Paris

It was hard not to take it personally.

The moment my mother and I stumbled off the plane onto Parisian soil this past June, the city was getting away from itself in a most unusual way.

Too-close-for-comfort terrorism alerts were being issued to Americans traveling to France. Torrential and relentless downpours of rain were pummeling the streets. The Seine was flooding to a historic level. A strike by transit workers and airport employees was looming. Unseasonably cold temperatures were forcing us to forego wearing the Paris-style fashions we had dreamily packed in our matching luggage sets. And, in an emergency act of protecting its antiquities from drowning, the Louvre had the nerve to close its doors - literally as we were arriving at the ticket booth - rendering us unable to so much as snap a prized selfie of us surrounded by hundreds of other tourists snapping selfies of themselves snapping selfies with Ms. Mona Lisa.

Frankly, the City of Light was looking more like the City of Uh-Oh, and I’m fairly certain my mother wanted to cry. After all, this was the highly-anticipated mother-daughter trip she’d been planning for a year now. A vacation to celebrate our triumphant survival through a previous year of abysmal woes. A vacation that had already been postponed once and had a lot riding on it emotionally and spiritually. A vacation that, at this point, seemed would have been better spent in the Bahamas. Or Trenton, New Jersey.

It was a hunk of meat that turned things around for Mom and me.

Brasserie Lipp is a magical place to me that has maintained its integrity for well over 131 years. Not much has changed with the decor, food or with the waitstaff since I was a small child. There are waiters that have been there every day for 40 years, rapidly shuffling along, flat feet and all, with huge trays of covered dishes. I love this place, period!

They have a thick Parisian attitude which means that it could take years for them to notice or acknowledge you, but when they finally do they never forget you no matter how far back in line you may be standing. The waters parts and you are summoned to the head of the line like royalty has arrived as everyone moves quickly out of the way with a confused look on their face as they try to figure out "who you are" that they are making such a fanfare over.

An excerpt from  "Hungry for Paris"

Some ten years ago, I went to dinner one night with no expectations. A London newspaper had asked me to write about Lapérouse, an old warhorse of a restaurant overlooking the Seine on the Left Bank—it was doing historic Paris restaurants, and this one’s been around forever. I politely suggested that there might be better candidates, because as far as I knew, this place was still a slumbering tourist table flogging its past: it has several charming tiny private dining rooms with badly scratched mirrors—as the legend goes, these cuts were made by ladies testing the veracity of newly offered diamonds (real diamonds cut glass).

The editor was unyielding, so off I went. The stale-smelling dining room was mostly empty on a winter night, and though the young mâitre d’hôtel was unexpectedly charming and gracious, I was more interested by my friend Anne’s gossipy accounts of a recent visit to Los Angeles than I was by the menu.

Our excitement builds as our tiny Peugeot navigates the streets of Paris heading for rue du Cherche-Midi and my mecca, Poilane. Poilane is an extrordinary bakery that I had been reading about and I knew well ahead of time exactly what I was going to buy. It was early morning in Paris and the streets were not bustling yet. Just a gentle calm with only the sparse activity of a few Parisians heading to market. We parked the car within sight of Poilane and got out.

The classic storefront is natural finished wood with a large polished brass door handle, I pushed the door open to a heavenly scent of baking butter. The store was starting to be filled with their famous large round pain au levain breads, pastries and only two other customers. I spin around taking it all in – the large rounds of bread with the big P cut into the dough before it is baked, the tarte de pomme are lined up like little soldiers, cello bags of round butter cookies known as sables and the smell of the chasson de pomme fill the air as they are baking.