Cheap eats in Paris: dining in the Japanese quarter for under €10

by Amy Chen on

Eating well in Paris isn’t hard to do, but it can easily cost more than you originally budgeted. After a week of dining on foie gras, duck, and cheese plates, I was ready for something simple — and cheap.

Less than a five-minute walk from the Louvre, the Japanese quarter is just that kind of place. With most of the ramen houses centered on rue Sainte-Anne in the area between Palais Royal and Opéra Garnier, the long lines outside the restaurants seem to be a reflection of the tiny eating spaces as well as the universal appeal of affordable meals.

I first heard about the Japanese quarter by following the culinary adventures of ex-pat food blogger Meg Zimbeck, who recently started the website www.parisbymouth.com. Though I was originally looking for restaurants that were actually open on Sunday, I ended up checking out the neighborhood on a Friday and Saturday night. By 9 p.m., most of the shops had already closed, but the lines outside the restaurants were just beginning to ramp up. Here are two places where I had dinner for well under €10.

Naniwa-ya (11 rue Sainte-Anne)
This tiny space has six tables and a bar, where I sat with a view of the chefs preparing the noodles. When I asked a man sitting to my right for tips on what to order, he was nice enough to tell me that the noodles tasted better than the donburi. Seeing that he had completely emptied his bowl of noodles, I followed his cue and ordered the ramen. Before the man left the restaurant, he told me to help myself to the tea, which was stationed near the door. For a mere €6.50 ($8.20), I was content with the noodles, hard-boiled egg, slices of pork, and miso broth. As you can tell from my bowl, I wasn’t disappointed. I wanted to try more of the menu, but was too stuffed to fit in anything else.

Hokkaido (14 rue Chabanais)
In this deceptively small restaurant, a narrow staircase took me downstairs to the overflow room, which was painted white with an arched ceiling. After asking my server which ramen dish was the most popular, I happily slurped up the Champon Ramen. At €8.30 (about $10.50), this version had a little more substance than the one I’d tasted the night before at Naniwa-ya: one-inch strips of pork, Napa cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, and just the right amount of sesame seeds.

Unfortunately, by the time I’d inhaled the bowl of noodles and downed most of the soup, I once again wasn’t hungry enough to be able to sample anything else — that’s one of the drawbacks of dining solo; it’s much harder to eat your way through a menu. Looks like I’ll just have to go back on my next trip.

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Benjamin Franklin, Traveler

by Andrew Evans on

“Traveling is one way of lengthening life,” remarked Benjamin Franklin, after returning from his very first visit to France. The gentleman from Pennsylvania had only gone for two weeks but felt that his time in Paris was so pleasant and full that it felt like six months had passed. Good travel should feel that way.

For Benjamin Franklin, Paris was “like a pleasing dream from which I was sorry to be awakened by finding myself again at London”. He thought England “a petty island” filled with poverty and always “wet” but with far more “sensible, virtuous, and elegant minds” than back home. As for company, he preferred the French–“I know not which are most rapacious, the English or the French, but the latter have, with their knavery, the most politeness.” Such politeness was not returned by Franklin, who described the Palace of Versailles as ill-kept and shabby: “The fountains don’t work.”

Can you tell that Benjamin Franklin was just a little bit opinionated? Thankfully, that’s one American value that’s survived. He was also a polyglot who studied Italian, French, Spanish, and German. Unfortunately, that’s one American value that has not survived.

The young Ben Franklin got his start traveling at age 17 when he quit his dead end job and ran away to New York City, setting a precedent for generations of Americans to come (e.g. Madonna). This led to a kind of study abroad/apprenticeship that sent him on his first real voyage–to London. Travel was slower back then, and he was already 20 years old when he finally made the return leg home, describing, “On the left hand appears the coast of France at a distance, and on the right is the town and castle of Dover, with the green hills and chalky cliffs of England.”

He fought boredom on the long sea journey by reading, having long conversations, playing checkers or cards, and drinking lots. He witnessed his first solar eclipse and saw an on-board kitchen hand get whipped for using too much flour in the dessert. He bet his travel companions a “bowl of punch” (the 18th century equivalent to a round of beers) that they would make it back to Philadelphia by a certain date . . . and he lost. When one of Ben’s fellow passengers was caught cheating at cards, the others punished him by tying a rope around his waist, hoisting him up and letting him hang there for “a quarter of an hour.”

From that point onward, Benjamin Franklin was a traveler, running up and down through the American colonies and crisscrossing the Atlantic at least a dozen times. In fact, he was probably the most well-traveled American politician in his lifetime–he admitted being accustomed to at least one journey per year, and that the one year he missed it, “I believe it hurt me.”

