Category: booze or lose

Clarence in Paris: Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur

in Parc des Buttes Chaumont

2, allée de la Cascade
75019 Paris

Métro: Botzaris (Ligne 7 Bis)

So I’m not the first self-loathing hipster to wax poetic about Rosa Bonheur, and I certainly won’t be the last. The concept is just so stellar.  It starts with one gorgeous, off the beaten path, Parisian park. Buttes Chaumont is surely my favorite public garden in Paris. It seriously makes me feel like I’m in Mirbeau’s torture garden minus all the gore (bonus points if you get that reference, and let’s be friends). This might have something to do with the fact that B erroneously told me that this was a major site for public executions in the eighteenth century (it wasn’t).  While not nearly as tightly manicured as the Jardin du Luxembourg or the Jardin des Plantes (my other favorite places to go on a sunny day), Buttes Chaumont makes up for it with traditionally styled English and Chinese gardens. The space began as a limestone and gypsum quarry, leaving the space full of miniature mountains and cliffs that you can climb up to ex(e/o)rcise your inner mountaineer. The park also has a large lake that contains both a grotto with an enclosed 65-foot high waterfall and an island accessible by a 200-foot long suspension bridge (aptly nicknamed the “suicide bridge”). The island itself is a verdant, craggy peak, atop which sits the belvedere of Sybil. Wikipedia informs me that the belvedere was added to the park in 1869 and is a Corinthian-style monument, modeled after the ancient Roman temple of Sybil in Tivoli, Italy. I’ll inform you that it is one of my favorite views in Paris.

Here’s an old timey map of the park:

See that little building called “Pavilion du Chemin de Fer”?  Well, since it was a railway outpost had many culinary incarnations, including this one from the nineteenth century:

The people at Rosa Bonheur renovated this amazing historic building to be a sort of bobo wonderland, complete with two bars with cheap rosé, yummy snacks, lots of outdoor seating, great music, and a view of the sunset.  Here’s the outside in 2010:

And the inside:

The food is built around the wonderfully simple concept that you can eat everything accompanied by a brown paper bag of freshly sliced baguette.  On a recent visit, our spread looked like this:

Clockwise from the top, that’s an aged comté, slices of spicy chorizo, black olive and fig tapenade, dry sausage, and a lovely jar of duck rillettes.  At a couple of euros for each component with a big bag of bread, you can put together quite a picnic.  Pair that with some cold beers or a bottle of rosé and you’ve got yourself a nice lazy afternoon.

The logistics are kind of heavy on this place.  First of all, the park itself is on the bizarre line 7 bis, a one-way, miniature subway line complete with a short train and a maddeningly slow schedule.  B refuses to even take it and insists on walking from Jourdain on line 11.  I’d recommend instead that you suck it up, take the 7 bis, and get off at Bozartis.  As you exit the métro, the park will be on your right hand side.  Walk up about a block to the entrance, then veer left on the path about another block to Rosa.  You can obviously enter the park anywhere, but it can sometimes be quite a hike to get to Rosa if you start at the bottom of the hill.  You can think of it as earning those rillettes.

My favorite time to go to Rosa is in the afternoon, as it is bar none one of the best places to laze away with friends on a sunny day.  The park gates close at 7 p.m. and Rosa becomes kind of a scene, with hoards of Chuck Taylor and tortoiseshell glasses clad hipsters waiting at the gates to be slowly let in by an unamused park security guard.  So if you want to go there for the evening, just show up at six so that you can get in to the park without a wait.  Try and snag one of the tables to your right as you enter the restaurant if you want a killer view of the sunset and the envy of the coolest kids in Paris.

Details:  I think I’ve covered it, though Rosa also has a very comprehensive website, from which I lifted both the map and the old photo of the pavilion.  Sometimes their hours get funky with the change of the seasons or private events, so it’s worth visiting their website or Facebook page if you are planning a visit.  On another note, it’s a very friendly place for kids and dogs, both of which run around in joyous abundance.

