part of a chef's job... For many reasons, not all of them being honorable. (Léon de Lyon, by the way, is soon to disappear. A sad thing.)

I cannot think of any general rules. Each case should be analyzed individually. UK lamb, French tomatoes, French chefs, Thai chefs, etc., do not mean much in themselves. There isn't much difference between good UK lamb and good French lamb, while the use of a Thai ingredient or spice in the hands of an inexperienced French chef is not likely to produce anyhing of interest. For instance French chefs have never understood mango as an ingredient, and many of them do not get their spices right although they are supposed to, since spices are cool. If you could describe the kind of food that was served to you in that Thai restaurant in the 18e, I probably could see what you mean more clearly. I suspect we are discussing two different subjects here: foreign cooking traditions transplanted in another country, and trying to duplicate themselves as well as they can using local products, or the evolution of the same cooking traditions through the integration of French elements, resulting in some sort of fusion cuisine?

Hm. I don't have clear ideas on that. Do you mean — to simplify —, on one hand, French products prepared according to non-French techniques, and, on the other hand, non-French products prepared according to French techniques? Could you give me more precise examples of French products prepared by that Thai restaurant?(I suspect some part of your sentence popped up and landed where it shouldn't have.) All Thai restaurants in France use French products. French meat, birds, fish, seafood, French-grown herbs and vegetables... The true question is, was this restaurant serving Thai cuisine or a hybrid of French and Thai, as is partly the case with Oth Sombat at Le Banyan? As for Bertie's, maybe the execution was just bad and the idea itself is not to blame. English food and British products are still very far from getting, in France, the respect they deserve. I think what is relevant is not where the hands come from, it is what they are able to do.

It is true that the South Indian/Sri Lankan eateries around rue Cail are "budget". I wrote they were distinctly better than the average (horrendous) North Indian-Pakistani restaurant in Paris but that isn't saying much, really. Dishny is a good example: some preparations are good (the sambar, a few others) but you don't expect a feast when you go there. Restaurants and snack shops in that area are of variable quality. It can go from very poor to pretty good. There is a vegetarian restaurant on rue Cail, facing Dishny, and I suggest you try it. Since you are from India, I would be interested to hear what you think of it. At the other end of rue Cail, corner of rue Louis-Blanc, there is a snack shop called Ganesha Corner and although I have been staying away (for no clear reason) from their more ambitious dishes like curries and birianis, I do like their rotis, parathas, meat rolls and idlis.

If this deserves a new thread, you might want to move this message. Anyway: if you will excuse me for the truism, there are two main conditions for cooking any native cuisine abroad — first the availability of ingredients, second the cooking skills and knowledge of that cuisine. The availability of Japanese ingredients in Paris (which is the French place I know the best) is more limited than the availability of Chinese and Thai products. Indian products stand in-between, with a few shops in Passage Brady and rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis South of Gare de l'Est and, more importantly, a whole neighborhood (upper part of Faubourg-Saint-Denis, La Chapelle and Western part of rue Louis-Blanc) devoted to commerces (grocery shops, butcher shops, DVDs, fabrics, etc.) catering mostly to the Sri-Lankan and South Indian communities. There you may find everything you see in the ingredient lists of Indian cookbooks, and much more. My idea is that the state of each cuisine in a French context has to be studied individually. The main supples for Japanese cooking, for instance, are available in a few shops near the Opéra (and the Japanese aisles in supermarkets like Tang and Paristore are growing), but this cuisine relies so much on high-quality fresh ingredients that it is not easy to duplicate successfully in Paris. Some restaurants do a very good job, but if you want to cook Japanese at home you will spend more time and energy searching for the right ingredients than actually cooking. Besides Japanese cooking (IMO) is by no means easy; it requires a "touch" and sureness of hand that not everybody can duplicate. Given the development of food imports and the adaptation of large markets like Tang Frères to the wishes of their Asian clientèle, I think it is possible for Chinese people to cook up something relatively close to what they'd make at home. Of course many ingredients are still missing but the main basics are there. And it shows in some restaurants, especially some Wenzhou places near Arts-et-Métiers and some recently-opened Sichuan and Shandong places who are run by professional chefs, where you can take a bite and say "it's just like China" — which is a new thing. When it comes to Indian food, the problem is more complicated. Many ingredients are now available (including goat meat at halal butchers) but what has regularly been missing in Paris is the cooking skills. Some 20 years ago, there were very few acceptable Indian restaurants and most of them were expensive. The situation still goes on with Indo-Pakistani restaurants in every neighborhood, complete with tons of wood carving, whose method generally consists in tandoorizing or just stewing meat or chicken and splashing one of three bland, fatty green, brown or orange sauces over them depending on the order. Sometimes chicken is stale under its coat of sauce, which makes you wonder if stewing happens only once a week. If you haven't choked on the 5-cm thick pakora before, that is. Add a half-liter of cloyingly sweet, fluorescent pink lassi and a Vache-qui-Rit cheese nan to this and you've got the average Indian meal in Paris. Except in the right neighborhood, that is. Which is why I insist on the Sri-Lankan/Tamil area past Gare du Nord. Not only you may find a great variety of products and imported foods, but some of the restaurants, snack shops and pastry shops are really good. Simple but spicy, and a few interesting vegetarian options, with the right use of chilli, grated coconut, asafetida, curry leaf and methi leaf that gives Indian vegetarian cooking its delicious flavors (these ingredients are totally absent from the restaurants mentioned in the previous paragraph). And apparently the cooks in that restaurant have no trouble getting that taste, it feels like they probably were already doing that in Sri Lanka before coming to France (whereas, in the Indo-Pakistani places, you really feel that they first decided to open a restaurant and then to learn cooking). So, to answer your question, I think Paris is probably not to the level of London regarding Indian food (I have never been to India) but things have improved a lot in recent years. I think that the easiest cuisine to duplicate at home is Thai cuisine. Because the availability of products directly flown from Thailand is very satisfactory (recently they have even begun to fly in "burnt" fresh coconuts, coriander with the roots on, and little-known fruit like the delicious longkong). Now, if you master the basics of Thai cuisine (which is, IMO, not based on complicated techniques but on a methodical mind), there is no excuse not to cook up a good Thai meal in Paris. Which is not to say that Thai restaurants in Paris are worth jumping up and down for, just that most conditions for success are gathered.

