Two Weeks in Paris (and a Detour to Belgium): An Honest Guide for Food Lovers, Culture Seekers, and the Curiously Lost
April–May 2015
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from stepping off a transatlantic flight at 8:30 in the morning — the light is wrong, your body thinks it’s 2 a.m., and yet the city outside the window is already fully, aggressively alive. That was how Paris greeted me: a Sunday in late April, the RER B rattling me through the suburbs toward the center of the city while I clutched my coffee-deprived face and tried to remember what day it was.
I had two weeks. A rented apartment near Porte de Vincennes, on the eastern edge of the city. A long list of restaurants, museums, markets, and neighborhoods I wanted to absorb. And the great privilege of having a local friend — Mike — who had lived there long enough to know the shortcuts, the hidden gems, and crucially, that the supermarket closes early on Sundays.
This is what I learned.
Getting There Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Wallet)
Let’s start at the beginning, because Charles de Gaulle airport is enormous and confusing and the taxi line will cost you a small fortune if you’re not careful. Skip the taxis entirely. Take the RER B — the blue line — from the airport directly into the city for around 10 euros. It’s fast, reliable, and leaves you at Châtelet les Halles, which is essentially the center of the Paris metro universe.
From Châtelet, switch to Metro Line 1 heading toward Château de Vincennes. If you’ve never ridden the 1 before, do yourself a favor: sit at the front of the train. It’s automated — no driver — and watching the dark tunnel approach through the front window while the city speeds beneath you is a genuinely thrilling way to arrive anywhere.
My stop was Porte de Vincennes, Exit 1. It is not a stop in any guidebook. It does not have a famous café or a notable monument. What it has is a real neighborhood where real Parisians live — a boulangerie that made the best bread I ate for two weeks, a Franprix supermarket in the building’s basement for essentials, and enough quiet on a Sunday morning that you can hear pigeons.
Recommendation: If you’re staying more than a few days in Paris, consider renting an apartment in the 12th arrondissement near Nation or Porte de Vincennes rather than in the tourist corridors of the 1st or 4th. You’ll sleep better, spend less, and accidentally discover things no one has put on a listicle.
The Neighborhood Table: Eating Near the 12th
I made a mistake on my first night. I was jet-lagged and slightly delirious and I needed dinner, so I walked fifteen minutes to Marco Polo at Nation, a bustling Italian restaurant that looked exactly like what it was: a neighborhood institution that has been feeding tired people for decades. I ordered the Crepes Suzette.
I want to be careful here not to oversell a dessert. But these were the best Crepes Suzette I have ever eaten. The sauce was deeply orange, slightly caramelized at the edges, and the waiter flambéed them tableside with the offhand confidence of someone who has done this ten thousand times. Jet lag dissolved. I forgave the flight, the airport, all of it.
For a more ambitious dinner, Les Allobroges at 71 Rue des Grands Champs is a ten-minute walk from the Vincennes area and represents exactly the kind of Paris restaurant that food writers have been mourning the death of for thirty years while it quietly continues to exist. Bring cash — they prefer it. It’s closed Monday and runs a traditional lunch service (noon to 2pm) and dinner from 7 to 10pm with no dinner on Sunday. The kind of place where you feel slightly underdressed and also exactly welcome.
On the Cours de Vincennes, within easy walking distance, Au Régal Couscous handles the evenings when you want something warming and generous and North African in a way that reminds you that Paris’s food culture extends far beyond baguettes and butter. The North African immigrant community has shaped French cuisine profoundly, and the couscous restaurants in the outer arrondissements are where you actually taste it.
Recommendation: Don’t eat every meal in a restaurant. The Wednesday street market on Cours de Vincennes runs from 7am to 2:30pm and is a genuine working market — roast chickens on spits, cheese vendors who will let you taste everything, produce stacked in arrangements that feel almost theatrical. Buy lunch there. Eat it on a bench. This is not a tourist experience; it is just life, and you are briefly inside it.