Booze or lose: Cannibale Café

Cannibale Café

93, rue Jean Pierre Timbaud, 75011 Paris

Métro: Couronnes

http://www.myspace.com/lecannibalecafe

So I’m realizing that Booze or Lose might be the most short-lived of these “features.” While I find myself happy to describe in excruciating detail everything I eat, I find myself reluctant to tell you about bars I like.  This isn’t because I think I’m too cool or in the know (believe me, it’s never ever because I think I’m too cool or in the know), but mainly because there are only so many ways you can say “well, they have a zinc bar, good lighting, and I suspect that everyone who frequents this place shops only at APC and has better taste in music than I do.”  Basically every bar I like in this town would fit that description, and it’s kind of boring to see that rehashed weekly on a blog.

I will mention the Cannibale Café, however, because it seems to do aforementioned combination quite well.  Plus they have a lot of live music and what they describe as a “copious brunch on Sundays.”  I haven’t been to their copious brunch, but I like that particular adjective when paired with brunch very, very much.  One downside is that their pints of 1664 (totally hip and darling to buy in the US, more or less like PBR over here on this side of the pond) are a whopping 6.50€.  That’s like thirty-seven dollars or so.  Conversion humor!  Always a giggle.  Well, not quite as much as it used to be, as apparently the euro is tanking.  While I know that there are much larger forces at work behind this economic development, I can’t help but suspect (in my own admittedly solipsistic way) that it has something to do with the fact that I’m finally getting paid in euros.  Where was Greece when I was hemorrhaging cash in Europe circa 2008?  Anyway, however you do the math, it’s an expensive beer.  An ex-boyfriend of mine had some kind of theory about what he described as eight-dollar-beer places.  I don’t exactly remember the theory.  I think it was mainly an attempt to talk into frequenting places with sticky floors and bargain pitchers of Coors Light.  But he did nail the price point and the sheer ridiculousness of an eight-dollar beer has stuck with me.

This isn’t a very sunny review.

I do really like this place!

One particularly enjoyable evening at Cannibale recently included a performance by Hold Your Horses, a Franco-American group that is getting a fair amount of internet buzz because of their video for “70 Million.”  Have you seen it yet?

Who am I kidding?  Not only have you already seen it, half of you have probably already integrated it into your Art History 101 syllabus. You are such savvy pedagogues, you 50% of my readership. But anyway, I like this video very much. It’s one of the better things to go viral in the past month or so.

Speaking of going viral, I now bring you a Pettiness Campaign 2010 update. I’m pleased to related that Hold Your Horses has over 10 times as many views as an unnamed other person’s video, which has stalled slightly in its exponential ascent to that peculiar heaven inhabited by Glenn Beck.  B convinced me that there was no way I could possibly continue in my contempt-filled, elitist-expat lifestyle without actually watching some of Mr. Beck’s videos.  I am finding them to be like ill-reasoned, sputtering crack cocaine.  I like it when he gets so worked up that he just starts shooting off a series of random, unrelated nouns. I also kind of lose my shit every single time he turns to the chalkboard.  What an amazing prop!  Depressingly, if success can be defined in quantifiable terms (does late capitalism really teach us any other lesson?), Mr. Beck is more successful than anyone else in the universe.  He also can apparently charge $120 for the privilege of going to a stadium and watching him rant about progressivism and fuck around on his chalkboard on the Jumbotron.  I don’t have any pithy commentary on that little gem of a factoid, as all I could do when I looked up his ticket prices on Ticketmaster was soundlessly open and close my mouth in a piscine gesture of disbelief.

This entry is becoming entirely unrelated to Cannibale Café.  I’ll end it now, before some poor soul seeking a bar recommendation on Google has to slog through another six paragraphs of my bullshit.  Sorry poor soul!  I’d definitely recommend you go to Cannibale!  Just order wine, okay?

She divined a very tough self-preservative instinct behind the promises, pity, and ten-pound note.