The founding father believed adamantly that travel improved his health and his spirits, despite the rough conditions of the times. As United States postmaster, he traveled some 1,600 miles by horse, carriage and foot, inspecting post offices from southern Virginia to far off New England. He fell off his horse, twice–an injury that lingered through his lifetime. On his way to Canada (on the eve of the American Revolution), he was delayed by unthawed ice and the April snows of upstate New York. In England and France, he usually traveled by post-chaise, a light carriage where the driver rode on the horse that pulled the cart. (Talk about turbulence.)

Sometimes, he complained. Scotland’s rain exhausted him: “Through storms and floods I arrived here on Saturday night, late, and was lodged miserably in an inn.” But like a good traveler, he made light of a scary situation with sarcasm: “The carriage was a miserable one, with tired horses, the evening dark, scarce a traveler but ourselves on the road; and, to make it more comfortable, the driver stopped near a wood we were to pass through to tell us that a gang of eighteen robbers infested that wood who but two weeks ago had murdered some travelers on that very spot.”

As a traveler, he was highly observant–he noted that traffic was worse in London than in Paris, that Americans speak much louder to people who don’t speak English (as if they were deaf), that travelers caught colds “from one another when shut up together in coaches, breathing each other’s transpiration”, that a certain Atlantic current (the Gulf Stream) made sailing in it much quicker, and that England was very, very expensive (from London he wrote to his wife: “My expenses here amaze me.”)

Franklin was fascinated by all he witnessed in his travels, from the strange kinds of seaweed that he scooped up from the middle of the ocean to the way French ladies applied their rouge. He liked Scottish songs and collected the sheet music like newly-released CDs, singing them alongside his daughter. As souvenirs, Benjamin bought books-he had a vast collection that he had bought up in Germany, Holland and France; books that “contained knowledge that may hereafter be useful to America.” As a gift to his foreign hosts, he bestowed packets of dried apples from America.

Abroad, Ben Franklin was a serious foodie, placing more value on local cuisine than on boring historical monuments. He wrote, “If I could find in any Italian travels a recipe for making Parmesan cheese it would give me more satisfaction than a transcript of any inscription from any old stone whatever.” As Ambassador, he kept a private wine cellar in France, where a servant counted exactly 1,203 bottles–more red Bordeaux, less Burgundy, and lots of sparkling French whites.

Ben Franklin enjoyed the anonymity of travel–that a man or woman could be liberated from cultural obligations and enjoy the outsider’s freedom. After the very unpopular Stamp Act passed in 1765, Franklin wrote a fairly cheeky, pro-American letter to a London newspaper, simply signing his name, “A Traveller”. As a diplomat, he respected dialogue and abhorred violence. He called the Boston Tea Party “an act of violent injustice”.

In 1776, after America was declared independent of Great Britain, Benjamin Franklin was dispatched to Paris as “Minister to France”. He lived in Europe for the next eight and a half years, forging important treaties, raising money for the newborn United States, and doing the mundane work of an ambassador (such as issuing a passport for the great explorer Captain Cook should he need to pass through a blockade of armed American ships).

As an early American abroad, Benjamin Franklin felt it was his duty to sell America to the rest of the world. He spoke of American corn that “delights the eye of every observing traveler” and he threw countless dinner parties where the rugged new American philosophies were discussed. On July 4th, 1778, Franklin celebrated the anniversary of Declaration of Independence by inviting his frenemy John Adams around for dinner to his French home, along with 50 French friends. The table was abundant with American flags.

Franklin was famous in France–very famous. There was a time when medallions and engraving of Franklin’s bust were upon every mantelpiece and on every snuffbox in Paris. He was inducted into several private clubs and academic societies and invited to witness the great inventions of the day.

In 1783, Franklin saw the first flight of a hydrogen balloon on the Champ de Mars in Paris. He invested his own money for a manned balloon flight a little later, and was the very first recipient of a piece of airmail when American loyalist John Jeffries carried a letter to him across the English Channel by balloon. The concept of air amazed Franklin and he dreamt of his own private balloon that could carry him from place to place without tiring his legs.

Too often, today’s politicians feel the need to exhume and abuse our poor Founding Fathers in order to promote their own political agenda. Pundits preach “patriotism” while forgetting the broad spectrum of early patriots and their differing lives and opinions. (For the record, Benjamin Franklin was the only founding father who signed all four principal documents supporting American Independence: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Alliance with France, and the United States Constitution. Also, John Adams thoroughly disliked Ben Franklin, finding him too well-liked to be liked).

Whatever one’s political persuasion, if we rely on Benjamin Franklin’s example than one value is certain: a patriot is someone who travels and broadens their minds through travel.

