Eating in France
some tips
1) In Nice, if looking for quality food, avoid
the places near the Promenade De Anglais, unless you have a specific
recommendation from someone you trust
2) In
Paris, avoid any place offering a 10 Euro menu. It is a tourist joint that
doesn't think you know better
3) Don't eat
dinner in the old town of Eze. You have three very expensive choices, none of
which are worth it.
4) Don't start doing the
conversions between Euros and Dollars for the food you are eating because you
will give yourself a coronary.
5) If you are
eating in a decent restaurant, a carafe of their house wine is going to be much
higher quality than you would guess and it will be substantially cheaper than a
demi-bouteille or a demi-litre of a wine off of their wine list. In a similar
vein, learn how to order a carafe of water unless you enjoy paying for bottles
of expensive mineral water everywhere
6) If
you are going for Soca in the Cours Selaya in Nice, do it early. It is closed
when the rest of the flower market is packing up, not when lunchtime is
over.
7) If you are having a hard time
finding a good place to eat, hit up a boulangerie, a charcruterie and a
légumerie instead; you'll be happier.
8)
Order in French even if you aren't very good at it. Outside of Paris, they will
appreciate it and will help with your pronunciation and grammar. In Paris, they
will just switch to English, but I think that they still appreciate the
effort
9) French people eat late. This can
work to your advantage, especially in Paris where the good restaurants fill up
and long waits are common. We usually ate around 7:30 when most of the
restaurants were just opening. After dinner we would walk around and if we
noticed a place that was packed with locals (you can tell by the (lack of)
overall volume and (large) amount of smoking) we'd head there the next
night.
10) If you know where you want to eat,
make reservations. It will guarantee your spot and will get you better
service
11) In Paris, they now have no
smoking sections, but they are filled with Americans and are not in any way
separated from the smoking sections. Actually, in most of the restaurants we ate
in, they would create a non-smoking section the first time it was requested. It
would be in the worst spot in the restaurant and would still have clouds of
cigarette smoke billowing over it. Better just to not stress over it: look for a
table with its neighbor tables having no or very few butts in the ashtrays and
sit there.
Posted: Sun - May 7, 2006 at 11:34 AM
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