On Friday night I went to a most excellent concert at Café de la Danse, which you should definitely check out if you are a Paris inhabitant. Can I just say how much I appreciate this thing of sitting down at concerts? I’ll confess, despite the fact that I really enjoy live music, I’ve been feeling kind of old and cranky at concerts for the past few years. I get tired of standing around forever waiting for the band to start, only so some guy who is three feet taller than me can suddenly push his way into the tiny pocket of space directly in front of me the minute the band starts playing. He’s usually a nice enough guy, a friendly, corn-fed, rosy-cheeked, baseball-cap guy, and he often turns around and says “oh, can you see?” and I always say “yeah, totally” because I’m terrified of confrontations. When I was sixteen this shit didn’t bother me. I wore high heels and danced until my feet bled and would have happily ignored the tall guy or the smelly guy or the chain of girls that push their way to the front and spill your beer in the process. Because that was all part of the concert-going experience, you know? Now I feel like a cranky old crow when I go to shows. I wear flats and I complain about the cost of drinks at concert venues and I get tired of standing and I end up spending a lot of my time resenting the people around me for various height, hygiene, and personal space infractions. I maxed out last summer when my friends and I attended a huge, two-day, outdoor music festival and it rained nonstop. As I shivered under my six-dollar poncho, drinking a partially spilled ten-dollar beer, the refrain that echoed in my head came not from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Of Montreal, or The Walkmen. The refrain came from my own damn superego, and it went something like:

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

Who do you think you are, you old loon?

You’re too damn old for this, oooh.

Pretend that this is a Pynchon novel and that you are already familiar with the melody.

At first I thought this sitting down thing was a merely a lovely anomaly when M and I went to see Stars Like Fleas at the Pompidou and everyone just sat and quietly swayed to the music. It seemed so damn civilized and pleasant, completely unlike concert going in the States. But the glorious Bosque Brown / Clare and the Reasons show we attended at Café de la Danse on Friday night confirmed my hopes. As we filed into the theatre, we discovered rows of elevated seating. You could put down your coat and purse! Everyone could see the band! Perhaps as a result of such creature comforts, the people attending the show were in their thirties, and forties, and fifties! Beer and wine were 4 euros! The bathrooms were clean! This is concert going for grownups! France: 1, United States: 0.

And let’s be honest, I’m not going to Fugazi shows anymore. I’m seeing bands that are mainly conducive to swaying and the occasionally foot-tap. Both Bosque Brown and Clare and the Reasons are such bands, in the best possible way. Mara Lee Miller and Clare Muldaur are for my money some of the most talented, idiosyncratic ladies singing today. In the imaginary universe where I am a tastemaker, I would instruct you to immediately fill your iPod immediately with their magic.

The concert was the climax of an evening where I renewed my deep and abiding love of M. I had wavered on whether or not I wanted to go to the show, and she pushed the envelope by texting me from the venue in the early evening and telling me to get my ass over there. We explored the area around rue de Charonne near Bastille before the show. It is essentially hipster paradise with tons of little bars and restaurants and glorious shops full of expensive things you don’t need. She had already cased the joint, so to speak, and found an adorable bar where we could try my newest obsession: Aperol Sodas.

I’ve been a longtime devotee of Campari-based cocktails. It’s such a gorgeous, interesting drink. There is nothing more aesthetically pleasing than a bottle of Campari. The graphic design is perfect. The alcohol itself makes everything look so girly, like a Shirley Temple, but it packs a pretty serious punch, especially in tandem with other hard liquor. I would say that Negronis (equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth, shaken with ice) are probably my favorite cocktail when I’m not messing around. But Campari also makes for an easy summer drink when paired with grapefruit juice, orange juice, or soda. One of my favorite memories of a summer trip to Vienna is sitting on the banks of Danube at one of those “beach” bars (I love that Europeans drag in a bunch of sand every year to simulate beach-going) with my mother, drinking Campari and orange juice and watching the sun set as our toes squirmed in the cool sand. Campari–along with nautical stripes, red lipstick, and well-made leather sandals–always makes me feel like part of a decaying Italian aristocracy. On Mad Men, Don Draper has a mid-life crisis and runs away to Palm Springs to stay with these itinerant, louche European “artists” in this spectacular mid-century mansion. As they have sex and discuss existentialism by the pool, guess what they are drinking, straight out of the bottle? Campari. Talk about pitch-perfect.