Got that? Real patriots travel. How appropriate then, that the face of our most well-traveled founding father graces our $100 bill, a denomination used more often by Americans traveling abroad.

When Franklin finally left France, he traveled in a private litter and a caravan large enough to carry all 128 pieces of his checked luggage. Somewhere in his carry on bags he also carried his farewell gift from King Louis XVI–a “modest” set of jewelry containing 408 diamonds.

In his journal, Franklin cheerfully reports that on this final voyage back to America, he was the only person not to get seasick.

(Quotes taken from Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, 1791)


Accor Hotels launches online game; winner wins trip to Europe

by Melanie Nayer on

We love a good game of hide and seek at Gadling, so when we heard about Accor Hotels’ new online game called “Around the World Photo Hunt” we had to investigate further. Seems the social media managers at the hotel are working to build brand awareness in North America by launching an online game where players win points by spotting the differences on two seemingly identical photos from a selection of Accor Hotels’ properties located around the world.

The grand prize winner will receive a 12-night European vacation for two adults to Paris, Berlin and Barcelona. Accor Hotels partnered with US Airways and Rail Europe to co-sponsor the 12-night European vacation that includes roundtrip airfare, first class train tickets, luxury Accor Hotel accommodations and daily breakfast.

Don’t fret game-goers, other prizes will be handed out including a SoBed™ package, digital cameras, flat screen TVs, DVD Home Theaters, and more. In addition, a $50 MasterCard gift card will be awarded randomly to one lucky player every day until July 23rd.

The online game will run from June 24th – July 23rd.

Letter from France: A time tunnel named Cluny

by David Downie on
Say “Cluny” and most people do not think cowled monks, dunce-cap towers or “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries. They think George Clooney.

Who knows, a thousand years ago Clooney’s ancestors may have strayed north from a monastic cradle in Cluny. Then as now this picturesque town of 5,000 was cupped by green hills at the extreme southern end of Burgundy, a pleasing location. Clooney’s face currently stares out from walls and billboards at mud-clotted carrots and goat’s-milk cheeses: Until recently Up in the Air was playing at Cluny’s only movie theater, on the main market square. Sip an espresso at crusty Chez Sissi or trendy La Nation and you’ll hear natives rolling their Rs with trademark Burgundian accents, pronouncing the actor’s name “GeoRges KloonAye.”

The Clunisois make no claims to patrimony: Clooney isn’t a native. Burgundy is la France profonde-deep, rural France. Family roots run deeper than those of the most venerable grapevines. Never mind that Cluny was once a cosmopolitan city, overrun by English monks, Spaniards, Italians and others, many affiliated with Cluny’s international network of benedictine abbeys. That was a long time ago.

Today’s Cluny is a welcoming, lively medieval town, a showcase of the Romanesque. “Lively” and “medieval” are not necessarily at odds with each other. This year Cluny is experiencing more action than it has for a millennium. To the tune of $30 million, parts of the abbey have been renovated, sidewalks and streets have been torn up and beautified. The pall of dust has barely settled in the leafy squares and alleyways. The last touches were applied this month to a thorough clean up and “relookage,” as some locals are apt to say.

Throughout 2010 Cluny is hosting dozens of events, from a street festival with actors in period costume, to exhibitions, plays and concerts, all to celebrate the 1,100th anniversary of the founding in 910 AD of its abbey, once more famous than even George Clooney.

For centuries Cluny’s tower-studded, walled marvel of ecclesiastical architecture, an orgy of archways, vaults and carved capitals, was the largest and richest monastic complex in Christendom. You wouldn’t guess it by the looks of the place today. Just one part of one of the abbey’s soaring transepts still stands, its freshly repaved floors replacing the dusty beaten earth that was so effective at summoning ghosts. A vaulted cellar, topped by a granary with a stunning, ribbed ceiling, and a cloister, rebuilt in the 1700s, are also left, plus a chapel, castellated walls, and three impressive watchtowers.

But in its heyday 900 years ago the abbey church alone was the size of a shopping mall. In the 1790s righteous French Revolutionaries shut down what was already decrepit and corrupt. Ninety percent of the stonework was quarried in the 1820s, when Cluny entered a slumber lasting almost two centuries.

The slumber is over, at least officially. Jackhammers lead you past art galleries and boutiques selling hand-woven baskets, organic wine and honey, waxed antiques, pottery or glinting handcrafted knick-knacks. Contrasts abound. Archeological excavations have revealed several huge column bases and the yard-thick walls of the 400-foot-long church. The floor plan of the complex has been mapped out on panels and traced on the ground. As you walk along it you can’t help feeling dizzy. Saints, potentates and Europe’s movers-and-shakers once paced here. Carved lintels, cornices, pillars and other architectural features reused in other buildings over the years are plain to see, dotted around town.

