We’ve always loved staying in St Germain, but prices have gotten so ridiculous that it’s time to ‘switch banks’ and try somewhere new.
So here we are the three of us, newbies in the 2nd arrondissement, a thin wedge on your Paris map that’s just a short walk from über sights like the Louvre and the Palais Royale and yet somehow completely apart from these over-trafficked magnets.
Our apartment is right up in the eaves and we hadn’t quite bargained for the eight flights of stairs. Weirdly, it feels like our host Madame Mau has literally just closed the door behind her as it’s clearly her home, but trusting that the linens at least are fresh and that she won’t mind us taking some space in her nearly full refrigerator, we settle in. Turns out our apartment rental is a metaphor for the deuxième itself with its gritty tangle of diagonal streets, a lived in hold out of the ‘vrai Paris’ whose residents merely tolerate tourists and where a disdainful curl of the lip or a frustrated wrinkling of the brow are never far away. It’s also an area that’s entirely devoid of any conventional must visit attractions, unless browsing books at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, is your thing.
And yet we are finding that this, the smallest of the city’s arrondissements has more than just proximity to its sexier neighbours going for it. For starters the restaurant scene, with few tourists to cater for, punches well above its weight. You won’t be offered an English menu, nor encounter wait staff that speak that language (and even if they do it will be a point of pride that they’ll pretend otherwise), nor white linen on the tables, but if you’re comfortable with a basic paper table cloth bistro which delivers old fashioned french cooking (in the best possible sense) you’ll be more than happy. We found just such a place on our first night and Sabrina ordered a dozen escargots, followed by Coq au Vin (a dish so antediluvian we’ve never seen it on a French restaurant menu this century). Ironically this restaurant shares a name with that stratospherically priced Roux Brothers establishment in London, “Le Gavroche”.
Coq au Vin: Serves Six
I simply couldn’t believe my eyes when I found this on the menu, along with Andouillette and Langue de Boeuf.
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 4 lb organic chicken, cut into 8 – 10 pieces
5 oz pancetta, cut in to 1/2″ dices
12 small pickling onions
1/2 cup brandy
1 bottle red wine (I like to use Beaujolais)
2 cups chicken stock
3 whole parsley stalks
2 fresh bay leaves
2 sprig of thyme
1 head of garlic cut in half
1 tbsp flour
8 oz small Crimini and white mushrooms, cleaned and trimmed
Preheat oven to 300ºF. Heat oil and butter in a heavy Dutch oven, add the chicken and brown on all sides. Transfer to a dish; add the pancetta and onions, cook until the pancetta is brown, discard any excess fat. Return the chicken to the pan, pour over the brandy, ignite or just boil rapidly for 2 minutes, then add the wine, stock, herbs and the garlic, season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper. Cover and bring to the boil, then transfer to the oven for 1 hour. Transfer the chicken, onions and pancetta to a dish, cover and keep warm. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve into another pan, and discard the herbs and garlic. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes or until it reduces to 2 cups. Combine flour and 1 tablespoon of butter, mix it together to form a paste, whisk it into the sauce, cook for 5 minutes or until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Return the chicken, pancetta, mushrooms and onions to the sauce, cook for 5 minutes, turning to coat and warm through. Serve with creamy mashed potatoes.
Now, unlike Sabrina and our daughter, I’m not much into the allegedly therapeutic benefits of shopping but even I am excited by the deuxième’s retail scene. First there are the still intact 19th century glazed commercial arcades which were mostly long ago re-developed in other parts of the city. These charming, idiosyncratic ancestors of today’s cavernous, characterless shopping malls are filled with small independent businesses from philatelists, engravers and vintage print and postcard sellers, to hairdressers and haberdashers. Passage de Panoramas, immortalised by Émile Zola in his 1870s novel ‘Nana’ in which the main character dreamed her dreams in these narrow, teeming glazed roofed halls, is the most famous of these, and is a veritable maze of retail and restaurants, but we loved some of the smaller, quirkier ones.
Equally interesting is the down at heel tangle of streets around Rue d’Aboukir that make up The Garment District, where you dodge rails of clothing being whisked along the pavements and dealers and pimps lurking in doorways, to buy stunning fashion pieces direct from the manufacturers at wholesale. Here I found Sabrina a beautiful faux fox fur trimmed coat, allowing me to (just about) bury her long simmering regret for having missed out on a similar garment in a Marais atelier years ago. Then of course, there is the charming pedestrianised Rue Montorgueil, which has arguably the city’s finest selection of food stores, produce stands, fishmongers and bakeries, including the magnificent La Maison Stohrer which dates back to 1730, where I am picking up our freshly baked croissants and a ficelle every morning.
Just a short stroll away from the rough diamond of the deuxième, fashionable Paris’s lily is just as gilded as ever, if anything more so as I’d swear that the finials at the Palais Royale have just been given a new coat and the Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde is now framed by a giant ferris wheel (a more elegant cousin of London’s ‘Eye’), artfully illuminated for the enjoyment of the dusk flaneur.
So while falling in love with our new arrondissement we were able to jilt her at will to make new discoveries and visit favourite old haunts like Café Marly where the three of us drank thick hot chocolates in the winter sunshine as IM Pei’s glass pyramid sparkled. In the Marais we searched high and low for the tiny Musée de la Serrure (a fascinating private collection dedicated to the art of locks, keys and door knockers) and it was only by the kindness of the caretaker (it was shuttered in 2003) that we got a private tour of the exhibits. St Germain was looking as glossy as ever and as I compared the prices in the haughty fashion boutiques with the deuxième’s Garment District (how about an entry level pair of Berluti shoes at €710, Monsieur?) and the restaurant tariffs with the magnificent set lunch we had earlier on Rue Montorgueil, which was so inexpensive we felt ashamed and had to overtip to assuage our guilty feelings, we were feeling even better about our accidental migration.
It’s our last day here, and with Sabrina feeling a little under the weather, she stays put for a few hours in our rooftop garret and we have a father-daughter art museum blitz (Sabrina’s tolerance of these places being low at best), taking in two Musées d’Art Moderne at the Palais de Tokyo and the Pompidou Centre, where sculptor Tom Sachs’s Chanel branded guillotine installation caught our eye even more than the Picassos and the Matisses, before rendezvousing late afternoon with Sabrina at the spectacular Musée Rodin.
There is just time for an important ritual at Notre Dame, as Sabrina and I both light candles for our mothers, before one last aperitif and dinner on Rue Montorgueil.
It’s a bittersweet evening as we know that this relatively undiscovered quarter is a miniature St Germain in the making. Long may its undeserved obscurity continue.
A fascinating journey through a Paris which most tourists never see. Great to see Zola, one of the finest French novelists of all time, namechecked. Paris never disappoints and neither does Marco's intimate portrait of such a wonderful city.
Avec une bonne Vielle Andouillette 😝