When I discovered last summer that Campari made sodas in adorable, miniature bottles, I nearly died of happiness. I wasn’t quite so jazzed to discover that a four pack of such delight costs ten dollars in Denver. Get with the program, Denver. In Europe, however, Campari soda is cheaper than Coke. I had noticed Aperol next to the Campari, but I thought that Aperol was merely a second-rate Campari knock-off. Uh, no, stupid girl. Actually both liquors are owned by the Campari company. Aperol is a lighter, sweeter herbal elixir with the distinct taste of—wait for it—rhubarb! Rhubarb is probably my favorite thing in the universe. So I’ve been on the hunt for Aperol sodas, which aren’t quite as ubiquitous as Campari sodas. The verdict from Friday night:  amazing. Sweet, effervescent, and the prettiest shade of pinky-orange you can imagine. M and I forecasted many warm evenings to come where we will sit in rue de Charonne cafes and sip Aperol soda and chat about all kinds of fallen-aristocrat topics.

Anyway, if we dwelled in that magical parallel universe where I am a tastemaker, I would tell you to stock up on some Campari or Aperol sodas for the summer. You’ll be the coolest kid on the block (that is, an imaginary block in the imaginary parallel universe where I am a tastemaker). I would also encourage you to start experimenting with Cynar, an artichoke (!) based liquor and the redheaded stepchild of the Campari family. I’ve been desperately wanting to buy a bottle, but I’m apprehensive about what I’ll make with it. I’ve heard that one can make a kind of Cynar-Negroni (substituting Cynar for Campari), but I love the citrusey kick of Campari in a Negroni and am loathe to give it up. So I’m desperately seeking suggestions from the cocktail-savvy reader. I’ll send you a sweet postcard in exchange for viable Cynar cocktail recipes. Or I’ll make you a drink (or three) if you’re a local. I feel like we already have a lot in common if you are experimenting with Cynar and happen to live in Paris.  Are you going to the Rouch/Artaud/Tarahumaras documentaries tomorrow?  Wanna date?

* * *

I haven’t been blogging with nearly the ferocity with which I began. Anyone who knows me can attest to my intensity right of the starting gate followed my lackluster enthusiasm a couple of laps into the race. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Sagittarius, what can I say? I have a list of good excuses, including a head cold, a houseguest, and an amazing documentary film festival that is only two blocks from my house. But excuses (and those individuals who make a habit of making them) suck and the last thing I want to do is abandon this silly little project. I’m so, so grateful that you are still stopping by. There are good things in the works for the month of April. I’m taking Clarence to Berlin and Brussels, so there will be lots of adjective-heavy reviews forthcoming of currywurst stands and steaming bowls of mussels. Stay tuned.

Did I mention how handsome you look today? You’re a knockout. Let’s get a Cynar-based drink. I think we’re totally ready to move to second base.

Clarence in Paris: Tokyo Eat

Tokyo Eat at the Palais de Tokyo

13 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris

Métro: Iéna

Yesterday I went and watched some psychoanalysts fight with each other at the Sorbonne for a few hours. The conference I attended ended with one of the panel members storming off the stage and the other throwing his glasses on the table in frustration. The were fighting over the stakes of a dogmatic reading of one of Lacan’s seminars, which I’m sure to most people would seem like a pretty irrelevant thing to get so bent out of shape about. But this was a niche audience and everyone got really fired up. It was kind of exhausting to witness, though I suppose that my ability to mock an angry French speaker improved immeasurably.

Worn down to a single raw nerve, I met up with my friends afterwards for an evening at the Palais de Tokyo, a museum that I’ve mentioned here before. How to explain the Palais de Tokyo to the uninitiated? It’s a rather enormous, partially unfinished contemporary art museum with no permanent collection. They put on a few large-scale exhibitions a year and have weekly lectures, concerts, film screenings, and other cultural happenings on Thursday nights. On the upside, some of their curatorial work is really sharp and the vastness of the museum space itself allows for certain work to be showcased that might otherwise have difficulty finding adequate museum space. The also have, hand-down, the best Photomaton in Paris (it’s actually nearly impossible to find the black and white kind that make photos in a vertical strip here, Amelie be damned). The downside? Well, sometimes the exhibitions indulge the emptiest trends of contemporary art. The last exhibition at the Palais, Chasing Napoleon, was a good example of the former alternative:  a fascinating group show that hinged upon the idea of the Unabomber as an exemplary escape from the social into a kind of aesthetic isolation. The current exhibition, Pergola, which is supposedly about the haunting of architectural space, is well, let’s just say it’s not that great. It’s the kind of show that makes intelligent people wander around bewildered, musing about how they too can get in to this conceptual art racket and make a killing assembling boxes out of construction-grade plywood. Or maybe that’s just my friends and me.