They are also on display in the handsome cellar and salons of the Musée Ochier, a Renaissance palace poised on a hill overlooking the abbey’s entrance. Here you buy your tickets. You can spend hours peering at a scale model of Cluny 900 years ago, and take a virtual tour of the abbey by watching a short documentary. It recreates the interiors with startling fidelity. Inside the abbey itself, another virtual visit, with cutting-edge 3D imaging and wrap-around sound, whisks you down the transepts and nave. But there’s no denying that most of the church is gone, not a single monk remains, and the atmosphere today is anything but monastic.

The real draw is outside. Cluny’s 200 or so houses with sculpted Romanesque façades, some 1,000 years old, slump on curving, cobbled streets. Corkscrew staircases hide behind heavy oaken doors. Gothic spires and the mullioned windows of the Renaissance crop up amid a jumble that climbs to a low ridge. From several panoramic spots you can see that the town’s layout hasn’t changed much. Many streets are now pedestrianized and gentrified, with their predictable, shoulder-to-shoulder shops stuffed with artisanal everything. Dentist-office music is piped in. Squint out of earshot and you can almost imagine the days of old, and wonder how glorious they were.

The abbey of Cluny was the right arm of the Vatican, managed by a succession of enterprising abbots, several of them subsequently sainted or made pope. Saint Mayeul (948-994) handed over to Saint Odilon (994-1049). Saint Hugues outdid his predecessors by holding on for 60 years, from 1049 to 1109. At its peak in 1109, Cluny controlled over 1,100 dependent monasteries. The Musée de Cluny in Paris, once a Roman bathhouse and now home to the “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestry series, was the abbey’s city residence. Ten thousand monks toiled like slaves for Cluny. They made, among other things, excellent wine. It was they who perfected winemaking in France.

There are no wineries in Cluny today, but at the Cellier de l’Abbaye, one of Southern Burgundy’s best-stocked bottle shops, I found excellent samples of the monk’s most lasting heritage, and also tasted the region’s best cheeses.

In Cluny as elsewhere in France, the church of Rome is no longer a power to reckon with. But one of the area’s industries remains spiritual tourism: questers flock to Cluny and the ecumenical community at Taizé, a village ten miles north. Hitchhikers line the two-lane road linking the sites. Give them a ride and you’ll learn that most at Taizé are young, penurious Eastern Europeans. Nearly all of them travel with guitars, beads and crosses.

Most Roman Catholic pilgrims, on the other hand, are French. They arrive in Cluny by private car, tour bus or on foot. Hiker-pilgrims often wear scallop shells symbolizing Saint James. The shells sway and click against the pilgrims’ burnished staffs as they make their way up Cluny’s main street. The Way of Saint James, the famed medieval pilgrimage route, runs through town and is now a paean to Mammon.

Climb the creaking staircase of the Tour des Fromages, a stone watchtower that houses the city tourism office, and glance down at the peaky, red tile roofs. In the streets below you might glimpse a three-cornered hat perched atop the head of a caped quester. Like other visitors, those seeking enlightenment, inspiration, succor and the company of kindred spirits open their beggar’s purses, filling the local coffers.

Another mainstay is the Ecole Normale Superieure d’Arts et Métiers, a polytechnical university, attended by budding engineers. They sometimes appear, bent by mountains of antiquated books and contemporary electronic communications equipment. The campus is inside the abbey. It makes Cluny not only France’s smallest university city. The students also add a touch of youthful if quiet life year-round.

The other, bigger cash-earners hereabouts are cattle and horse-breeding. Sniff the air and you’ll get the drift soon enough. The region’s indigenous white Charolais cattle, flanked by Arabian horses from the National Stud farm, also inside the abbey compound, graze in pastures within hailing distance of Cluny’s shopping streets.

Circle the abbey’s forbidding perimeter walls, following your nose. Near the post office you’ll find the newest of several equestrian rings and tracks. Horses trot, jump, race or parade, and do all the things that horses do, among them pulling an antique omnibus carriage. It’s Cluny’s answer to the elephant train. There are so many horses here that an equestrian level-crossing and equestrian stop light have been added on the main road flanking the equestrian ring. When the horse shows are on, traffic backs up-a mix of hard-driven semis and tractors, gleaming BMWs and SUVs. The horses clomp by, then dash into the fields bordering the old railway tracks, now a hiking and biking path, and a rushing stream. The stream once acted as Cluny’s natural moat.

