Great meals and relaxed dining remain a focus in France

Food and eating in France has changed.

My two-week visit in mid-September followed the Olympic Games, which attracted more than 11 million international visitors to Paris. Maybe the invasion of burgers, cheeseburgers and pizza I saw on that city’s menus is a result of that. I don’t remember seeing them in 2019.

Fortunately, croissants and crepes, along with the camaraderie of long and leisurely outdoor meals on terraces, remain mainstays in France. Pastry shops, seemingly on every corner, still fill their windows with elaborate desserts.

My daughter Sascha Nelson and I took a French pastry cooking class in Paris to learn more about the beautiful desserts we saw everywhere. La Cuisine, run by Chicago native Jane Bertch, teaches classes in English and is as much about French culture as it is about making French food. We both devoured Jane’s recent book ‘The French Ingredient’ and her monthly Bonjour From Paris newsletter before our trip.

The school is located along the River Seine, given the tall construction cranes working to restore the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral for its reopening on December 8, after the tragic fire of 2019.

One of the first things we learned in La Cuisine class is that French ingredients are so different from the ingredients we get in America that we cannot accurately reproduce many French pastries at home. Butter in France contains much more butterfat, and their all-purpose flour, for example, is more similar to our cake flour. But the desserts we made in class were amazing.

Sascha made it her mission to bring French butter back from France, and despite the obvious difficulties, she was successful. Our La Cuisine instructor provided assistance with a list of Parisian resources for the ingredients we wanted to take home.

The butter department at La Grande Epicerie is absolutely huge and the store will shrink-wrap purchases for travel. We had already brought packets of gel from home to keep my medicine cold. So we asked our hotel to refreeze them so we could take French butter home with us.

La Grande Epicerie de Paris has tens of thousands of great foods besides butter, including cheeses, pastries and caviar, along with 13 counter-style restaurants in special sections dedicated to the things found there. It’s a great place to stock up on picnics in Paris and take unusual things home with you.

The carbonnade flamande we enjoyed early in our visit to Lille is not as difficult to reproduce at home as baked desserts. It is a stew in which the beef is marinated in beer and covered with a mustard-rubbed slice of gingerbread during baking. The difficult to imagine combinations of ingredients result in an unusual and delicious dish.

We came to Lille for the Braderie, an annual 48-hour flea market – the largest and one of the oldest in Europe.

How we overcame mobility problems in France after the Olympics

Because it is close to France’s border with Belgium, Belgian dishes populate Lille’s menus, and beer is more often served than wine.

The mussels and fries, called moules et frites, can be found everywhere, and during Braderie the growing piles of discarded mussel shells outside restaurants showcase the most popular places to eat.

When I was in Lille I also enjoyed Welsh, a cheese dish with ham and toast points, similar to Welsh rarebit. The meals were hearty and cheap.

With a few exceptions, our meals in Paris averaged 60 to 80 euros for the two of us, including wine and tip – included on a check that is only presented when asked. The French consider the meal sacred and believe in a leisurely meal that is meant to be enjoyed.

Le Moulin de la Galette, housed in a former mill atop a hill near the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Montmartre, was especially memorable among restaurants. It was a favorite of the Impressionists when it was a guinguette wine bar in the late 19th century and a setting for works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and other artists of the time.

Our patio table was surrounded by greenery under the sails of the mill itself, and our coq au vin and linguine dinners were delicious. Sascha’s chocolate soufflé dessert – which was presented to her in a gigantic bowl containing many liters of soufflé – got attention from the people at neighboring tables. Our server scooped it onto her plate with a large ladle and invited her to “say ‘when.'” It was served for me with an extra spoon.

Beefbar Paris was at the top of Sascha’s wish list in Paris, and friends told me about it too, so we emailed for a reservation. I’m not really a beef eater and usually prefer independent restaurants, but my interest was piqued when I heard that owner Riccardo Giraudi sources the world’s best available beef for his Beefbar restaurants in Europe, Asia and America. Since he opened the first Beefbar in Monaco, he has received many accolades, prizes and a lot of press.

The restaurant did not disappoint.

As we were led into the dining room, we stopped to gaze at its graceful beauty. Once the famous but long-closed restaurant La Fermette Marbeuf, its Art Nouveau elegance was discovered beneath plain walls during its 2019 transformation into the Beefbar.

To give us a taste of the many ways the meat is served as street food with iconic sides, the staff suggested a meal with tacos made from Kobe beef and the signature mashed potatoes.

Since then, Sascha has been putting her potatoes through a ricer and whipping them with full cream and real French butter, to the delight of family and dinner guests.

For our last dinner in Paris we chose fondue, one of my daughter’s specialties back home in Maryland. Le Chalet Savoyard’s fondue was a mixture of melted cheeses with pieces of bread and potatoes for dipping. I prefer Sascha’s fondue, with pieces of apple, broccoli and dried sausage among the dipping ingredients. I should have ordered a Reblochen fondue, because that raw milk soft cheese is not available in the United States.

But our table neighbors in Savoyard had Raclette, a cheese dish I had eaten in Switzerland, and they let me take pictures if I asked.

The easy-melting Raclette cheese, which is available in the US, is melted with a heating device brought to the table. The melted cheese is scraped onto a plate for dipping with an assortment of vegetables.

Maybe next time I’ll have it.