Although Pink Flamingo Pizza offers many unusual and playful kinds of pizzas, La Ghandi, for example, is topped with sag paneer and baba ganoush, tahini, lemon and garlic, and La Che has marinated Cuban pork and fried plantains – we were more in the mood for a basic pizza, one that might remind us of my original home country so we ordered La Dante with tomatoes, mozzarella and fresh basil, and La Marcello, which features roquette seasoned with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and shaved parmesan. With crispy, thin crust made with organic flour and toppings from local merchants, the pizzas were pure yum. Exactly what we needed and wanted.

During the warmer months, you can order your pizza and plan to eat it outside either on the banks of the Canal Saint Martin or at a park in the Marais, depending on which location you’re eating, and they will bring the pizza to you!

Pink Flamingo will be our “go to” pizza place whenever we’re in Paris. It’s a perfect place for American expats to grab a taste of home. It really tastes more American than European, if that makes sense. (Possibly because one of the owners is from Boston?) Thankfully, there are NO pizzas that feature olives WITH seeds or an oozing, raw egg smack dab in the middle.

67 rue Bichat, 75010, 01 42 02 31 70, Métro: Jacques Bonsergent and 105 Rue Vieille du Temple, 75003, 01 42 71 28 20, Métro: Saint-Sébastian-Froissart

Everyone who comes to Paris wants to hit the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, and the Pompidou. After that, there are still lots more choices (150 in all, I’m told) but just what qualifies as numbers 4 through 10 is a pretty subjective business. Still I’m willing to bet that of all the smaller museums in town, the Musée Rodin is a favorite of many visitors. And with good reason! The work is familiar yet still interesting, the location central, and the setting divine. Go for the special exhibitions, the permanent collection, or chuck the indoors and pay the 1-euro entry for the gardens, and you will not be disappointed.

The building dates from the early 18th century and had a long history of aristocratic tenants before the Revolution, and students and artists after, including Isadora Duncan, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, and of course M. Rodin. The rooms, which are badly in need of a major updating, are filled with Rodin’s own work (finished and in draft form) as well as pieces by other artists he collected for himself. The process of creating bronzes is complicated but the curators have assembled models to explain the different steps in the process.

Today, I was really craving Pinkberry, which, as you can probably guess, doesn’t exist in France. We do, however, have a curious knockoff called Myberry. There’s one not too far from my house, and I was considering trying it out, so in a moment of boredom I logged onto the Myberry website. At first glance, looks like your standard trendy fro-yo. But aside from offering ice creams, juices, and smoothies, they also have what they call “Smoo’soups,” which is either a carrot-ginger or red pepper puree—get this—TOPPED with frozen yogurt. Yes. And on top of that you can add hazelnuts or whatever. Wow.
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Nomiya is a temporary restaurant installation designed by artist Laurent Grasso atop the Palais de Tokyo, only open till July 2010. It’s set in a glass box with sweeping views of the city and the food concept is almost like a private dinner party, except you share a communal table with like-minded foodie strangers. They only serve 12 people at a time for lunch and dinner and chef Giles Stassart and his team whip up four & five course inventive, modern French meals. With such limited seating, it’s almost impossible to get a reservation, which are only available on line and open up daily exactly for the next 30 days at 12:01AM. I didn’t have the patience to wade through this complicated, unnerving reservation process, so when browsing through the site I saw that you can go on a tour for free.

Nomiya also has cooking classes, so a friend and I came in on the tail end of a kid’s baking class, where they were putting the finishing touches on some yummy chocolate concoction. We climbed the stairs up to the restaurant and before we even entered, we were blown away by the views. It was dusk, so the light was magical. Once inside, the dramatic purple, blue, and pink lighting lit the view in such a romatic way.  Of course the Eiffel Tower took center stage as it always does but the amazing thing was the reflection bouncing off the other side of the window made it look like it was placed in a different spot, like an optical illusion. Try and tell which ones are actually the tower and which are reflections.

