Great meals and leisurely dining remain a focus in France

Sampling restaurants and taking a pastry class prove to be lovely experiences

Housed in an old mill atop a Paris hill in Montemarte and once a hangout for Pierre-Auguste Renoir and other Impressionists, the iconic Le Moulin de la Galette remains a dining favorite. (Sascha Nelson)

Food and eating in France has changed.

My two-week mid-September visit followed the Olympics, which drew more than 11 million international visitors to Paris. Perhaps the invasion of hamburgers, cheeseburgers and pizza I saw on that city’s menus is a result of that. I don’t recall seeing them when I visited in 2019.

Thankfully, croissants and crepes, along with the camaraderie of lengthy and leisurely outdoor meals at sidewalk cafes, remain mainstays in France. Patisseries, seemingly on every corner, still fill their windows with elaborate desserts.

My daughter Sascha Nelson and I joined a French pastry cooking class in Paris to learn more about the beautiful desserts we saw everywhere. La Cuisine, run by Chicago native Jane Bertch, conducts classes in English and is as much about French culture as it is about making French dishes. We both devoured Jane’s recent book “The French Ingredient” and her monthly Bonjour From Paris newsletter before our trip.

This elegant strawberry pastry was created by Sascha Nelson at a La Cuisine cooking class in Paris. (Janet Podolak)

The school is along the Seine River, in view of tall construction cranes working to restore the cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris for its reopening on Dec. 8, following the tragic 2019 fire.

One of the first things we learned in the La Cuisine class is that French ingredients are so different from those we get in America that we cannot accurately reproduce many French pastries back home. Butter in France is much higher in butterfat, and their all-purpose flour is more like our cake flour, for instance. But the desserts we created in the class were stunning.

Sascha made it her mission to bring French butter back from France, and despite the obvious difficulties, she was successful. Our La Cuisine instructor offered help with a list of Paris resources for the ingredients we wanted to bring home.

The butter section at La Grande Epicerie is really huge and the store will shrink wrap purchases for travel. We already had packages of gel, brought from home to keep my medications cold. So we asked our hotel to refreeze them so we could bring French butter home.

La Grande Epicerie de Paris has tens of thousands of amazing food items beyond butter, including cheeses, pastries and caviar, along with 13 counter-style restaurants in special sections devoted to the things found there. It’s a great place to stock up for Paris picnics and unusual things to bring home.

The carbonnade flamande we’d enjoyed in Lille early in our visit is not as difficult to reproduce at home as baked desserts would be. It’s a stew in which the beef is marinated in beer and then topped with a mustard-slathered slice of gingerbread as it bakes. Its difficult-to-imagine combinations of ingredients result in an unusual and delicious dish.

We came to Lille for the Braderie, an annual 48-hour flea market — the largest and one of the oldest in Europe.

Because it’s near France’s border with Belgium, Belgian-style foods populate Lille menus, and beers are served more often than wines.

The mussels and fries called moules et frites are everywhere, and during Braderie, the growing piles of discarded mussel shells outside restaurants show the most popular places to eat.

Moules et frites — mussels and fries — is a super-cheap meal washed down with beer and served during the Braderie in Lille, a 48-hour flea market in the French city near the border with Belgium. (Laurent Javoy)

While in Lille, I also enjoyed Welsh, a cheese dish with ham and toast points similar to Welsh rarebit. Meals were hearty and cheap.

With a few exceptions, our meals in Paris averaged 60 to 80 euros for the two of us, with wine and the gratuity — included on a check that’s never offered until requested. The French hold mealtime sacred, believing in a leisurely repast meant to be savored.

Housed in a former mill atop a hill near Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Montmartre, Le Moulin de la Galette was especially memorable among the restaurants. Favored by the Impressionists when it was a guinguette wine bar in the late 1800s, it was a backdrop for works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and other artists of that time.

Our patio table was nestled amid greenery beneath the blades of the mill itself, and our coq au vin and linguine dinners were delicious. Sascha’s chocolate souffle dessert — brought to her in a giant bowl holding many gallons of souffle — received attention from those at neighboring tables. Our server scooped it onto her plate with a large ladle, inviting her to “say ‘when.’” It was served with an extra spoon for me.

Chocolate souffle is ladled from a large bowl onto Sascha Nelson’s plate at Le Moulin de la Galette, a 150-year-old restaurant in a one-time mill that was a favorite of the Impressionists and other artists. (Janet Podolak)

Beefbar Paris topped Sascha’s Paris wish list, and friends also told me about it, so we emailed for a reservation. I’m not much of a beef eater and usually prefer independent restaurants, but my interest was piqued when I learned that owner Riccardo Giraudi sources the world’s best-available beef for his Beefbar restaurants throughout Europe, Asia and America. Since opening the first Beefbar in Monaco, he’s stacked up accolades, awards and lots of press.

The restaurant didn’t disappoint.

As we were led into the dining room, we stopped to gaze at its ornate beauty. Once the famous but long-closed La Fermette Marbeuf restaurant, its Art Nouveau elegance was discovered beneath ordinary walls during its 2019 transformation into the Beefbar.

Its stunning Art Nouveau interior, uncovered during the remodeling to establish Beefbar in Paris, is an appropriate setting for the restaurant’s best-ever beef dishes. (Janet Podolak)

For us to sample the many ways its meats are served as street food with iconic sides, staffers suggested a meal that included tacos made from Kobe beef and its signature mashed potatoes.

Ever since, Sascha has been putting her potatoes through a ricer and whipping them with whole cream and real French butter, to the delight of family and dinner guests.

For our final dinner in Paris, we chose fondue, one of my daughter’s own specialties back home in Maryland. Le Chalet Savoyard’s fondue was a mixture of melted cheeses with chunks of bread and potatoes for dipping. I prefer Sascha’s fondue, with its chunks of apple, broccoli and dried sausage among dipping ingredients. I should have ordered a Reblochen fondue because that raw milk soft cheese isn’t available in the United States.

But our table neighbors at Savoyard had Raclette, a cheese dish I’d eaten in Switzerland, and allowed me to take photos when I asked.

Heated Raclette cheese is scraped off for dipping into vegetables at Le Chalet Savoyard, a Paris restaurant specializing in fondue and other cheese dishes. (Janet Podolak)