Terminus Nord, just in front of Gare du Nord is an old institution. It is open every day, even on Sunday evening ( exceptional in Paris) and until very very late. And early in the morning you can have your “petit déjeuner”.

The restuarant is reasonably priced, full of Parisians and has nice “plateau de fruits de mer”. The staff is friendly and even if they don’t speak English, they try to help you out.

We did arrive rather late in Paris and were hungry. Almost all the restaurants in the neighborhood were clossing. So we went to Terminus Nord. We had a real nice dinner with our kids. (One of our kids would like to work there for a month or two, just because of the real Parisian ambiance) We came in at 22.30 h, the place was half full. The waiters had some time to chat with some “habitués” as there were an professor, an old piano artist, a young couple after a performance,…

We ordered some rumsteack with “beurre Maître d’Hôtel”, it came with french fries and a salad ; a dozen oysters (even in July they were delicious) and the best of all “steack haché minute”, the waiter did a great job seasoning to perfection. As a dessert everybody took our family favorite “crème brulée”.

Terminus Nord, 23, Rue de Dunkerque, 75010 Paris ]]> http://www.cool-paris.com/terminus-nord/feed/ 0 http://www.cool-paris.com/about-eating-and-drinking-in-paris/ http://www.cool-paris.com/about-eating-and-drinking-in-paris/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:43:23 +0000 Rita http://www.cool-paris.com/?p=910 Eating and drinking in Paris isn’t so much about food and wine. It’s really about easing the process of ordering food and having a good time – or at least not a stressful time- doing it.  In a food guide “Eating and drinking in Paris – French menu translator & Restaurant guide by Andy Herbach, I read 10 simple rules :

1. Avoid eating in a restaurant that has a menu written in English.

2. Don’t be afraid. They can’t and won’t hurt you.

3. Don’t ever call a waiter “garçon”

4. Try to make reservations.

5. Return to a restaurant if you like it.

6. Parisians dine leisurely.

7. Don’t talk loudly.

8. Stand your ground without being aggressive.

9. Visit a street vendor at least once in Paris.

10. Alway be courteous. Remember that you are a guest in their country.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

Most likely you’ll see a typical quarrel between two ex-lovers because the guy was too evidently showing off his new conquest. Or maybe you’ll see two old Parisian friends discussing over who’s going to buy the next stella artois.

It’s all very likely to happen

If you leave the Montmartre Studioloft the place is located down the street at your right. It’s the very first little place you see. Before the renovation of Place Condorcet it was a rather lousy café, now it’s a nice place to sit down and just relax. Even the prices are reasonable (to Parisian standards, that is).

When we were there last week, we enjoyed having a drink (happy hour comes with real big pints) and  we just did some people watching. In front of us there was a young Parisian lady in a beautiful red dress with little white dots who was reading the paper (probably just solving a crossword) and sipping a red wine. Next to us, there were two beautiful young Brazilian ladies exchanging their views on the latest episode of their favourite soap when at a certain moment one of them said hi to a couple of youngsters (dressed in skinny jeans, sneakers, short haircut with a bless, 1day unshaved) who joined them for a while to on their part exchange what they thought of the ladies’ new dresses. Subsequently, the quartet disappeared to go dancing all night. There was also this young, cute, probably newly-wed couple : he was coming from work, in costume with a stylish briefcase – she, dressed in a classical outfit (gray skirt, a white blouse with gray stripes and ballerina shoes), had just done some shopping (with yesterday’s money). They were probably having one drink before heading home. They took 4 chairs, for they didn’t want to be bothered. I could see what was inside her little green bag, a new lingerie set, and when she gave him a glance of her latest purchase they also left into the night.

Finally a young Senegalese lady, dressed in traditonal fabrics, bright orange and blue, nice jewels and funky sunglasses took their place. All she did was take sips from a “petit café” but that was all she needed to do as far as I was concerned.

Café Le Turgot,  2,Rue Turgot, 75009 Paris

http://www.evous.fr/Le-Turgot,1125010.html

The first large retrospective exhibition dedicated to Yves Saint-Laurent the fashion designer is set to take place from 11 March to 29 August at the Petit Palais. Discover this beautiful exhibition, you still have some time, but buy your ticket in advance on-line or in the Fnac (even with a ticket be prepared to be in line for 3/4 of an hour). The exhibition is very worthwhile, you will recognize photo’s, advertisement, maybe fashion clothes.

The Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent and the Petit Palais (City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts) are showcasing the first Yves Saint-Laurent retrospective exhibition since the fashion designer passed away. A total of 307 haute couture and prêt-à-porter models are on show, ranging from the designer’s beginnings at Dior in 1958, with the famous “Trapèze” collection, to the splendour of the evening dresses from 2002. He revolutionised women’s wardrobes.In 40 years of creating, Yves Saint-Laurent revolutionised women’s wardrobes, by drawing on aspects of the male evening suit, trouser suit and safari suit to dress women, thereby passing attributes of power from one gender to the other.