13 Ave. du President Wilson, 75016, Metro: Iena, reservations

As one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Paris takes design very seriously. This attitude manifests itself in the boldness of its many architectural landmarks, as well as day-to-day things, such as the Métro or the ubiquitous newstands on the sidewalk. It’s easy to take for granted that someone, at some time, put a lot of thought into what we see before buying a newspaper or getting on the subway. In recent years one of those people has been Patrick Jouin, the man responsible for the look of Velib stations and the hi-tech public toilets throughout the city. These are just two of the 20 design projects from Jouin’s design firm being highlighted at the George Pompidou Centre until 24 May.

The exhibition is really more of a presentation: a projector and a mock stage create the impressive (albeit obvious) illusion that Patrick Jouin is right there, talking about his work. The presentation is complemented by a display on the surrounding walls, featuring preliminary sketches, photographs, diagrams and material samples from each of the 20 designs discussed in the presentation.
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After years of complaining about the lack of pancakes in France, I’m at it again but this time to moan about pancakes attempting to infiltrate the palates of French people all across the Hexagon. I have mixed feelings about this, obviously.

These were part of a freebie bag handed out from a road toll booth leaving Paris. It looks like the packaged brioche company, Pasquier, is testing out a revolutionary new product: pancakes.

To be fair, these pancakes were not horrible, but I wish they had been giving out free wine.

All great cities have one thing in common: once you have visited their renowned monuments, museums and historic sites, there remains much to explore.  And so it goes with Paris.

After you have seen every room in the Louvre and every impressionist masterpiece in the Musée d’Orsay, there is still le Centre Pompidou, l’Orangerie, le Musée Rodin, le Musée Picasso — and these are the well-known museums.

There are plenty of unknown museums, too, places that even some Parisians haven’t heard of or visited. These overlooked cultural institutions are never crowded, even on Saturday afternoons, and on weekday afternoons they can be downright deserted.  I love that.

The photo above was taken at le Musée des Arts et Métiers at the end of a weekday afternoon and, as you can see, I nearly had Clément Adler’s bat-inspired flying machine ”Avion III” to myself.  L’avion is one of the museum’s gems, along with a copy of Foucault’s pendulum, which hangs in the adjacent Saint-Martin-des-Champs church.

Atelier les Quatres is a studio/shop consisting of four young, talented textile designers creating fun and funky prints, designs and illustrations for pillows, napkins, dishtowels as well as T-shirts, baby clothes, canvas bags and one-off ideas like masks and found ceramics. The studio includes Eve-Marie Bousquet, Rachel Pelquin, elsako, and Hélène Georget, and on Saturdays they open their doors to the public to see what they are making and of course, to shop. They all work independently but a couple of them collaborate on other project. Most of the work is made in a limited edition and all of it by hand. It is ambitious yet fresh and fun. It seems they work hard but don’t take things too seriously. Bright colors, birds and other animals, sunglasses are silkscreened onto their respective objects giving them a new life and attitude.

36, rue du Fer à Moulin, 75005

Just next to Madonna in Paris is this adorable rendition of Einstein, carrying a sign, “Love is the answer.”

The Louis Hachette Prize 2009 was awarded last week to the journalist François de Labarre and the photographer Enrico Dagnino for the reporting distributed by Paris Match, “Immigrants: rêve brisé,” (”Immigrants: Broken Dreams”) taken on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa in Italy. This investigation, a unique proof of the Human Rights violation by the Italian state, has alerted the European Union and the United Nations. The reporting pictures have been widely broadcasted in European press: la Repubblica, Die Zeit, Afrique Magazine, l’Illustré, il Corriere della serra… and have been screened at the photojournalism festival Visa pour l’Image 2009. In 26 years, the jury has only rewarded three photographers with this prize, generally reserved to written press journalists: in 1990 to Jacques Langevin for his photographic reporting Sous les balles à Pékin; in 1998 to Hocine for his picture of the Algerian woman, and this year to Enrico Dagnino.