The Good Life France Magazine




The Good Life France Magazine brings you the best of France - inspirational and exclusive features, fabulous photos, mouth-watering recipes, tips, guides, ideas and much more...


Published by the award winning team at The Good Life France

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2 years ago

Issue No. 15

Discover the Drome, Nyons - the last Provencal frontier, Charente-Maritime, Burgundy, Paris gastronomy, Nice, secret Provence, recipes, a whole lot more. It's the next best thing to being in France...

Barbara Pasquet-James a

Barbara Pasquet-James a writer who lives in Paris, is no stranger to the temptations of the city's restaurant scene but even she was impressed by just how good it can be when she Paris is indisputably one of the best food cities in the world. Its marvelous markets and shops touting eye-popping droolinducing produce, pastries, chocolates and more, are fodder for thousands of food blogs, and there are enough neo bistros and restaurants to keep food reviewers busy for a lifetime just revisiting old chomping grounds. So imagine being contacted by insatiable foodie friends from California, with whom you’ve shared many a stellar meal, announcing that they are returning to Paris not for the shopping, not museums or monuments, but for four days of “extreme fooding” - a marathon of restaurants they’d been dreaming about for ages, and they’d love it if you (and in my case, French hubby as well) would join them? My mission, which I cheerily chose to accept, was to snag reservations at some of the hardest-to-get tables in town on relatively short notice. There would be eight fantastic restaurants in four days: lunches and dinners. We would eat and drink our way round the city. Juggling bookings at sought-after Paris eateries can be a challenge: most are open on certain days only. Others just for dinner and incredibly, starred players are closed on weekends. But I was both pistonnée (food writer/guest eater at chefs’ tables) and very persistent. Our only restriction: no fish or shellfish for one in our party. We were afraid this would prove to be an obstacle at places with fixed tasting menus but happily, it wasn’t.