Numerous photographs and films shed light on the historical background, the development of the Yves Saint-Laurent style and the aspects underpinning his creations.The designer took inspiration from the streets (1971 scandale collection), his dreamlike journeys (Russia, China, India, Spain, Japan, Africa and Morocco) and interaction with art (Modrian, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh).

“I’ve always had the highest of respect for this profession, which isn’t an art form per se, but which needs an artist in order for it to exist” – Yves Saint-Laurent.

Rétrospective YSL, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris ,Avenue Winston Churchill , 75008 Paris

By Robert Fisher
Fodor’s Editor

If you love Monet and Renoir you’re in good company—these fathers of Impressionism are among the most beloved painters of all time. But who would have thought that they also made amazing road-trip buddies? I “hit the road” with them during a recent trip to France, to savor the summer-long Impressionist Normandy Festival (June–September). Along the way I discovered towns and gardens that are a bevy of 3-D Gauguins, “virtual” Monets, and pop-up Pissarros. Here’s how to enjoy the best of France’s celebration of art.

Hitting the Road with Monet

With more than 150 special events, the Impressionist Normandy Festival reveals how the region became the “cradle of Impressionism” and forever influenced the history of world art. As a Monet junkie, I’ve spent a lifetime seduced by his paintings and this was the perfect opportunity to learn more about what exactly seduced him.

My week-long vacation proved to be an exuberant, intoxicating feast of art. And feast it is—in one tightly packed 100-mile stretch of coast you can take a road trip through the history of 19th-century painting, the giants of Impressionist art acting as your kindly tour guides. Many of us already know that a visit to any major museum is enough to virtually transport a viewer—by way of Monet’s luscious water-lily paintings, Boudin’s vibrant beach scenes, and Renoir’s Seine river vistas—to beautiful Normandy. But it is one thing to marvel at masters’ paintings in museums, and quite another to visit the actual sites and scenery that inspired them. I’ve compiled some highlights to take the guesswork out of the vast festival schedule and, perhaps, help you make some lasting impressions of your own.

Brushing Up on Impressionism

Why Normandy? The reasons, historians tell us, are simple and yet extraordinary. Back in the 1860s, Parisians were as stressed out as today’s New Yorkers and just as desperate to escape the frenzied effects of urban industrialization. Voila! The construction of a new rail line turned the westernmost province of France into the “Hamptons” of Paris, and almost overnight, scores of elegant Parisians flocked to the seaside towns of Deauville and Trouville to promenade by the sea in their Worth gowns. Upon returning home many of them bought examples of then-revolutionary beachscapes. And once back in Paris, liberated from the confines of their stuffy studios, artists traded shop talk about painting en plein air (”in the open air”). Normandy became the new promised land because, thanks to the sea and its river estuaries, the region had the most mercurial weather in France. It became the perfect place to capture the fleeting aspects of nature.

I Left My Heart In Etretat

Etretat, a storybook fishermen’s village welcomed Monet one winter in 1868. This end-of-the-world spot might have been expressly composed for the artist by nature: views of spectacular chalk cliffs, soaring rock needles, and rolling sand dunes practically demand you to pick up brush and palette. Perched midway along Normandy’s Alabaster Coast, it is a Fisher-Price toy village with streets lined with 19th-century houses covered with sculpted wood figures. No matter there are no museums there—the entire village could be a museum exhibit.

The stunning white-sand beach and white-chalk rocks, such as the Manneporte—a limestone portal likened by author Guy de Maupassant to an elephant dipping its trunk into water—are major elements in the landscape. Here Monet became a pictorial rock-climber with the help of his famous “slotted box,” built with compartments for six different canvases, allowing him to switch midstream from painting to painting, as weather patterns momentarily changed. I experienced this first-hand when an unexpected downpour threatened to terminate my climb up the cliff footpath. The guide was quick to reassure me, “Just wait: in Normandy we have great weather several times a day!” For an artist like Monet, intent on capturing the ephemeral (he would have been glued to the Weather Channel), Etretat’s constantly changing weather was ideal. For more information visit our destination guide or www.seine-maritime-tourisme.com to find a full list of hotels and restaurants. (If you want to join Offenbach and Victor Hugo’s names in the guest book stay at its Château Les Aygues.) Etretat rocks!

