What’s not to like about a somewhat out-of-the-way bistrotière like Astier, serving examples of classic French cuisine, keeping the torch alive of a genre that’s become harder to find done right? The pre-fixe menu at Astier is a little gentler at €35, and you can choose from four of five selections in each category. There are more extensive selections on the à la carte side…
I have a bad habit of reading cookbooks while I’m eating, if I’m alone at home. I like flipping through the pages and looking at pictures, but the downside is that too often I get so excited about a recipe that I don’t even finish dinner and head over to the kitchen and start pulling out the tubs of flour and sugar. To avoid malnutrition,…
We’ve had some really nasty weather in Paris during last couple of weeks. Some days were so bitter, dark, and cold that even though I had my heater on full blast, I was bundled up a wool coat and scarf inside of my apartment. And you know it’s really cold in Paris when the normally indifferent teenagers (who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything but…
I was a little perplexed as to what constitutes authentic Mexican Hot Chocolate. Thankfully a reader from Mexico explained to me that unlike other hot chocolate “drinks” in the Mexican repertoire, it traditionally was a mixture of cocoa beans and sweetener. Yet nowadays folks generally use sweet chocolate bars as a base, which are made from coarsely ground chocolate with a dose of cinnamon and…
Last month I was teaching at Central Market, a chain of pretty amazing supermarkets in Texas that has just about anything you can imagine—including cooking classes. And I never pass up the chance to teach there. For one thing, the staff is uniformly excellent and it’s just a pleasure to step into their kitchens and work with them. But the other is that I get…
Many years ago I worked in a restaurant in New York with a group of other cooks, who were mostly women and we were all friends. We’d gather in the cold morning kitchen, working around a communal wooden counter near the warm stove armed with cups of strong coffee as we set about our various tasks while engaging in conversations while doing all the repetitive…
People are surprised that there is a craving amongst a certain crowd (namely transplanted Californians…but with a growing number of Parisian locals) seeking Mexican food in Paris. Like any city with an international population, a variety of ethnic food and places are welcome. Parisians, notably the younger set, are becoming more adventurous about Latin American foods and the quality of Mexican places is getting better, including…
A few years ago I got a message from a nice young couple that had worked their way through each and every recipe in Room for Dessert, my first book, and wanted me to sign their copy. And let me tell you, these kids were really pioneers, as this was well before the “cook every recipe from the book” blogs got so popular—they didn’t even…
{UPDATE: Princess Crêpes closed in September 2019.} I wasn’t on planning on going to Princess Crêpe, which I’d passed a while back and was intrigued (for lack of a better word) by their unusual look. Well it was “different”, as my mother used to politely make me say when something was out-of-the-ordinary. If we were in Harajuku, it’d fit right in. But in Paris, this…
A
Get David's newsletter sent right to your Inbox!
Sign up for my newsletter and get my FREE guidebook to the best bakeries and pastry shops in Paris...