What’s kind of terrific about the Palais de Tokyo, however, is that even if the art viewing is a total bummer (an entire installation of non-functional pneumatic tubes?  really?!), the bookstore is consistently amusing and the bar and restaurant at the museum are pretty excellent. I’ve told you about the excellent neon lighting at the Tokyo Bar before, but I’ll emphasize again that it is a great place to meet up if you find pinky-orange light to be very flattering (I do). While the service at the bar is comically bad (just order at the bar, because seriously they are never, ever coming to your table), the bartenders are cute guys that certainly provide evidence that my students are wrong to say that there is no such thing as a French hipster.

The restaurant, Tokyo Eat, has a diverse, pseudo-Asian fusion thing going on that provides a nice break from Paris bistro fare. While it’s trendy and kind of expensive (a nine euro milkshake guys?  for that price it better be laced with cocaine), I actually really like eating there. Last night, my friends and I ate the tartare de boeuf au saté et sésame, roquette et frites maison (standard steak tartare/salad/fries with the twist that the tartare was made with a kind of lovely Asian sesame and saté flavor), the pastilla d’agneau aux aubergines et oignons confits et mesclun (a really lovely Moroccan-style lamb pastilla filled with eggplant and onions and served with a heap of salad) and the adorable daurade à la plancha, aubergines confines, et sauce cacahuète (sea bass with roasted eggplant and a peanut sauce). For dessert, we shared the mini macarons d’Hermès, dissident d’Hermé, aux parfums varies (an assortment of macarons served with a “dissident,” which I believe is what they were calling a small piece of lacy caramel).  I’d been eyeing a large display of macaroons in tall milkshake glasses all night, and my friends humored me in ordering one for dessert.  I felt kind of bad when I realized that M doesn’t even really like macarons.  Though how can you dislike macarons?  They are practically the most perfect Parisian foodstuff!  The tourism industry might likely crash to a halt if Ladurée or Fauchon closed their doors!  I’m not going to bore you with a long description of the macaron culture in Paris (there are fifteen other blogs that can do that for you just as well), but I will say that the ones at the Palais de Tokyo are pretty amazing.  While they didn’t have a lemon one (my personal favorite), the assortment of pistachio, rose, vanilla, and passionfruit that they serve is really lovely.  Further proof in my growing pile of evidence that M is actually a Soviet spy.

Details: Lunch and dinner served whenever the museum is open (noon to midnight everyday except Tuesday).  Reservations totally unnecessary.  Dinner service starts at 8 p.m.  A nice alternative to the many overpriced tourist traps in the area (surrounding the Eiffel Tower and the Musée du quai Branly).

Photos via Palais de Tokyo.

I live across the street from a Live Hot Shower Show.

While I’m admittedly often quick to make the cheeky metaphor, the title of this post is the most literal thing I’ve ever written. I live across the street from a Live Hot Shower Show.  Why is this capitalized? I don’t know. But the Raidd Bar, whose awning I look directly down upon from my window, advertises it as such, so I’m going to stick with their stylistic decisions.

My apartment building is essentially at the corner of Gay and Gayer as far as Paris is concerned. The boulangerie downstairs is called Legay Choc (yes, it means what you suspect it means). While I frequent it for baguettes and the occasional tarte framboise, I suspect they make the majority of their money on a little item called le pain magique, a cock-and-balls shaped roll with sesame seeds for pubic hair. Oh, they also sell bags and bags of pale pink, penis-shaped meringues. Need to buy some bondage gear in Paris?  I can refer you to at least half a dozen shops nearby. Les Mots à la Bouche is one of the most impressive gay and lesbian bookstores I’ve ever seen, both for novelty items and serious queer theory. My neighborhood teems bars with names like Le Feeling and Open Café, out of which hoards of well-groomed gentlemen spill onto the street every night. But Raidd Bar, with live DJs seven nights a week and the Live Hot Shower Show, is the king of them all.  I seriously wish I had stock in this place. As my dear British friend would say, Raidd is always heaving.