Farther out of town the vineyards of the Maconnais stipple tuck ‘n’ roll hills, their summits cloaked by dark fir forests. Remarkably handsome, these hills are now spawning increasing numbers of tract homes for commuters, and luxurious villas for well-off retirees, horse-breeders, and foreigners with vacation properties.

A few hundred yards beyond the old railway tracks, the TGV high-speed train from Paris swooshes past like digital clockwork, skirting town innocuously. It stops 10 miles south at Macon-Loché station. Some residents, especially the horsey set, commute from their pastoral enclave at Cluny to the City of Light, a 90-minute, painlessly postmodern ride.

If they’re not nurturing thoroughbreds, making wine, producing forestry products or catering to pilgrims, most other residents work in the government offices of Macon, Lyon or Nevers, the main cities within a doable drive.

Clearly, though partly preserved in historic amber, Cluny is neither isolated nor undiscovered. Like so many provincial French towns, it walks a tight-rope between tradition and modernity. The contrasts often add to the allure, though not always: if removed tomorrow, the sprawling supermarkets and parking lots edging town, and the piped-in music around the abbey, would not be missed by most old-timers.

It’s not that people here are anti-modern. But the supermarkets and the lack of easy parking in the center of town have made life difficult for many normal businesses-grocery stores, shoe shops, appliance and hardware stores.

Ultra-modern, the TGV is a life-line, and few complain about it. The TGV brought me to Cluny for the first time over 20 years ago. Back then, when walking or driving up the pitted asphalt of Cluny’s main street, you felt as if you were entering Sleeping Beauty’s castle. You also sensed it couldn’t and possibly shouldn’t last. To paraphrase Giuseppe di Lampedusa in The Leopard, you knew that if things were to remain the same, everything would have to change. Historic landmarks were crumbling, locals were moving out, and widespread bankruptcy loomed.

Cluny is compromise incarnate. A grassy, landscaped parking lot stands where the cattle market used to be. Instead of light industrial plants shoehorned into Romanesque buildings, you now get the car-free cobbles, virtual reality displays, and quaint sellers of delightful if unnecessary items for tourists and starry-eyed pilgrims. Some of the latter seem more interested in the costume drama than the spiritual quest.

How different things were 1,000 years ago, when Cluny’s sainted abbots grew fat by exploiting monkish drudges, is a question worth asking. Today’s democratic populism would have been unimaginable. Would Mayeul, Odilon and Hugues have approved of the sublime chocolates and pastries served to one and all at Germain, on the main drag? Or the sinfully sumptuous food at Hotel de Bourgogne, built atop the demolished abbey’s nave? Their ghosts are distinctly absent in Cluny today, and perhaps that’s for the best.

[Photos, from top: Hellolapomme; Olivier Bruchez; wwhyte1968; Olivier Bruchez; PhillipC]

*****
An American author and journalist based in Paris, for the last 25 years David Downie has been writing about European culture, food and travel for magazines and newspapers worldwide. His nonfiction books include Enchanted Liguria, Cooking the Roman Way, The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam, and three critically acclaimed volumes of travel, food and wine in the Terroir Guides series: Food Wine the Italian Riviera & Genoa, Food Wine Rome, and Food Wine Burgundy. Downie’s travel memoir Paris, Paris: Journeys into the Heart and Soul of the City of Light is being reiussed in 2011 by Broadway Books. His latest books are Paris City of Night, a classic thriller set in Paris, and Quiet Corners of Rome (to be published in spring 2011). His website is www.davidddownie.com

Airport survey reveals huge trade in bushmeat

by Sean McLachlan on

Researchers studying customs seizures at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris have discovered that smuggling of illegal meat is a huge problem.

Up to 270 tons of illegal meat may be coming into Europe from Africa every year. The study made its estimate based on customs searches over a 17 day period involving 134 passengers from 14 African countries. Nine people were caught with bushmeat weighing a total of 188 kilos (414 lbs). The defendants had a variety of dead animals in their bags, including primates, crocodiles, and rodents. Some were protected species.

Bushmeat, the common term for animals hunted in the African countryside for food, makes up to 80% of protein and fat in the diet of rural Africans. Much of the hunting is for rodents and deer that aren’t endangered, but this practice has also led to some species being pushed onto the endangered species list or becoming locally extinct. Importing bushmeat is illegal in Europe, but the taste for exotic foods, or nostalgia for good home cooking, has led to a major trade in wild animals.

While it’s not a headline grabber like discovering a shipment of human heads, officials say bushmeat smuggling poses a health risk and contributes to wildlife extinction.

Photo courtesy Amcaja via Wikimedia Commons.