Dos café con leche, s’il vous plait?

Our atrocious French/Spanish mix-up ran rampant during my recent weekend in Paris with LM. You know that special area of the brain reserved for language skills? Yeah, mine doesn’t exist. Or if it ever did - was replaced with a pretty decent knowledge of tropical Asian fruits. Yeah, I know – I lost out on this one.

Horrible lingual skills aside, LM and I got up to a fair bit of mischief over our 2 ½ days in Paris. When it came to our copious food and wine consumption (the best vin of the weekend being the cuvee fie gris from Domaine Jacky Preys & Fils) we counteracted it all with a self-directed (aka - we had no idea where the hell we were going) walking tour of the city. It was grey and chilly but it didn’t make much difference to us.

For certain, Paris provides a battle upon the senses. It’s a culture that oozes sophistication and style like ripe brie that’s been sat out to ready itself for consumption. Everywhere I turned was some scrumptious confection looking even more perfect than the one I strolled past minutes before. On a number of occasions I could hear the lulling of “How much is that doggie in the window”… only my cute little doggy was a strawberry tart, a basket of cannelés or a home-made chocolate éclair. If Hansel and Gretal made a visit to Paris they may have left a trail of breadcrumbs to find their way back to their hotel. I think I left my face imprinted on patisserie shop windows.

And I’m not ashamed; I’ll admit…possibly a bit of drool at some of the finer establishments.

Pastry stalking aside, we managed to get off of the beaten track a bit and found some great up and coming bistros and wine shops to spend a fair bit of our time. While not necessarily ready to board the Eurostar back to London Sunday afternoon – we ended our weekend with an excellent brunch at La Cantine de Quentin. However, this time around the most delicious dish served up was most certainly NOT on the menu…and it filled us up and kept is happy until nearly home 3 hours later…