Painting the Town

The Impressionists went on to colonize every point of the compass in Normandy, including Honfleur, whose harbor, lined with half-timbered houses, is so picturesque that I wished I knew how to paint—mere photographs don’t do it justice. A few blocks from the port is the town’s Musée Eugene Boudin, named to honor Honfleur’s most famous native son. The first to set up his easel outdoors (a revolutionary act at the time), he wound up holding painting sessions for the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Jongkind at a pretty seaside auberge which today is the noted hotel Ferme St-Siméon (www.fermesaintsimeon.fr). During the festival, the museum is hosting a striking show called “Honfleur: Between Tradition and Modernity, 1820-1900″ (through September 6th), which traces how earlier styles, including the School of Barbizon, were veritable springboards for Impressionism.

Lying at the center of Normandy’s compass is the bustling river port capital of Rouen, whose Fine Arts Museum is hosting the festival’s focal show, “A City for Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro, and Gauguin at Rouen” (www.unevillepourlimpressionnisme.fr, through September 26th). The high point is the room hung with 11 of the 31 paintings Monet did over a three-month period, in 1892, of Rouen Cathedral. “Everything changes even if it is made of stone,” said Monet of this series—clearly the cathedral façade was simply a pretext to capture the essence of every hour from dawn to twilight. Embrace your inner Monet by heading across from the cathedral to Rouen’s tourist office and signing up for “Learn to Paint like Monet,” a mini-tutorial that allows you—thanks to a professional artist on hand, a watercolor set, and a traced outline of the cathedral façade—to paint your own Rouen cathedral. By a stroke of luck, I wound up sitting on the exact spot (second floor front, third window from the right) where Monet once set up his easel. Alas, my “Monet” wound up looking like a… Picasso.

We’re in the Monet

Fittingly, my final stop was the picturesque village of Giverny, where Monet spent forty-five years (until his death in 1926) tweaking the terrain of a former farm into a veritable live-in Impressionist painting. Adjacent to the Claude Monet House (www.fondation-monet.com)—its cozy rooms, done up in sugared-almond hues, Art Nouveau furniture, and Japanese prints, are open to the public—he created two legendary gardens (like the house, open May through October). Some people refer to the Clos Normand as “the Liberace of gardens” due to its avalanche of pink flowers, but a stroll here underscores how Monet regarded the garden as a painting (he said, “the most beautiful masterpiece I have done is my garden”), and vice versa. I confess I shed a tear upon entering the Water Lily Garden, set with the famed Japanese footbridge and water-lily pond. Magically, the real world appeared to dissolve and, just for a moment, I had the sensation of stepping into a 19th-century Impressionist painting. This garden is so precisely similar to his paintings that I realized the Impressionists had nothing to invent—it was all there, in Normandy, to begin with.

I arrived at Giverny around 4 pm (during summer in Normandy it stays light until 10 pm)—while the water-lily flowers had closed for the night I was just in time to see a gardener cleaning the pond from a rowboat. In a flash I recalled the “late” water-lily paintings—the celebrated canvases that show a horizonless sky reflected in the water including one that sold for $80 million at Christie’s last year—and realized that Monet must have painted those from a similar rowboat. These paintings were done near the end of his life when he was suffering from cataracts brought on by incessant smoking and too much sun. Ghost colors, blurry shapes, and lapidary shades of blues (he could no longer see reds or yellows) helped these works open the door to the new age of 20th-century abstraction. The garden at Giverny was truly an avant-garden.

Not far from Monet’s house is Giverny’s sleek new Musée des Impressionistes (www.mdig.fr), which just hosted a major show of the festival, “Impressionism Along the Seine River” (through July 18th) and now features an exhibition of photographs by Olivier Mériel of towns immortalized by the Impressionists (through October 31st). But be sure to continue several blocks down Rue Claude-Monet past the museum to the Hotel Baudy (restaurantbaudy.com). Painted cake-frosting pink, this was the place where droves of artists stayed while visiting chez Monet. Today, Renoir could enter the dining salon (it is now only a restaurant) and feel entirely at home, so little has anything changed. Out back is one of the most beautiful rose gardens in France, whose winding paths take you to a tiny studio-hut which Cézanne once briefly called home.

Unfortunately, I won’t be in Normandy to enjoy the most communal event of the festival, but this is the perfect time to make your own plans. The indoor-outdoor Great Impressionist Ball will be held in Rouen on September 24th, the last day of the festival. The public is invited to attend on the condition that they dress only in white, to create a giant blank canvas onto which a master lighting expert will project constantly changing splashes of color—similar to brushwork—an effect that will be captured on video and instantly played on large screens. Start planning your own pilgrimage by getting the full run-down on the Impressionist Normandy Festival Web site or www.seine-maritime-tourisme.com—and then get ready to book your own flight to Monet-land!

