One thing I absolutely love about Paris is how affordable it is to stay cultured and educated. With photography exhibits, gallery openings and plays available at any given time, the city is ripe with activities to make everyone less dopey and a little more enlightened.
My weekend started off with an amazing brunch with friends at Rose Bakery which never fails to impress. The only missing element was Emily, an ardent devotee. Owned by a British-French couple, this organic English hotspot always has lines out the door (English speakers and Parisians alike) and offers a diverse menu from salads and tarts to homemade yogurt, pancakes and traditional English porridge. They also sell a variety of British products (excellent natural peanut butter, I must say) and all of the dishes can be ordered to go. As soon as you walk into either of their two locations, you’re instantly greeted by a long glass case of drool-worthy baked goods: carrot cake, marble cake, pistachio cake, green tea cake, brownies, cupcakes, fresh from the oven scones and breads, berry crumbles and more. With a menu on the pricier side, the quality of the everything they serve makes it worth the extra euros. If you’re savvy in the kitchen, you can make your favorite Rose delights at home with their codified recipes in “Breafkast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Little Meals of Rose Bakery”.
I’ve had their fluffy pancakes and their scrambled eggs so I decided to opt for the veggie platter, which was outstanding, followed by the carrot cake (seen in the above photo on the left) which I found slightly dry and in need of more carrot. The menu remains relatively consistent with slight seasonal changes (see below).
Courtesy of Haut Marais blog
Next it was off to the Coney Island photo exhibit that Anne (Pret à Voyager) told me about. I didn’t get to go to the vernissage last Thursday where visitors were served the finest of Coney Island cuisine – nuggets, oreos, cotton candy and margaritas but Ced and I were lucky enough to get to sit down and have a coffee with both photographers, Frenchy Baptiste Lignel and his partner in the project Johnny Miller, a seasoned New Yorker.
The longtime friends met in New York during their tenure at Parsons and shared a fascination for Coney Island. For a photographer, Coney Island provides unbelievable material – fat, trashy America. And for a foreigner, there is inherent shock value. In an ethnographic study of sorts, the project accurately displays the raw demographic of CI’s current visitors. Baptiste photographed the people and Johnny captured the objects left behind – images that when juxtaposed with one another form a telling narrative.
“In Coney Island, fat is open, available and everwhere, on the beach, on the boardwalk, in the water, and people don’t seem to be camera-shy, even the very big ones. As long as you peak a bit of Spanish, almost everyone is cool in Coney Island. No show off. No investment bankers. No anorexic models for a change….All in all, colors and shapes embrace and marry as harmoniously as a frankfurther with a roll, bringing a new meaning to the surrounding fat and dirt” (Sophie & Bruce Gilden)
Never before have I been to any exposition or exhibit where I was able to pick the brain of the master behind the work. Johnny talked about his expectations for the project, its future and what fascinates him about photographing objects – the stories they tell and what they reveal about a person. We even got him to talk about what Martha Stewart is really like since he does quite a lot of work for her publications. You’ll have to go to the return of Coney Island on November 12th if you want to find out what he said!
Finally, it was off to see the comedy “Le Clan des Divorcées” at the Rive Gauche Theater in the 13th. We had relatively good seats and bought our tickets from Billets Reduc for 13 euro instead of 35+. Not a bad deal for an evening at the theater.
Sunday continued with a 3 hour brunch with some girlfriends at Supernature, also a completely organic restaurant known as much for its healthy fare as for the naked farm girl photo hanging on the wall. Absolutely delicious meal.
We’ll see what next weekend brings….
