Café de Paris
Add: 10 Rue Buci, 5th Arr., Paris
Tel: +33 1 46 34 84 11
Hours: Mon-Sun 8am-2am
Price: [main course] €15-25
Visited: December 2015
We rented a little flat on Rue de Bourbon le Château in the Latin Quarter for our week-long stay in Paris. The area is a bit touristy, but plenty of good bistros, cafés, bakeries, and specialty food stores, so no complaints 😉 This particular bistro was next block from where we lived, so we ate there quite often.
Outdoor tables. Great for people-watching.
Some champagne to start. They had a pretty good wine list by the bottle. But neither of us were great drinkers, and it being the middle of the day, we decided to have two glasses instead.
Oysters! These babies come fresh from the oyster stand across the street. On this visit, the options were somewhat limited. We went for the ones from Brittany. Rather small (no.4 if I remember correctly), but very fresh, very briny. But I still prefer the sweet Gillardeau I had on a subsequent visit.
My travel companion doesn’t like oysters, so I got to finish these all by myself (yay!)
Confit de Canard. The smell alone was amazing! The duck was cooked beautifully. Crispy skin and succulent flesh. But my favorite part of the dish was the potatoes. Cooked in duck fat, they were fragrant beyond belief. Yum!
Salade Niçoise. Not a very traditional Niçoise and looked rather sloppy, but very tasty nonetheless. Tuna cooked very well-beautiful sear on the outside, rare in the middle.
My only criticism is that the egg yolks were grey on the outside 😦 Did they forget to shock the egg in ice water? A rudimentary and slightly disappointing mistake.
All in all, we had a very enjoyable meal (and several more over the next few days). I can’t remember the price for each dish. But the total for the two of us came down to €100, including two glasses of champagne, a bottle of water, and coffee.
journeys of a gourmand 