Paris by Mouth: Ordering Coffee in Paris

It can be a struggle to decipher the coffee menu before you’ve actually had your coffee. We get it. Want to understand just what exactly you are ordering at your neighborhood café? Or fancy specialty coffee shop?

What You’ll Find at Every Corner Café:

Many places won’t even bring you a coffee menu because there is so little variation among these options:

• Café/Café Noir/Espresso/Express: A shot of espresso, often very dark and bitter

• Café Allongé: Espresso diluted with water

• Double/Double express: A double shot of espresso

• Filtré: Filtered coffee, also known as café américain. It will not be refilled, except if you go to Sugarplum Cake Shop.

• Noisette: An espresso with a spot of cream. It derives its name from the French word for hazelnut because of its color.

• Café crème/Cappuccino/Café Latte: Milky coffee, plain and simple. Your average café will rarely differentiate between any of the terms. These drinks will be espresso-based with a large proportion of milk, and the milk at your average place will be sterilized, shelf-stable, and slightly chalky. The price will be more expensive than an espresso. Cappuccinos typically cost slightly more than a café crème, will taste generally the same, and often come with cocoa powder or whipped cream on top. We’ve never seen a Parisian order one. It’s popular among visitors, and priced accordingly.

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Paris by Mouth: Beyond the Hotel Bar

“Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars,” –Ernest Hemingway

Serious cocktail snobs, beautiful bobos, eager expats, and beer geeks alike are buzzing around the octagonal bar at Le Mary Celeste on a weekday night. Bright, airy, young, and fun, the bar is the hub around which the restaurant itself is organized.

I could just as easily come for chef Haan Palcu-Chang’s globe-trotting small plates like tamarind soaked endives as I would for Le Nord Sud, a tangy-sweet drink that combines apple brandy from Normandy with dry Spanish sherry, lemon juice and a homemade grenadine leagues above the radioactive red syrup you commonly find in a Shirley Temple. There’s a freedom and flexibility to ordering international small plates that was not easy to find in Paris until recently. Combined with an equal opportunity beverage program (fine wine, beer and cocktails) and staff who are seriously professional without being too serious, and you have a triple treat on your hands. It’s a harbinger for the revitalized craft cocktail movement in Paris.

Pisco Punch at Fish Club. Photo by Catherine Down.

Craft cocktails are made from fresh ingredients, conscientiously sourced products, thoughtfully prepared and served with special attention to glassware and garnish. They demand preparation and presentation that go beyond the slapdash cocktails available at your standard bar.

In direct contrast to the expensive, old, heavy-drinking hotel bars that were the only Parisian cocktail scene for decades, and the dark and claustrophobic speakeasies that have swept the city more recently, Le Mary Celeste is light, open, casual, and in a word, accessible. To be sure, it doesn’t feel particularly Parisian. If anything, it comes off as très Brooklyn, the New York City borough where one can’t throw a rock without hitting a suspendered bartender. You could just as easily be in Cobble Hill as the Marais, but that’s just the point. Paris has finally caught up with cocktail mad cities like New York and London in terms of creating world-class cocktails by embracing worldly flavors and influences, ones that lack clearly defined geographic or ethnic boundaries.

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Huffington Post: The Kindness of Strangers

The kindness of strangers. It's overwhelming. I'm seeing it in all the photos from the marathon, and hearing about it from friends back home, and I'm feeling it here in Paris.

I special ordered some tortillas last night from a woman who makes them in her apartment building. When I was there, I was explaining how they were for a friend who I was seeing that evening, how he is from Boston and it's his birthday. I wanted to bring him something that might taste like home.

I mean, don't even get me started on the Mexican food in Boston. It's terrible. But somehow tacos taste like America and it seemed like the right thing to do.

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