dine•o•crat

"Nicole Kidman is next door, vous l'avez vue ?" asked our waitress after we sat down at Les Bouquinistes. My dining companions and I looked outside, into the inscrutable and slightly drizzly evening. The sudden appearance of a swarm of paparazzi, circling the building like giant fireflies, gave credence to her claim. "Really?" I wanted to ask. "Did she bring her career with her? Because she seems to have left it somewhere equally hard to spot." Besides, we had already found our star that night and it was food. Les Bouquinistes , Ze Kitchen Galerie 's neighbor, is breathtaking at night. The Seine is right in front, lit up and glorious, Notre Dame is in the distance overseeing the night's activities on the Left Bank. It was Fashion Week in Paris, which made the appearance of a celebrity logical, though her appearance in the restaurant next door was a mystery worthy of Poirot. Les Bouquinistes is Guy Savoy's more "affordable" o...

Ze Kitchen Galerie , as well as Les Bouquinistes to which it is practically joined at the hip in more ways than one, is situated around the Rive gauche or Left Bank of the River Seine in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. In the vicinity, you'll find a few of the famous bouquinistes—the booksellers, not the restaurant—along the Quai des Grands Augustins hawking their bookwares quietly. Lovers of French literature and history, as well as of French language in general, would do well to mark this as a stop, for it's a place to find relatively cheap used books that may be hard to get in a non-francophone country. I was even able to buy a book of Edgar Allan Poe short stories translated to French by Baudelaire. Not bad for 3€! Not very far is the famous Notre Dame Cathedral, which emits its mournful bell sound regularly. The closest Métro stop is St. Michel–Notre Dame a mere couple of blocks away. A city known for its variety of arts, Paris is naturally home to many a...