Getting Here

Often turning a 2 hour trip into a 3 hour ordeal, the Parisian exodus every weekend can gridlock the A13 highway to Rouen so it’s best to opt for the frequent trains that leave every two hours from Paris’s Gare St-Lazare (70 minutes, €19.50) for Rouen. From Normandy’s capital you can head to Normandy’s coast by taking the train to Deauville and then using buses (www.busverts.fr and www.cars-perier.fr) to Etretat and Honfleur. You can also take a train from Paris directly to Deauville (2 hrs, €26) or one to Le Havre (2 hrs, €27); from either station buses leave for the coastal towns. As for Giverny, a train from the Gare St-Lazare on the Rouen-Le Havre line heads to Vernon (which also has rail links with Rouen), from which buses, taxis, or a long hike will connect you to Monet’s village six miles away. ]]> http://www.cool-paris.com/normandy-art-festival-have-an-impressionist-summer/feed/ 0 http://www.cool-paris.com/paris-with-popcorn/ http://www.cool-paris.com/paris-with-popcorn/#comments Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:24:59 +0000 Rita http://www.cool-paris.com/?p=856 You must not be addicted to film or blind to the city’s inexhaustible charms, to go to the movies in Paris in all weathers and all seasons because it is, by a wide margin, the best place in the world to watch film. Paris offers a variety of choices that pales many big cities. Paris’ riches include a peerless selection of American films from Hollywood’s golden age, playing every week of the year. After all, this was the first city to show films publicly ( a plaque at 14 Boulevard des Capucine celebrates that De. 28, 1895, event) , and it is loath to give up its preeminence.

Paris’ position as the preeminent moviegoing city is not an accident; it flows from France’s belief in and commitment to the art of film. This is a country that believes, more strongly and self-consciously than even America, that film is part of its heritage, its actual cultural identity.

Paris has a wide diversity of movie theaters as it has films. Two are so unusual that you have to visist them, though they show mostly French or French-subtitled fare. One is the Panthéon, 13 Rue Victor-Cousin in the 5th Arr.. Built in 1907 it is the oldest movie house in Paris, the first to show films in English, and it still has a remarkable stylized facade that features the outline of a venerable projector. The café has been refurbished by Cathérine Deneuve with the help of a Parisian antiquair in 2007.

Then there is La Pagode. Looming forbiddingly over 57, Rue de Babylone in the 7th Arr. like a Japanese Addams Family house, La Pagode, with its brooding side garden and stone lions, may be the most atmospheric movie theater in the world. It was built by a French architect but with many decorative elements that came from Japan. It started life in 1895 as a ballroom for one of the wealthy owners of the nearby Bon Marché department store and became a cinema in 1931. It got a huge restauration some years ago.

The other great theater where Hollywood films, especially if they’re Disney, may be playing in Le Grand Rex. This impressive 2800 seat movie palace ( one of the largest in Europe and possibly the largest in the world still showing movies every day ) is the highest-grossing theater in all of France. Le Grand Rex, on Boulevard Poissonière in the 10th Arr. is a national historical monument, so its three levels of seats, original wall murals and Art Déco decorations are kept in impeccable condition. It was built in 1932 with an interior meant to recall the Tunisian childhood of entrepreneur Jacques Haik. It had kennels and a hairdresser and was used late at night by Hollywood mogul Darryl F.Zanuck as his private screening room. Such luminaries as Ray Charles and Bob Dylan have taken the stage, which is larger than the old Paris Opéra. If you like they do a one hour interactive tour behind the scenes ” Les étoiles du Rex ” by reservation only.

And of course you can also go to the new MK2 chain in the shadow of France’s controversial François Mitterand National Library. It has also a bookstore well stocked with a strong cinema section, a classical-musica boutique features CDs from the French label Harmonia Mundi and a 5000 title DVD store. Any of these shops would be worth a visit, to have them all together in the lobby theater is a dream come true.

How to make sense of all this ? How to deal with the French repertory custom of changing programs every day of the week and sometimes showing several different films a day ? The answer is Pariscope, an inexpensive pocket-sized weekly guide to the city’s events that devotes nearly 100 of its pages to a comprehensive look at film in Paris. It sells at almost every newsstand in Paris, goes on sale midweek. The magazine has addresses, métro stops, admission prices and the all-important show times, plus the notation about whether the film will be in its original language (v.o.) or dubbed into French (v.f.).

How tho make sense

The atmosphere is sixties-seventies with a twist. Music is good and on a big screen they show old french musictelevision. When there is a rugby match it’s shown on the big screen too which gives it a sporty macho ambiance at that moment.

Nostalgique French Pub, 46, Rue de la Tour d’Auvergne, 75009 Paris, open 7/7 until 2 h

Marché St.-Quentin, 84 B, Rue Magenta, 75009 Paris

You can also assist to cheese degustations that change with the season.

Marie-Anne Cantin, 12, Rue de Champs-de-Mars, 75007 Paris, M° Ecole Militaire,

In front of the restaurant is the wine-shop where you can find nice wines with an excellent price/quality.

Le Miroir, 94, Rue des Martyrs, 75009 Paris, tel 01 46 06 50 73, M° Abbesses