La Régalade Saint-Honoré: The Meal Worth Planning Around
On my fourth evening — a Wednesday — I had an 8pm reservation at La Régalade Saint-Honoré, 123 Rue Saint-Honoré, and I want to give this restaurant its own section because it deserves one.
La Régalade is a bistro in the best possible sense of the word: not precious, not trendy, not interested in Instagram. Chef Bruno Doucet runs a kitchen that produces food of genuine seriousness at prices that seem, even in Paris, like a slight accounting error in your favor. The prix-fixe format means you’re eating what they want to cook, which is how it should be. The bread arrives in a terrine and you are expected to help yourself as many times as you want, which is a civilized policy.
Getting there: Metro Line 1 to Louvre-Rivoli. Walk. Arrive at 8pm. Do not make plans for afterward because you will not want to be anywhere else.
Recommendation: Make the reservation before you leave home. It’s not the kind of place you walk into, especially on a weekend. The neighborhood around Rue Saint-Honoré is also excellent for an after-dinner walk — you’re near the Palais Royal gardens, which are lit beautifully at night and completely free to enter.
The Marais: Depth Over Width
Most visitors to the Marais see the Place des Vosges, eat a falafel on Rue des Rosiers, and move on. This is fine but incomplete. The Marais — Paris’s 3rd and 4th arrondissements — contains a density of history that rewards slow walking and low expectations.
Maison Victor Hugo, at 6 Place des Vosges, is free and runs from 10am to 6pm. Victor Hugo lived here for sixteen years and the apartment has been preserved with the kind of obsessive exactitude the French apply to their cultural monuments. The Place des Vosges outside is the oldest formal square in Paris and still one of the most beautiful — red brick arcades, a central garden, children playing, old men reading. It does not need to be anything more than what it is.
The Musée Carnavalet, also free, is the museum of Paris’s own history and it is extraordinary. Two hôtels particuliers connected and filled with objects spanning from prehistoric Paris through the Revolution through the Belle Époque — furniture, paintings, reconstructed interiors, room-sized installations. Budget three hours minimum and arrive early. The Proust room alone is worth the visit: his cork-lined bedroom, reconstructed in full.
For something quieter: Musée Cognacq-Jay, free, 10am to 5pm at 8 Rue Elzevir, is a collection of 18th-century decorative arts assembled by the founders of the La Samaritaine department store. It sits inside another hôtel particulier and gets almost no visitors, which means you can stand alone in rooms full of Fragonards and Watteaus and feel, briefly, like a person of extraordinary wealth and taste.
And then there is Les Enfants Rouges — the oldest covered market in Paris, operating since 1615, at 39 Rue de Bretagne. Open Tuesday through Saturday 8:30am to 1pm and 4pm to 7:30pm, Sunday mornings only. There are perhaps a dozen food stalls inside: Moroccan, Japanese, Antillean, traditional French. Lunch here costs twelve euros and tastes like it cost three times that. The market is named for the red uniforms worn by the orphan children who once lived nearby, and it is the kind of place that makes you feel grateful simply for being in it.
Recommendation: Schedule a full day in the Marais and plan nothing beyond a rough neighborhood loop. Start with Musée Carnavalet, walk through Place des Vosges, visit Maison Victor Hugo, then drift toward the covered market for lunch. Spend the afternoon in Musée Cognacq-Jay. End with a drink somewhere on the Rue de Bretagne. This is not a tour; it’s a day well spent.
The Free Museum Economy
Paris has an extensive system of free municipal museums that most visitors never discover because they’re busy queuing for the Louvre. Here is the list that matters:
- Musée Zadkine, 100 bis Rue d’Assas: The sculpture garden and studio of Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine, hidden in the 6th arrondissement. Free, 10am-6pm, closed Monday. You will likely have it almost entirely to yourself.
- Musée Bourdelle, 18 Rue Antoine Bourdelle: Emile-Antoine Bourdelle was Rodin’s student and the studio complex here — with its magnificent great hall — is one of the most atmospheric art spaces in the city. Free, 10am-6pm, closed Monday.
