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bistro, too. As long as it’s not high season, when it gets too crowded, I also love Barbizon in the Seine-et-Marne region south of Paris. The brasserie at Les Pléiades hotel (hotel-les-pleiades.com) is excellent, and the Boucherie de l’Angélus (64 Grande Rue, Barbizon, / +33 01 60 66 40 27) is one of the best all-purpose grocers in France—their meat is superb, they have a terrific assortment of cheese and charcuterie, a small but good selection of vegetables, and even a nicely stocked wine department. When I crave a quick trip to the seaside, I head for Le Touquet on the English Channel in Picardy. The Hôtel Westminster (westminster.fr) is a polite, affordable old-fashioned hotel, and I love the fish soup at Perard (restaurantperard.com), a popular long-running fish house there. I also never miss a meal at La Grenouillère (lagrenouillere.fr) in nearby Madeleine-sous-Montreuil—Alexandre Gauthier is one of the most interesting young chefs in France, and I can’t think about his poached lobster tail served in a smoldering juniper branch (for the perfume) without my mouth watering.

Photo Credit 29.2

Q: Do you envision expanding Hungry for Paris to include other culinary-related favorites such as pâtisseries, boulangeries, charcuteries, ice cream shops, coffee and tea salons, chocolate purveyors, bookstores, street markets, florists, and tabletop stores?

A: Since I don’t want to make Hungry for Paris too much of an armload, I am planning to expand my Web site (hungryforparis.com) to include write-ups and listings of my favorite cafés, charcuteries, tea shops, etc. In my experience, most people only go to one or two of these places—whereas they’ll go to many restaurants—so I’d rather offer this information online and let people cut and paste from my site before they travel.

Q: At the risk of becoming outdated, what are some restau-rants you’ve recently discovered that you’re particularly impressed by?

A: In Paris, I love Frenchie, La Cave Beauvau, Jadis, and Yam’Tcha, all of which I include in the updated version of Hungry for Paris. Outside of Paris, the best meal I’ve had recently was at Sa.Qua.Na in Honfleur—superb fish cookery in a really charming Zen-style dining room. During a recent trip to Istanbul, I fell head over heels for Çiya—I had no idea that the Turkish kitchen was so brilliantly diverse, and I loved some of the sour-savory tastes of the dishes I tasted there.

Q: When you’re not thinking about or writing about food in Paris, what are some of your favorite ways to spend time in the city?

A: Whenever I have a few minutes free, I head for the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or one of the city’s many other wonderful museums—and always by foot, since Paris is one of the world’s great walking cities. I love walking along the stone-paved banks of the Seine, and I love strolling through the city’s food markets, too. And there’s no better way to spend a sunny afternoon than to head for the Jardin du Luxembourg, the world’s most perfect urban park, with a good book. For me, the Jardin du Luxembourg offers the ultimate unself-conscious display of European civilization, with all of its grandeur, beauty, endearing flaws, and petty hidebound codes.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food.

—Ernest Hemingway,

A Moveable Feast

MUSEUMS, MONUMENTS,

AND GARDENS

I threw myself on a bench and began to wonder if there was anything better in the world worth doing than to sit in an alley of clipped limes smoking, thinking of Paris and of myself.

—GEORGE MOORE,

“IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS,”

Memoirs of My Dead Life

I stand for a long time on the Place de la Concorde, where there is as much sky as in a Russian rye field or a corn field in Kansas.

—NINA BERBEROVA, The Italics Are Mine

In Paris the past is always with you: you look at it, walk over it, sit on it. I had to stop myself from grabbing Gwendal’s arm as we walked up the narrow