Sure, not to get to far off topic, I love spaghetti primavera and eggplant parmesan and white beans with garlic and oil and well, you get the idea. ← What I mean is that eggplant parmesan, for instance, is not likely to be OK for someone who demands soy milk in public cafés. There are not many Italian dishes in Paris restaurants that do not contain some egg or dairy product. About Indian restaurants: the real vegetarian ones are in the La Chapelle area, top of rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. Most of them Tamil or Sri Lankan. There is one on rue Cail that serves truly delicious food. A vegan option that might be interesting to some: Green Garden (yes, in English) on rue Nationale near the porte d'Ivry is an Asian, totally vegan, restaurant. Classics of Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese cooking are interpreted with soy protein in place of meat or fish. Some friends of mine rave about the place, so there must be something to it, which is why I mention it. But personally it leaves me cold, for two reasons: an excess of — vegetable-based — taste enhancers compensates the blandness of most dishes, and the problem is that this compensation is quite noticeable. Also, there is nothing exciting, far from it, about soy protein except that it imitates animal protein. But when I want to eat vegetarian, I crave a good dish of vegetables and I am not interested in finding a substitute for meat. I think the Indian vegetarian places in Northern Paris are more satisfying because they treat vegetables and pulses for their own sake, not for imitation or as substitutes.

Sure — although that seems to me a little too obvious to be a clever advice —, but Italian?

And she makes the availability of vegetarian and organic product (not to be confused, which she does) a recent innovation... Come on, they've been around for decades! The bio aisles in supermarkets have grown a bit more substantial lately, but really the trend has been constant for some time. The true difficulty for vegetarians in France lies in restaurant-going, and arguably being invited in peoples' homes. As far as food shopping is concerned, France is just as good as many countries, and much better than some. Up to her if she prefers to feast on ready-made dishes that are just as processed as any other overpackaged supermarket food instead of stewing her own lentils and rice (takes 30 minutes) or "peeling, chopping and steaming", but that is more a demonstration of her own inability to survive on her own culinary skills than of the way vegetarians fare in France. She'd be just as clueless in any other country. I'm with you on this, in my book anyone who has the guts to ask for soymilk in her crème in a Paris café or to include the word sinfully in an article is clearly begging for the duncecap.

I think this is due to the foreign origin of the ingredient and to its relatively recent introduction into Europe. The fact that the French "embrace good food, good wine", etc., is due to historical and above all geographical reasons, not to genetical dispositions. There is no natural reason why the French should do well with coffee while there is every historical and colonial reason why they should do badly. Quite unlike the Italians, whose initiation to Ethiopian mochas and Northeast African ways with coffee yielded different results. Another good coffee address in Paris: Ethiopian restaurant Ménélik, 4, rue Sauffroy in the 17e (métro Brochant) tel. 01 46 27 00 82, has a coffee ceremony every Friday and Saturday night at 10:45 PM, in the late stages of the dinner service. Green Ethiopian coffee is roasted directly in the dining room on a portable brasero by the owner's two daughters, then quickly brewed and served to all the customers. The fragrance is incredible and the resulting brew is some of the best coffee one can taste. The restaurant is quite good, too.

I'd have thought my opinion on French coffee was crystal clear... However: - All coffees at Verlet (rue Saint-Honoré, near Palais-Royal) are excellent. - La Grande Epicerie du Bon Marché has a lightly roasted Mexican Liquidambar maragogype that is very good. - Brûleries have good stuff and some restaurants really care about coffee. But IMO they are by no means the majority.

