Drinking in Paris

"It's five o'clock somewhere" definitely applies in Paris. (Not that anyone here would be familiar with that phrase or why we Americans would even need to justify some day drinking.) Passing by cafes on my way to school, I am likely to see people drinking wine or beer as early as 11:30. As you may know, the French are famous for the two-hour lunch, though in these troubled economic times of "la crise" I think that practice is swiftly losing ground. (I myself have yet to spend more than hour eating lunch, and usually not with any alcohol.)

France has no national brand of beer that I'm aware of, but that's fine because they serve plenty of Belgian beer, including my old favorites from The Hague, Leffe and Grimbergen. I think the French are less likely to drink beer with a meal; I usually see it consumed alone. You can usually order beer in two or three different sizes (in centiliters); if you say "pint" here, that usually results in the largest size, which is quite big!

Happy hours are everywhere here and usually include specials for beer and cocktails (but not wine), making it a distinctly American import. I think I mentioned in a previous post that beer is really expensive when you get it at a bar - I bought a six pack of Leffe for the same price as I'd pay for one in a bar. Even with happy hours, you're usually paying around five euros for a beer. It's a much better deal to get a cocktail, which is often the same price and at least is more interesting.

Cocktails here have surprised me, in good and bad ways. I've now heard a few people say that good martinis simply do not exist in Europe, and while I have never ordered a martini here on the basis of that advice, I can say that it's probably true. Some cocktail menus list "martini liquor" as an ingredient in their martinis; essentially, they have a separate, pre-mixed liquor that is supposed to taste like a martini... which probably isn't going to result in the flavor you want. Cocktails often surprise you when they arrive; it's impossible to predict in what kind of glass and with what types of garnishes (even ice) something may or may not be served, whether something will be shaken, stirred, or just layered. I got a drink yesterday (called a Moon Light, for no particular reason) made with champagne, cranberry juice, and "passion" [passionfruit juice]; I had expected it to arrive in a champagne flute, all mixed together; instead it arrived in a mai tai glass, served on the rocks with two straws, and layered so that the cranberry was on the bottom with the lighter ingredients on top.

The pleasant surprise about cocktails in Paris is how international they can be. I have seen caipirinhas on 85% of the cocktail menus. (Caipirinhas are my favorite drink and are made with a Brazilian liquor called cachaça which is similar to rum. It is very, very difficult to find a proper caipirinha outside of Brazil; every one I've tried in the US has disappointed me, but I had one here that wasn't half bad.) I have also seen pisco (a liquor from Peru and Chile) on a number of menus, and tequila seems to be just about everywhere. I'm on the hunt for a place that sells rakija, the dangerously strong liquor found in the former Yugoslavia; there is supposedly a significant population of ex-Yugoslavs here, so it's gotta be somewhere.

We've visited two cocktail bars (owned by the same people) that really pride themselves on creative, complicated, and totally unique drinks. Most drinks contain at least one ingredient that we've never heard of; for instance, I had one containing "Chesapeake Bay Bitters" - definitely not something I've seen, despite growing up in Virginia, and definitely not something I would have expected to find in a cocktail on the other side of the Atlantic. Anyone interested in a unique drink (with a price to reflect the diversity of ingredients) should check out the Experimental Cocktail Club on the right bank and the Prescription Cocktail Club on the left bank.

All of this being said, the French still love their wine. You can get a perfectly decent bottle for under five euros, so it's by far the most cost effective option. We are all on a mission to become much more knowledgeable about wine in general and French wine in particular by the end of the year, so I hope to be able to post something eventually explaining everything I've learned!