No.1 The unassuming Michelin three-star restaurant has only 25 tables. Reservations are booked months ahead. Online reservation is now available by clicking the réserver button from their website.
No.2 Dinner starts at 20:15 and is one-seating only. Everybody gets the same surprise menu designed by chef Pascal Barbot.
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The day we visited Petit Palais in Paris
Its courtyard garden was blazing with spring blossoms.
After spending a memorable evening at Palais Garnier, we woke up the next morning to brilliant sunlight.
If you’ve read my post about one dark and stormy night (with a delish chocolate hazelnut cake), you would know that I’d been trying to see Marc Chagall’s paintings in person for years without much success. So when I heard that the Russian-born artist of Belarusian Jewish origin painted the ceiling of the famous opera house in Paris, and that Juan Diego Flórez – a Peruvian tenor who received his country’s highest decoration at the age of 31 – would be performing a recital at Palais Garnier during the time of our visit, I did not waste any time in acquiring a ticket.
“This is what you do on your very first day in Paris. You get yourself, not a drizzle, but some honest-to-goodness rain, and you find yourself someone really nice and drive her through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi. The rain’s very important. That’s when Paris smells its sweetest. It’s the damp chestnut trees.” – I can almost hear Audrey Hepburn saying those words in her 1954 film Sabrina.
In Paris we stayed at Hôtel Saint Paul Rive Gauche in the 6th Arrondissement, a few blocks from the Luxembourg Gardens. On the day of our arrival, after storing away our luggage, we went for a walk.
“It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver gleamed in the windows of the gold and silver smith, and the light that fell obliquely on the cathedral shimmered in the cracks of the grey stones. A flock of birds circled in the blue sky around the trefoils pinnacle turrets.”
