a food tour gone upside-down and sideways

I sent an email Monday pestering you all to leave thoughts about what you’d want to read here, and I’ll guess I’ve got nothing better to do than to continue being a pest. So if you’ve got thoughts, leave ’em here. And if you don’t, ignore me and keep on reading. I appreciate so much that so many of you have been.

I hate being wrong. It’s genetic and also pragmatic. I was raised by a man who, somehow, is almost always right, and I spend a whole lot of time and energy trying my hardest to avoid being wrong. I research. I double-check. I have decent common sense.

Last year in Paris, I was wrong.

Jesse (that’s my husband) and I were there for three nights, and it was his first trip to Europe. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Paris several times and fall completely under its spell, and I felt a self-imposed pressure to show it off in the most dazzling, memorable way I could muster. I’d done a couple food-centric walking tours in the past, and I figured we should do another — but I decided it had to be better than the perfectly great experiences I'd had in the past.

So instead of booking a tour through a company I’d used before, I clicked myself into a cleverly disguised Internet vortex of hell. I read blogger recommendations, swiped through Instagram stories and landed on a site that offered to sell me a personalized food and beverage tour of one of the most decadent cities on earth.

For the purpose of this newsletter, I won’t name names. Let’s call our guide Muzzy, for the sake of injecting one iota of irreverence into the tale I’m about to tell. Muzzy had worked in the Paris restaurant scene. Muzzy seemed reputable, interesting, cool. (Always beware of cool.) So I picked a date and paid Muzzy, and we exchanged emails. Tell me what you like, Muzzy wrote, and that’s what we’ll do.

We met Muzzy at a wine bar that was one of the chicest places I’ve ever imbibed. That’s where Muzzy shared exactly one intelligent, open-minded thought: “Drink what you like.” Muzzy then proceeded to tell us everything we liked was trash. Muzzy called Jesse a loser for nearly knocking over a glass in a bar that felt a little bit like the room down the rabbit hole after Alice eats the cake.

Over the course of the night, which did include a pretty stunning piece of sticky, Korean-spiced fried chicken, Muzzy told us we ate oysters wrong. Muzzy told us we talked to waitstaff wrong. Muzzy told us we wanted to eat cheese at the wrong time. Muzzy ignored my repeated requests to have some red wine — requests I made only after Muzzy asked me what, exactly, I wanted to drink next.

Muzzy did all of this while telling us there are no wrong answers when it comes to food and drink, no need for pretension. I wondered if I’d suffered a head injury, if this was all a hallucination. Jesse took to speaking in grunts. When we finally escaped, we were hungry. I wished I were drunk.

our walk home was lovely

It took me another day and a transcontinental flight to no longer feel like a two-inch tall Neanderthal, both because of Muzzy and because I’d been the one to arrange this expensive evening of belittlement. It took another few weeks before I could laugh about the whole ordeal, and now, I only feel a little bit sick to my stomach every time I think about it. Mostly, I remember the one non-demeaning thing Muzzy said.

Drink what you like. Eat what you like. Taste the flavors you like to taste. Jesse loves fruity cocktails and hates full-bodied wine. I avoid ingesting anything that’s been in the same grocery bag as a cucumber. And that’s okay. When I was a kid and my grandpa came over for dinner, my mom used to take one of the medium-rare filets she’d pan-seared and plop it in the microwave until it was gray. My dad would put mayonnaise on Wagyu beef if given the chance.

And who cares? Sure, maybe my taste buds cried every time the microwave dinged and a sad, leathery steak came to the table. But that’s what my grandpa wanted. At some point, he’d tried something tender and pinkish-red inside, and he’d thought, nope, I’ll stick with my way.

Sometimes, I accidentally stab my oysters when I’m freeing them from their shells. I’ll eat cheese before, after and during whatever meal I please. I’ll swill red wine with halibut and pick the cucumber out of ceviche. None of those things are nearly as wrong as I was about signing us up for that night in Paris.

Here’s a better way to approach eating while exploring Paris: Check out Paris by Mouth. (They also have a great Substack newsletter.) I’ve done two of their tours in Le Marais and have loved both. We visited a boulangerie, a fromagerie and a boucherie, picked up macarons from Pierre Hermé and chocolates at Jacques Genin and sat at a corner table in a tiny oyster bar to enjoy our spoils while we tasted wine. I learned about the differences between corks and screw tops and debated the shortcomings of Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump.

The world’s best falafel shop, L’As du Fallafel, is also in Le Marais. It operates a big window on the Rue des Rosiers, a narrow, pedestrian-only, cobblestone street in the old Jewish quarter. The line often stretches down the block, which is dotted with small boutiques (and a great patisserie, Yann Couvreur), but the falafel people are as good at service as they are at frying chickpeas. Show up hungry, wait it out, and order a sandwich, which will come with falafel (obviously), pickled cabbage, hummus, harissa, fried eggplants and cucumber. It’s so good, I don’t even mind eating around my least favorite vegetable. And don’t worry about getting one of the very few tables inside; these sandwiches are best snarfed on the street under a light Paris mist, in a pack of people all going through the same transformative experience.

Just a short walk away, on the banks of the Seine, is my favorite Paris recommendation for anyone with even a passing interest in cooking: La Cuisine Paris, an English-language cooking school. Like Paris by Mouth, it’s 100 percent geared toward tourists. Turn your nose up if you’d like. All I can report is that it’s wonderful.

A few years ago, I did one of the half-day market classes, which began with a trip to the Marché Maubert. We went in with no shopping list, and the chef whisked us around, sniffing fruit and poking vegetables and getting nose-to-nose with several species of seafood. After he’d assessed the offerings, he conjured a menu out of thin air. We bought pork tenderloins and scallops in their shells, figs and huge bulbs of garlic. Then we marched back across the river and cooked.

Instructions got lost in translation; there were people from four continents wielding knives and mangling scallops. The chef yelled and smiled and lit brandy on fire, and then we all sat around a table by a big window and ate a three-course lunch. I wasn’t hungry again until the next morning.