Lunch in Paris Quotes

“They weren't tears of sadness or even tears of joy. I was just overflowing. Like so many things since I'd been here, I didn't yet understand it, but I felt it.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“No better way to avoid making a decision than burying yourself in a big fat book.” (p. 105).”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“For the record, I'm not an indecisive person, and I'm not a coward. I just have a very detailed imaginary life, and it sometimes takes precedence over what's actually happening around me.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“If "Sex and the City" taught us anything, it's that Paris is the only city in the world that New Yorkers actually fantasize about.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“It's simple: Women who pick at their food hate sex. Women who suck the meat off of lobster claws, order (and finish) dessert- these are the women who are going to rip your clothes off and come back for seconds.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“Mostly I’m a thinker, a worrier … it’s not that there’s no free spirit in me. But it’s a free spirit with a five-year plan”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“I was living "every girl's" dream. But I had yet to find my own passion, my personal project, the thing that would help make Paris mine.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“A French portion is half of an American portion, and a French meal takes twice as long to eat. You do the math.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“In Paris the past is always with you: you look at it, walk over it, sit on it.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“People grow, but they don't change.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“I love the way the rain melts the colors together, like a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. There is a moment, just after sunset, when the shops turn on their lights and steam starts to fog up the windows of the cafés. In French, this twilight time implies a hint of danger. It's called entre chien et loup, between the dog and the wolf.
It was just beginning to get dark as we walked through the small garden of Palais Royal. We watched as carefully dressed children in toggled peacoats and striped woolen mittens finished the same game of improvised soccer we had seen in the Place Sainte Marthe.
Behind the Palais Royal the wide avenues around the Louvre gave way to narrow streets, small boutiques, and bistros. It started to drizzle. Gwendal turned a corner, and tucked in between two storefronts, barely wider than a set of double doors, I found myself staring down a corridor of fairy lights. A series of arches stretched into the distance, topped with panes of glass, like a greenhouse, that echoed the plip-plop of the rain. It was as if we'd stepped through the witch's wardrobe, the phantom tollbooth, what have you, into another era.
The Passage Vivienne was nineteenth-century Paris's answer to a shopping mall, a small interior street lined with boutiques and tearooms where ladies could browse at their leisure without wetting the bustles of their long dresses or the plumes of their new hats.
It was certainly a far cry from the shopping malls of my youth, with their piped-in Muzak and neon food courts. Plaster reliefs of Greek goddesses in diaphanous tunics lined the walls. Three-pronged brass lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains.
About halfway down, there was an antique store selling nothing but old kitchenware- ridged ceramic bowls for hot chocolate, burnished copper molds in the shape of fish, and a pewter mold for madeleines, so worn around the edges it might have belonged to Proust himself. At the end of the gallery, underneath a clock held aloft by two busty angels, was a bookstore. There were gold stencils on the glass door. Maison fondée en 1826.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“That's the real reason why French women don't get fat: every day they make "petites" decisions that keep the larger weight loss struggle from ever having to begin.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“He was still open to the magic of this place. I didn't know a lot of people who were open to magic at all.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“A picnic basket in Paris is like a treasure chest- untold riches in a limited space. The first apricots had appeared at the market, their skins fading from speckled red to glowing orange to burnished gold, like the sun-bleached walls of an Italian villa. There were tiny cucumbers, as thick as my thumb and curled like a ribbon. I'd become obsessed with a new fruit called a pêche plat, a flat peach. Imagine a perfectly ripe white peach that someone has sat on. Gwendal picked up a tomato and bit into it like an apple. I did the same.
At the bottom of the basket was a carefully folded square of waxed paper. Inside was a small mound of rillettes, shredded pork cooked in its own fat until meltingly smooth.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“Paris presented different questions. If no one asked me for the rest of my life what I did for a living, how much money I made, who I knew, where I went to school—what would I want to do with my time? What if I stopped to ask myself what would make me happy, instead of what would make me successful, respectable, worthy? If that answer had to come from the inside, rather than the outside, what would it be? Afra”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“My inner control freak had taken the day off... I had descended from the mountain of the perfect, into the valley of the possible, and was now on the happy shaded trail, dappled with sunlight, of the present. It was the most wonderful walk of my life.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“A French conversation starter is more subtle. Work is considered boring, money is out of the question, politics comes later (and only in like-minded company). Vacation is a safe bet - it's no exaggeration to say that French people are always going on, returning from, or planning a holiday. But more often than not, social class in France is judged by your relationship to culture.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“He carefully poured the juice into a bowl and rinsed the scallops to remove any sand caught between the tender white meat and the firmer coral-colored roe, wrapped around it like a socialite's fur stole.
Mayur is the kind of cook (my kind), who thinks the chef should always have a drink in hand. He was making the scallops with champagne custard, so naturally the rest of the bottle would have to disappear before dinner. He poured a cup of champagne into a small pot and set it to reduce on the stove. Then he put a sugar cube in the bottom of a wide champagne coupe (Lalique, service for sixteen, direct from the attic on my mother's last visit). After a bit of a search, he found the crème de violette in one of his shopping bags and poured in just a dash. He topped it up with champagne and gave it a swift stir.