- Musée de la Vie Romantique, 16 Rue Chaptal: The former home of painter Ary Scheffer, with a rose garden that is absurdly charming in late spring. Free, 10am-6pm, closed Monday. George Sand memorabilia. Excellent tearoom.
- Musée de la Préfecture de Paris (Paris Police Museum), 4 Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève: An extraordinary curiosity — two floors of guillotine blades, criminal artifacts, evidence from famous cases, uniforms, and weapons spanning five centuries of Parisian law enforcement. Free, 9am-5pm, closed Sunday. Almost no one goes. You should go.
- Maison de Balzac, 47 Rue Raynouard: The house where Balzac hid from his creditors and wrote several of the Comédie Humaine novels. Free, 10am-6pm, closed Monday.
Recommendation: Buy the Paris Museum Pass for the big ticketed sites (Louvre, Sainte-Chapelle, Arc de Triomphe) and then build entire days around the free museums. The free museums are frequently better.
On the Louvre specifically: go early, use the Richelieu wing entrance to avoid the main pyramid queue, and do not try to see everything. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa (crowded but worth it), and the Napoleon III Apartments — that’s a morning. The rest requires a different trip.
The Markets: Where the City Actually Lives
If you visit Paris and skip the markets, you have visited a Paris that does not fully exist.
Marché d’Aligre in the 12th arrondissement (Tues-Sun) is the best food market in Paris that tourists haven’t yet colonized. A covered hall for cheese, meat, and fish; an outdoor produce market that spills onto the square; a flea market section selling used books, vintage clothing, and objects of uncertain origin. Get there by 9am before the best produce goes.
Marché Mouffetard in the 5th — Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sunday 9am-1pm, Metro: Censier-Daubenton — is older and more famous and correspondingly more photogenic. The street itself dates to the Roman era and the market stalls have been here, in various forms, for centuries. Buy cheese. Buy bread. Buy wine. Eat on the steps of the fountain at the bottom of the street.
Boulevard Richard Lenoir near Bastille runs Thursday and Sunday mornings and is where the Parisians of the 11th do their actual shopping. Long, sprawling, unpretentious. A whole roast chicken for eight euros. Strawberries in season. The best olives.
For flea markets: Les Puces de Vanves (Sat-Sun, 8am-7pm, Metro: Porte de Vanves) is smaller, less touristy, and better for actual finds than the more famous Clignancourt market to the north. Come early, bring cash, and do not make eye contact with anything you desperately want before you’ve checked the price.
The flower markets deserve their own mention. Place Lépine on the Île de la Cité (Mon-Sat, 8am-7:30pm) transforms into a bird market on Sunday mornings — an experience that is bizarre, charming, slightly melancholy, and completely unlike anything else in the city.
Off the Beaten Path: A Few Specific Suggestions
Café la Palette, 43 Rue de Seine, 6th arrondissement: Over a hundred years old, decorated with the palettes of the painters who drank here, perpetually full of people who look like they’ve been coming since before you were born. Order a pichet of wine and a croque-monsieur and don’t rush.
The Sewer Museum (Musée des Égouts): Closed Thursday and Friday, open 11am-4pm other days, tickets on the left bank side near the Pont de l’Alma. Tours are in French only, which adds to the absurdity. Paris’s sewer system is genuinely remarkable — a 19th-century engineering marvel that runs beneath every street. The smell is exactly what you expect.
Père-Lachaise Cemetery, 16 Rue du Repos: Open every day, free, and one of the most extraordinary places in Paris. More than one million people are buried here, including Chopin, Proust, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and Molière. It is not morbid; it is a park where the inhabitants happen to be permanent. There is a documentary called Forever about this place that is worth watching before you go.
City-Pharma, 26 Rue du Four in Saint-Germain: Not cultural, not historical, but useful. This is where you buy French pharmacy products — La Roche-Posay, Bioderma, Vichy, Caudalie — at prices significantly lower than anywhere else. The queue moves fast. The haul is worth it.
