Gabrielle #22 – Paris, France

A layabout's guide to the city of lights, love, and all the rest of it.

La Haine (1995)

Paris is underrated. I say this having been a grand total of three times, once on a flying 24-hour visit to cover Jamiroquai’s comeback show in 2017. That was back when music journalism still existed, obviously. The PR company put me up in a very expensive hotel, took me for a very expensive meal, and then a very expensive blow out in Bizet’s former mansion, which has been renovated into a club that has maintained all the moulded frescos and sculpted columns of the Rococo era but also, for some reason, added a bust of Michael Jackson at the top of the stairs. A lot happened that night that will stay under lock and key, but I will say this: you haven’t lived until you’ve been daggered under a chandelier*. 

The fruits of all this? Eternal friendships and a voicemail from Jay Kay thanking me for “the best write-up I’ve ever, ever had,” which was basically 2500 words of me bullying him for pausing the show to charge his LED hat. If that doesn’t demonstrate what we lost when venture capitalists gutted all the music publications and handed what was left of the industry over to content creators, I don’t know what does. Though not without its flaws, the death of music journalism represents the death of fun in culture at large.

And that’s why I like Paris. For all its alleged snobbery and servers laughing “ah, you are English!” when you try to use your GCSE French to order a tagine, it’s still effortlessly fun. The metro will take you across the whole city in 15 minutes. Every building is beautiful (for evil reasons, but beautiful all the same). People will tell you to go to small plates restaurants but that’s a waste, because Paris has the best Vietnamese food in Western Europe (also for evil reasons, but delicious all the same). The bars open at 6PM and you can get a slap-up Turkish meal at 2AM. It smells nice when it rains and, when it doesn’t, like any half-decent city of culture, quite powerfully of piss. There are groups of American women in pastel berets everywhere and bin day sounds like Stalingrad but, all things considered, it’s a fair trade-off.

You can go to Paris and do tourism, if you want to spend hours looking at art. Or you can go there and mince about, if you are me. If I’m going away I generally prefer to have a reason for it, which is why I became a journalist (RIP) in the first place , but sometimes it’s nice to just be somewhere else, which is why I went back to Paris earlier this month. There is no better place to do nothing.

Long-suffering free subscribers of this newsletter will be pleased to hear that I’m actually writing something at the moment, so get ready for a needlessly long essay about how much I hate wearing clothes, coming next week. In the meantime, since Paris is the capital of romance, erotica, and all the rest of it, I figured I’d give you a few reccies.

Astoria Bar

This place does an alcoholic variation on the Arnold Palmer called the Laura Palmer, which is enough to get a co-sign from me, but more importantly it has a sexy-but-not-in-a-forced-way vibe. Minimal lighting, exposed brick walls, illustrations of car crashes in the bathroom, banging martini that comes with a respectable three olives in a finely engraved art deco glass. What more do you want? 

KB Coffee 

Killed a few hours here waiting to check into our AirBnB. (I knew we were in for a boss weekend when we showed up and the place reeked of cigarettes and the host – a chef who lived in the adjoining apartment – answered the door barefoot in a Seinfeld cap and said, extremely Frenchly, “I am sorry you have to see me like this.”) I drink coffee black with no sugar, like putting petrol in a car, so if it’s mid I really notice it. And look, I’m not a coffee prick. The best coffee is shit in a cheap way, like diner coffee or the stuff that comes in a styrofoam cup at the hospital, but if it’s shit in an artisanal way there is nothing worse. Obviously Paris has no shortage of nice coffee but the stuff here goes down smooth and it’s in a good spot for people watching and the staff are a laugh. One girl really enjoyed it when I smacked the peak of my husband’s cap into his face because he was winding me up. Proof that physical comedy is the language that transcends all barriers.

Le Carmen

This is Bizet’s old gaff I mentioned up top. It’s one of those places that’s really into gin and has hundreds of different infusions of the stuff, which is something you’ll just have to push past if you’re like me and find that sort of thing really annoying, but the upstairs looks like a palace and the downstairs looks like the club in Blade. Opening hours are midnight to 6AM, which is absolutely correct.

The Liberation of Paris Museum

A few years ago they turned the civil defence shelter where French Resistance fighters organised the liberation of Nazi-occupied Paris into a museum, and it slaps. Does what it says on the tin: takes you through the history of French Resistance in WWII, using a few key individuals as through lines. It’s not as well laid out as the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, which is the same concept but for the Netherlands and probably my favourite historical museum in the world, but they do have Henri Rol-Tanguy’s gun and an underground air raid shelter-turned bunker that was used for plotting and scheming, which you can go down. Comparisons of institutions dedicated to specific aspects of global conflict are definitely what you subscribe to this sex newsletter for, yeah? I bet you are excited to read on.

24 Rue de Poitou

Random bit of street where Vinz threatens to kill the skinhead in La Haine. Fuck the Eiffel Tower.

Petit Saigon

There are probably dozens of Vietnamese restaurants around the city that will change your life, but I’m throwing in for this one because it has nice walls, was mostly filled with local Vietnamese families having dinner with their kids, and they’re doing things with sa-te in there that will blow your mind. Also, it’s opposite Saint-Joseph des Carmes church, which served as a prison during the Revolution. So if you want to house spring rolls in the shadow of the site where 49 aristocrats were executed for conspiracy, this is your spot.

Watching A Film About Paris On A Laptop In Bed At Night With The Window Open And The Sounds Of The Streets Drifting In And Maybe Having A Cigarette As Well

I recommend Billy Wilder’s 1954 romantic caper Sabrina, if only for the bit where Audrey Hepburn says: “I don’t want to go to Paris, I want to die.”

Église Saint-Sulpice

If you do one bait tourist thing, make it this. It’s so beautiful I almost dropped to my knees and embraced Catholicism in a way my comp school R.E. teacher could only have dreamed about. And there’s definitely something up with the place, existentially, because I’ve never been in a church and seen so many people visibly in crisis. Entered and immediately clocked this young lad who sort of looked like a waifish Jeremy Allen White talking urgently to a priest, Fleabag-style. I saw him again later, kneeling in front of the monument statue of the Virgin Mary praying the rosary, and a little girl wearing a fluffy cat ears headband walked up and started copying him until her mother dragged her off. There were multiple confessions taking place. Lots of men there alone dressed in a way that suggested they just nipped over on lunch. Like 300% more sculptures of grim reapers than is normal for a place of worship.

Rue Gabrielle

Duh.

But if you need more of a reason, Picasso had a studio on this street during his era of abject poverty and Carles Casagemas killed himself in it.

*By someone who is now a dear friend and beloved patron of this newsletter. Shout out Jamiroquai. Lifelong bonds were formed.