BONJOUR FROM PARIS!

I am spending a couple of months, all alone, in this tres magnifique city, doing some writing and research for my NYU thesis, and Tracey and I thought it would be fun if I did a couple of dispatches about life—and the world of food and drink—from across the pond. Right now, I am sitting upstairs at a café on the Rue Vieille du Temple in the hip Marais district (sort of a mix between New York’s west and east villages, with old-world European architectural grandeur and narrow, windy, cobblestone streets thrown in!), sipping tea, enjoying the light breeze wafting in through the French doors I am sitting in front of.

Speaking of cafes, the very first thing I noticed about Paris was that no one here walks around with a disposable cup of coffee. And I mean no one—I haven’t seen a single soul carrying one in the week I’ve been here. In New York it’s de rigeur for every other person I see on the street (including me, admittedly) to be carrying a cup from Starbucks or their local coffee shop, but not here. Why? A slower pace of life (c’est possible, even in a big, cosmopolitan city!), less of an inclination for disposability, but most importantly, the preponderance of a serious café culture.

In Paris, cafes are as ubiquitous as Wal-marts are at home. Actually, probably way more so, but you get my point. And it gets better: once you sit down in a café, you never, ever have to rush—it’s commonplace for a person to savor a café au lait or an espresso for an hour or more. That happens so rarely in New York and the rest of our country. People in big U.S. cities seem to be in so much more of a hurry, and there’s also the factor that servers in America rely upon tips for their income, so it’s in their best interest to turn tables over as fast as possible, after, of course, inflating checks as much as possible (“What before dinner cocktails/bottle of wine/after dinner drinks/dessert would you like?”). In Paris, there is a service charge included in every check (although much to the chagrin of my French friends, I always tip more!), and people in the service industry here make a set salary, which is even higher than the French minimum wage (which in turn, suffice it to say, is much higher than the appallingly low U.S. minimum wage). All of this makes for happier, more relaxed servers, and more importantly, gives Le Parisienne license to linger.

At home in New York, I only have one place downtown where I feel the freedom to sit for hours, drinking only tea, bothered by no one, and before I left, it became my daily breakfast and lounging go-to. Of course it’s called Les Deux Gamin!

Each café in Paris has a slew of as many chairs as possible squeezed into one area, most of them facing out toward the street, and people sit in them all day along; Everyone has equal access to the energy of passersby, of which there are what seem like hundreds, even on tiny, quiet side streets. And yet another great thing about Paris I've noticed, too, by the way, is that when you sit at cafes and have a coffee, tea or glass of wine, they always bring you a little bowl of something delectable to snack on. Forget peanuts or chips or pretzels. Last night it was little squares of home-made spinach and cheese quiche, and the other night at another cafe it was warm olives and little potatoes with toothpicks in them. Yum! It makes the wine taste so much better.

Also, here, wine and champagne are cheap and damn good: a kir is the same price as a Coca-Cola (3.50 euros), and a glass of vin rouge is the same price as a Lipton the vert (4 euros). Even the cheapest wine in a dive bar is inexplicably good. I wouldn’t walk into Spring Street Lounge or the Hog Pit in Manhattan and order a Cotes du Rhone or a Rose, but here, I do, and it’s delicious. Whether that’s me or the wine, I don’t know, but does it matter? I am happy.

Maybe that’s the reason for the café culture: it’s affordable for everyone to drink wine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yet, I regularly walk by plenty of people happily sipping on just cokes and coffees amidst the wine drinkers. I think part of this, too, is that Parisians certainly like their vin et bierre—I can bear witness to the fact that they drink it all day long—but the café culture supersedes day drinking or over-the-top imbibing. It is about socializing, sitting around comfortably, and lapping up life. So the reason I have yet to see a person carrying a to-go cup of coffee is simply that a staple of life here is having every beverage out somewhere, preferably with friends, even if it’s when you don’t have tons of time; in other words, taking (at least) a few minutes to enjoy something. Living in Paris, I am starting to understand the meaning of joie de vivre. And I am drinking it up!