Bus Routes 29, 69, 72, and 73: These four bus routes together cover an extraordinary amount of ground and are used primarily by Parisians, not tourists. Route 69 alone passes the Louvre, the Tuileries, Saint-Germain, the Musée d’Orsay, and eventually reaches Père-Lachaise. A carnet of bus tickets costs less than a museum entry fee and gives you the city at ground level, at human speed.
A Day (or Three) in Belgium
On a Thursday in early May, I took the Thalys train from Paris Nord — departing at 11:22am, arriving Brussels Midi at 1pm — for a stay with a friend outside the city in Zaventem, a village to the northeast of Brussels.
A practical note for anyone doing this: from Brussels Midi, take the local train to Zaventem (dorp) — the village station — and not Zaventem-Nationaal-Luchthaven, which is the airport station and costs more. There are three trains per hour and the Belgian rail website (belgianrail.be) is in English and genuinely easy to use.
Belgium is not Paris and it doesn’t try to be. It is smaller, quieter, more self-deprecating, and obsessed with beer, chocolate, and frites in a way that feels earned rather than performative. Brussels has the Grand Place — one of the most beautiful medieval squares in Europe — and the Magritte Museum, and neighborhood restaurants that have been serving the same classics for generations. If you have a friend with a car, the Belgian countryside in May is green in a way that feels almost theatrical.
What struck me most about crossing into Belgium was the change in register. Paris performs its own beauty constantly; it knows you’re watching and it adjusts accordingly. Belgium doesn’t care. The food is honest and generously portioned and the beer menus are seventeen pages long and the people seem faintly amused that you’ve come all this way to be here.
Recommendation: Even if you’re primarily in Paris, build in at least a day trip to Brussels. The Thalys is fast and comfortable and the contrast sharpens your appreciation for both cities.
Practical Notes for the Careful Traveler
A few things I wish I’d known or almost forgot:
The Eiffel Tower at night: The tower is illuminated continuously, but at the top of every hour after dark — from first nightfall until approximately 1am — it sparkles for ten minutes in cascading lights. Do not leave Paris without seeing this. Do not pay to go to the top (the queues are ruinous); stand at the Trocadéro or along the Seine with a bottle of wine and watch it from below.
Monday closings: The vast majority of Paris’s free municipal museums are closed on Monday. Plan accordingly. Mondays are good for markets, the Louvre (which is open and slightly less crowded), and long walks.
The Rodin Museum garden: The museum itself was under renovation during my visit, but the sculpture garden — with the Thinker, the Gates of Hell, and Burghers of Calais spread across immaculate grounds — was open and beautiful. It’s one of the best things in Paris and most people rush past it on their way to the Eiffel Tower, which is visible from the garden’s back wall.
Bring cash to neighborhood restaurants: Several of the best places in the outer arrondissements don’t take cards or prefer not to. Les Allobroges specifically requests cash. This is Paris being Paris; bring 60-80 euros in cash as a baseline.
Don’t go to Montmartre on weekends: This is advice from someone who has done it. The Sacré-Coeur is beautiful, the view is wonderful, and on a Saturday in tourist season the climb through the crowds is an exercise in frustration. Go on a Tuesday morning when the light is good and the selfie-stick vendors are not yet fully operational.
Two weeks is enough time to fall in love with Paris and nowhere near enough time to understand it. The city is stratified — different lives happening at different altitudes, different rhythms in different arrondissements, different versions of itself depending on the hour and the weather and whether you’ve eaten yet.
What I keep coming back to, months later, is not the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower but the smaller things: the bread from the boulangerie downstairs, the Crepes Suzette at Marco Polo, the early morning light over the Cours de Vincennes market, standing in a room of Watteaus at Musée Cognacq-Jay with no one else around. These are not the things in guidebooks. They are the things that happen when you slow down enough to let the city be itself.
Go. And take the RER B.