lunching like the French

Leave your Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches at home, in Paris, lunch is a real meal!!  We arrived to our apartment around midday and were famished, so we checked out the bistro around the corner.  Inside it was packed.  The tables couldn't have been larger than a normal sized dinner napkin.  There were 50 simultaneous conversations going on in a space smaller than my living room.  The waiters were squeezing through the melange to deliver plates laden with delicious looking goods.  Wine glasses were refilled.  The couple next to us finished their Plats Principeaux, then a dessert, and THEN a coffee.  Lunch is no half-forgotten affair.

As I looked around me, I asked my handsome Tour Guide if he thought that most of the people in the restaurant were tourists or local business people.  I just couldn't believe the these people would eat such an extravagant lunch on a random Thursday in October.  I mean there were seriously four-course meals and healthy doses of wine being downed all around me.  But after Pablo listened a bit to the Parisienne conversations around us, he said that yep, probably just locals on their lunch break.  Incredible.

I will always remember my first meal in Paris.  I guess for a Frenchman it would be no big deal, but the sweet/ salty richness of the fresh onion soup, and the oven- roasted goat cheese with drizzled honey salad, and the not-pictured-because-we-were-too-busy-licking-the-fat-off-our-fingers grilled duck, and the glass of wine will go down in history.  best. lunch. ever.