The Girl Who Ate Everything

Note (April 12, 2011): I wrote a weekly post for Parisist from October to December 2006. As the site is currently "on hiatus" and you can no longer view my posts there, I've backed up the posts here. They're timestamped with their original post date and haven't been edited aside from pulling images from Flickr instead of Parisist.

An NYU student and NYC food blogger, currently studying non-foodie things in Paris, Robyn of The Girl Who Ate Everything is doing plenty of food studying on her own in the form of eating things from bakeries almost every day and writing about them at least once a week in her food blog.

Robyn will be sharing her discoveries with Parisist every Monday while she explores all the eats that Paris has to offer. This week: baguettes, Japanese curry, and pizza...

Secco/Poujaran

Baguette, eaten.

As I am new to Paris, I haven't have much time to figure out where to get the best baguette. I do have a list of places to check out, but one stomach (well, if it's normal sized) can only sample a limited number of boulangeries.

My current favorite place to exit from with a baguette (and maybe a macaron and a croissant) in tow is Poujauran, (7ème), whose baguette de tradition in all its crispy crusted, chewy innards, sweet wheat scented glory made me believe for moment that as long as I had this baguette, nothing else in life was important. Who needs human companionship when you can have long sticks of carbohydrate-based love?

And then I realized that the baguette was merely an inanimate object that tasted especially good, more so with a slathering of butter, and that trading humans for baguettes is probably not a good idea. Luckily, you can have both in your life, unless you are gluten intolerant (or friend intolerant).

Japanese curry.

Japanese curry has been one of my favorite foods for the past ten years. It may look like brown sludge (or worse; I'll let you use your imagination), but thankfully tastes nothing like that or else god knows who would eat it. Japanese curry is a thick, hearty, comforting, and slightly spicy and sweet stew that accompanies rice and usually consists of onions, carrots, potatoes and pork, beef or chicken.

If you crave a hug pot of it like I did this weekend, check out Japanese grocery store Kioko (2ème) where you can choose a box from the shelves of curry mix.

Kioko

The two-level store stocks also stocks ginormous bottles of soy sauce, dipping sauces, a gazillion (give or take a few) types of noodles (soba, udon, ramen, etc), dumplings, fish cakes, tofu, daifuku, bags of rice, tea, alcoholic beverages and Japanese kitchen ware. Of course, they have the quintessential Japanese snack, Pocky (basically the same as the widely available Mikado, although I can't say for sure until I eat them side by side).

Pizza Sant'Antonio

Pizza Sant'Antonio (4ème) is a friendly, inexpensive Italian restaurant that specializes in pizza (at least, you should probably order the pizza if it's featured in the name of the restaurant) near the Centre Pompidou.

Most of their pizzas hover around 9€ and provide more than enough cheese and slightly charred thin crust harmony for one person.

Pizza!

Although I've gathered that eating with pizza with your hands is a no-no in Paris and apparently an American habit that I must squash in order to look less barbaric, their crust is substantial enough so that you could pick up a slice without it flopping over. (Of course, I figured this out by eating it with my hands.)

During my visit they were a bit generous with the cheese, which resembled a lava floe on my friend's Marguerite pizza. The cheese looks less menacing if you get a pizza with toppings, such as my Neptune pizza with anchovies, capers, sweet peppers, tuna, egg and olives, but you may want to ask for less.

Addresses

Poujauran
18, rue Jean Nicot, 7ème
Metro: La Tour-Moubourg (8)

Kioko
46, rue des Petits Champs, 2ème
Metro: Pyramides (7, 14)

Pizza Sant'Antonio
16, r St Martin, 4ème
(the map looks wrong; the restaurant is very close to the Pompidou)
Metro: Hôtel de Ville, Châtelet (1)