5 Small Pleasures About Paris and Rome You Need to Know
It was mid-December and time to meet up with my far-traveling family. That gave me an opportunity to re-connect with my three Alaska-based grandchildren, unique pleasures themselves. That attachment keeps growing, enriching as these seven-to-nine-year-olds explode, like time-delayed flower videos, into fascinating, intelligent, and charmingly independent realizations of smidgens of my DNA.
But first a brief stay in Paris. then on to Rome and all of those small, special pleasures. As usual, I was on the lookout for interesting, little known places to find as I bounced from one city to the next.
1 - On a jaunt up to the fabulous outsider art gallery/museum in Montmartre I passed a pastry shop on a Sunday morning. There was a line out the door, so I stopped in to sample what one of the men in line assured me was the best pastry shop in Paris, located at the corner of rue André del Sarte and rue Feutrier. Raphaëlle is a small shop with one long glass case filled with every kind of fabulous French pastry my heart forever longs for. I decided to sample the house specialty, a gauffe, a kind of French waffle infused and encrusted with delicious not-too-sweet flavors. Divine. One paid by dropping bills and coins into separate slots, an arrangement to spare the salesperson from handling money with their pastry-saving hands. Old fashioned; thoroughly analogic. But the place was buzzing with customers gleefully choosing their particular hearts' desires.
The Raphaëlle gauffe, looks like a Belgian waffle but tastes totally Parisien.2 - Walking back from the Louvre on a chilly, dusky late afternoon I stopped to break the long walk and have a drink. The Café de la Comédie has a narrow enclosed, heated outdoor sidewalk area, cozy and warm. The year before I had tasted my first Mojito in Paris and went on to become a devotée. I decided to try what the cafe turned out to be is the best Mojito I've had so far.
The Mojito jar, empty because so tempting it was quaffed before I could get my phone out to photograph it.3 - A friend had invited me to dinner on a hidden corner on the left bank, just behind and over the river from Notre Dame. The Reminet is a charming, slightly upscale little restaurant with an extraordinary, hugely delicious menu. It features the best dessert I have ever had, Cremeux Coco: a gorgeous concoction of creamy coconut, dark chocolate cone with exotic spoom (a kind of frothy sorbet), and crunched cocoa.
Le Cremeux Coco.
The menu is vast but also scrumptiously interesting.
.4 - The first time I found the Cul de Sac restaurant in Rome I had wandered into a street behind the vast, noble Piazza Novona. This was one of those old cobblestone streets, surprisingly narrow to an American, that meanders and winds into similar quaint streets, all of them lined with restaurants and shops, some quite elegant. The Cul de Sac, which I have dined in many times, is the best low-cost restaurant in Rome. The menu is vast but also scrumptiously interesting. No fanfare -- but also fitted with a huge selection of wines. Fun and kid-friendly.
Cul de Sac. Piazza di Pasquino 73, 00186 Roma5 - The best ice cream in Rome is not the famous touristy Guilitti near the Pantheon but a small stand behind the Piazza Navona, on the narrow, winding Via del Governo Vecchio. The Frigidarium serves a dozen or more truly great favors of gelato, my favorite being chocolate with orange bits wandering through it.
The Frigidarium in a rare moment without a line in front.Paris and Rome offer many other pleasures, of course. But the small ones, like these, make the visits not just memorable, but uniquely indelible like a secret reminiscence.A lesson in not bothering to sweat the big stuff.