Because*: - Espresso comes from coffee machines in cafés; those coffee machines are rarely well maintained. Water in Paris is very chalky. The method argument is not quite valid since Italians can make superior coffee through those machines. - The very underestimated power of habit: French espresso has always been piss, so people are used to piss, which is why they stomach it without winking. Some even describe it as "good coffee", honest! - The main explanation: it's all because of la Françafrique, in this case "privileged" (means "low-price") commercial relationships with former African colonies (mainly the Ivory Coast) that grow only robusta coffee but grow masses of it. France is, as far as I'm informed, one of the rare countries in the world where the daily coffee is mostly robusta. Robusta, in its usual expressions, is coarse, very rich in caffeine, very productive and easy to grow. While arabica has more aroma, less caffeine, but is also less productive. (Some robustas, grown in Indonesia, are good, but they're part of a quite different deal and are grown differently.) - Therefore troquet (café) coffee in France is mostly robusta. Adding insult to injury, it is also invariably over-roasted, to a point of darkness that makes it pukeningly bitter and enhances its vinegary, rotten-fruit sourness. - Not only is it over-roasted, it is also brewed much too hot. Adding more misery to something that already has enough. - And not only is it over-roasted and brewed too hot, it is also brewed much too concentrated and too strong. Some people (not just café owners) give you morning coffee so dark and opaque that it is almost syrupy and makes your heart palpitate in minutes. I don't understand how they can swallow that. - When, interviewing a coffee specialist for Saveurs I asked him why French cafetiers were still depending so much on over-roasted, over-scalded, cheap robusta, he told me that getting enough mousse (foam) on the surface of the cup was the main objective. Every other characteristic of the coffee was irrelevant for them. And robusta makes a lot of dense, thick foam. So we're not out of trouble any time soon. - In order to avoid any undesirable jealousy from perfectly respectable arabicas, many French restaurant owners and chefs (and that includes one, two or three-starred chefs) regularly make sure they give them the very same treatment as is given to plebeian robusta in troquets: overroasting, brewing too hot and making them taste like donkey piss. Such is the tragedy of French coffee. (*Summarized from my replies in a thread of long ago.)

Fresh milk being available just about everywhere, I suppose you mean "raw milk". Do try the magasins bio/health food stores. There should be a Naturalia somewhere near your place (in fact there is one rue Montorgueil); also try Les Rendez-vous de la Nature, rue Mouffetard (angle rue de l'Epée-de-Bois) in the 5e, or Les Nouveaux Robinsons in Montreuil. If raw milk is not a must, there is good microfiltered whole milk at Monoprix...

I clearly heard of a move recently, but I don't remember where to and who told me. It will surface back soon I hope.

Yeah, don't bring too much of that Paris honey folks... The Luxembourg, OK, but L'Opéra Bastille? And Garnier? I mean, there's a Monceau Fleurs on boulevard Henri-IV, but really... At least the bees from the Luxembourg do bring in a few flavors and extra saccharose from nearby Sadaharu Aoki and Mulot. And purchasing Opéra honey from Fauchon when you could have perfectly good honey from the country? I just hope they charge a lot for it.

My mistake; I thought those cheeses were made from boiled curds. I just found that the curds were pressed but not boiled, unlike gruyère, comté, etc.

This is very good honey indeed. It benefits not only from the flower bounty of the Luxembourg garden, but also from a bit of sugar from the neighboring pâtisseries. If you are not there, I can try and bring some. But I thought it was only available in September during a short period?

Dammit, I have to find some interesting honey! Since everybody seems to be going to Les Abeilles I'll try another place. Do we restrict ourselves to French honeys? I think we have to circumscript our subject once more or we won't have any clear judging lines. So do we say "miels français", or at least commonly sold in France ? And do we say "pure origins" and not blends "from more than one country" (which does not includes the various-flowers honey, which are blended by the bees themselves) ? I'm thinking of bringing some lime blossom honey, and perhaps some heather honey, from I-don't-know-where-yet.

What was mlsleading in your post was that you were mentioning brie de Meaux as a cooked cheese. It can be cooked in some preparations, like any other cheese, but that's not usually the case. Gouda and edam are cooked cheeses. The brie on your picture does not look "cooked" but slightly warmed on the plate (and so does the lamb's lettuce salad while we're at it). This could be done to bring out the truffle flavor.

If it's Brie de Meaux, it is by no means cooked. If it is Brie de Mieux, well — I don't know. Dave, I think your intuitions are correct. Also, helping yourself to loads of cheese when you're invited in someone's home could make the host think that he has not given you enough to eat. However people feel happy when you honor their cheese platter. So the truth lies somewhere in between. In restaurants, helping yourself to lots of cheese or just a little doesn't mean much either way. It is really up to the client.

Wrap it in dirty laundry, put it in a suitcase and check it? Or travel by sea... Or have it shipped. Or give it to me.