When researching the French silent film star Max Linder I was surprised to discover that the studio in which he made most of his films was still standing. At the earliest opportunity I headed out there to investigate. The story of the studios goes back to 1904, when Charles Pathé, in competition with Georges Méliès and [...]
Café Pinson is the newest savvy vegetarian restaurant in Paris. The owners, Damien Richardot, a successful restaurant owner with three popular restaurants in Paris, and Agathe Audouze, who was formerly in the fashion and cosmetic marketing business and went on to study naturopathy, decided to go partners and to create an organic, vegetarian restaurant that [...]
Just for fun: Montmartre by night
The ballooning craze burst onto the scene on June 5, 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, launched the world’s first successful hot-air balloon. There was no one on board, but the public was entranced. A new word entered the French vocabulary: montgolfier, meaning a hot-air balloon. Public interest grew even more feverish on October [...]
Some Italian friends, designers, have been here this past week to visit two big Paris trade fairs, Bijorhca for jewelry (including costume jewelry) and Maison et Objet for home design. It was bad luck for the fairs that they coincided with Paris’s biggest snowfall in years. The city of Paris cannot deal at all with [...]
The Figaro newspaper has a beautiful gallery of images taken during this past week’s snowfall in Paris. Enjoy (Hat tip to Prete-Moi Paris.)
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is hosting L’Art en Guerre (Art at War), an exposition about the art created in France during WWII and the artists who managed to survive and even thrive during the Nazi Occupation that labeled many of them as “degenerates.” More than 400 works of art by over 100 artists, some [...]
Frédérique and I were heading to grab a drink the other night for some quick FaceTime. We met at République as it was convenient foot us both. But I didn’t want to go anywhere on the Place de la République which is mostly populated by chain restaurants, cafés and fast food joints. So we walked literally a [...]
Don’t rely on your guidebooks (print or online) unless they were updated since January 1st, when new prices went into effect in France for everything from stamps and metro tickets to electricity and beer. Priority mail stamps are now €0.63, Lettre Vert stamps are €0.58, a carnet of ten Metro tickets costs €13.30 (old T-tickets [...]
For many people in Paris, owning a car is neither necessary nor desirable. Transit service is good and parking is difficult. But that means that when your groceries include, say, containers of milk or orange juice, bottles of wine or San Pellegrino (San Pé to the Parisians), cans of soup or cassoulet, or jars of [...]