You may be so vanilla as to now inquire, “What, praytell, does the Live Hot Shower Show consist of?” As far as I can ascertain, there is a large glassed-in vitrine in the center of the bar in which a handful (a large handful?! sorry) of extremely strapping young men, well, take a live hot shower. I’m sure there is also dancing involved, and maybe also some towel work? I’m not entirely sure, because by the time the Live Hot Shower Show has commenced, the windows of the bar are completely fogged up and all you can see is purple and pink lights flashing inside. Occasionally, damp men fall out into the street for a smoke. Everyone looks pretty hot and bothered by the time they leave.  Your next question might well be: “Well, why haven’t you been to the Live Hot Shower Show?” I haven’t been because it isn’t the kind of place that appears tourist-friendly, as one might say. Most of the bars in my neighborhood aren’t particularly conducive to female patrons. And honestly, I get it. Do your thing, boys. I feel lucky to live in a neighborhood where there are people out and about at all hours and I am never, ever harassed on my walk home late at night from the métro. Granted, I’m not harassed because nobody in my neighborhood after ten p.m. has even the remotest interest in me, but sometimes it’s nice to go blissfully unnoticed. If you are curious about what happens inside, Raidd Bar has a very well-designed website, complete with a killer opening video sequence. I’m not going to link there, as I suspect they get plenty of web traffic on their own. But Google it if you would like to see some very cut young men that possess a rather remarkable, if niche, skill set.

The one drawback of living in such close proximity to a Live Hot Shower Show is that it is a rather loud affair. First there is the happy hour, when the first rounds of patrons show up for the night. Then there are the two nightly live shows, in which the music is cranked to full volume (fortunately these guys are as gaga for Lady Gaga as I am). On Fridays, Saturdays, and inexplicably some Sundays and Mondays, there is a serious house DJ until 2 or 3 a.m. Then, there is the inevitable post-bar-ejection hookup loitering, in which a dozen or so drunken guys schmooze with one another on the street until everybody figures out who they are going home with. Finally, around 4 a.m. the dancers from the Live Hot Shower Show go home, glistening, beautiful, and often singing Barbara Streisand songs at the top of their lungs. I’m not being hyperbolic. Last night it was “Happy Days are Here Again.” They nailed it.

I’ve spent a fair amount of evenings watching the proceedings from my window.  It’s pretty addictive, as several of my houseguests can certainly attest.  My mother could barely peel herself from the window during her entire visit for the holidays.  It sometimes makes for a wistful Friday night, like the one I find myself in the midst of now.  I stayed in to try and get some dissertation reading done, and instead I’m looking out the window and wondering why there isn’t more Cyndi Lauper, more Madonna, more ABBA, and more hot-water-centric entertainment in my life.

I’ve become voyeuristically well-acquainted with some of the regular patrons, including one guy who always, always wears a white leather suit, Labor Day rules be damned. He is often bare-chested underneath, even on some of the most frigid evenings. He’s loud, he’s proud, and he never, ever goes home alone. I like this guy. He really puts himself out there. He’s tenacious. Sometimes, long after everyone else has left the building, he is still out on the corner trying to put something together for himself.  Often at 5 a.m. on a workday. But nevertheless, tonight I had a lovely surprise:

You might not be able to tell from my clandestinely-shot photo, but that’s white leather suit guy with ANOTHER white leather suit guy. I watched them for a while and they are definitely an item, a pleasantly touchy-feely item. There was a cheek kiss! As far as I’m concerned, cheek kisses mean these two crazy kids are sharing the Sunday paper over brunch. If finding someone else willing to wear a white leather suit that matches your own when you go to see the Live Hot Shower Show together isn’t the dictionary definition of “soulmate,” I don’t know what is. I’ve never been more encouraged that there is somebody for everybody out there.

Good night, dear reader.  I hope this finds you on the verge of an amazing weekend.  While that may or may not include a Live Hot Shower Show, I do think it gives us all certain lotus-eating paradigm to aim for, yes?