"To dinner in Paris," he said, glass aloft.
'To the chef," I answered, dodging swiftly out of the way as he poured the reduced champagne over some egg yolks and began whisking like his life depended on it.
"Do you have fish stock?"
"Nope."
"Chicken?"
"Just cubes. Are you sure that will work?"
"Sure. This is the Mr. Potato Head School of Cooking," he said. "Interchangeable parts. If you don't have something, think of what that ingredient does, and attach another one."
I counted, in addition to the champagne, three other bottles of alcohol open in the kitchen. The boar, rubbed lovingly with a paste of cider vinegar, garlic, thyme, and rosemary, was marinating in olive oil and red wine. It was then to be seared, deglazed with hard cider, roasted with whole apples, and finished with Calvados and a bit of cream. Mayur had his nose in a small glass of the apple liqueur, inhaling like a fugitive breathing the air of the open road.
As soon as we were all assembled at the table, Mayur put the raw scallops back in their shells, spooned over some custard, and put them ever so briefly under the broiler- no more than a minute or two. The custard formed a very thin skin with one or two peaks of caramel. It was, quite simply, heaven.
The pork was presented neatly sliced, restaurant style, surrounded with the whole apples, baked to juicy, sagging perfection.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“I ordered a salad with smoked salmon. I know that doesn't sound like a particularly decadent repast, but it is. That's because the French long ago mastered the art of serving salad so it doesn't feel like a punishment for something. There are always a few caramel-crusted potatoes on your salade niçoise, or a plump chicken liver or two bedded down in a nest of lamb's lettuce. A lot of this has to do with what is called a tartine- a large thin slice of country bread (Poilâne if you're lucky) topped with anything from melted goat cheese to shrimp and avocado.
My lunch arrived, a well-worn wooden planche heaped with pillowy green lettuce, folded in a creamy, cloudy, mustardy vinaigrette. Balanced on top where three half slices of pain Poilâne, spread with the merest millimeter of butter, topped with coral folds of salmon.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“He took out a carrot and thee onion half. I'm not sure I'd ever seen anyone use half an onion. Or rather, I'd never seen anyone save half an onion he hadn't used. The real secret ingredient, however, was the package of lardons fumés- plump little Legos of pork- deep pink and marbled with fat. He dumped them into a pan with the chopped vegetables (he may have washed the pan from the charlotte), and the mixture began sizzling away. A box of tagliatelle, the pasta spooled like birds' nests, completed the meal.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“I thought about Gwendal and his non-recipes - throwing this and that into the pan. This no longer seemed like a totally foreign idea to me. I'd become so experimental in the kitchen, embracing unknown ingredients and making things up as I went along. Could I learn to do that for other parts of my life? In France, composing a well-balanced meal is easy; a well-balanced life is another story. How could I keep my American just-do-it attitude without the accompanying fear of failure? How could I keep the French pleasure of savoring the moment while still building for the future?”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“I watched the couples walking around the lake, 'Maybe it's the New Yorker in me. I'm too used to rushing around. But everyone here is so relaxed, it's like they're moving in slow motion.'

'Why should they rush? They're not going anywhere.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“To start, there were small salads- the thinnest slivers of red and yellow pepper, slow roasted and glistening with olive oil, and the simplest blend of carrots and golden onions, heady with the smell of cumin.
Then came the fish, its sauce simmered with saffron and tomatoes, thickened with ground almonds. I served myself the merest spoonful or two. "Elle est stratégique." Affif winked with approval. "She knows what's coming." I wanted to savor every bite, even if it was a small one, nothing blurred by the rebellion of a tired palate. I plucked a toothpick out of the end of an oblong white calamari. It was stuffed with rice and peppers, a curly violet-tipped tentacle poking out here and there.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“In the morning, Affif used the leftover couscous to make us a kind of sweet porridge, drizzling hot milk and honey over the grains and dotting the casserole with small nuggets of butter.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“There was still a line, but a bit of waiting was a good thing; you need time to choose between pink grapefruit and raspberry sorbet or cinnamon and honey nougat ice cream. They serve golf ball-sized scoops, so you have to be a real purist to walk away with just one boule. Courtney and I both got doubles- pear and cacao amer (bitter chocolate) for her, peach and rhubarb for me.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“There was a florist at the corner, closed for the night. I stopped in my tracks. Along with the heavy branches of lilacs and tangled stems of forsythia was a fluffy mound of tiny sleeping chicks- a living, breathing Easter basket. Paris continued to surprise me; instead of the slick consumerism of a twenty-first-century world capital, it was the little things, the living things, that made me smile.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“I glanced down at the menu, relieved that although I hadn't taken a French class since my sophomore year in college, I still recognized most of the words. Chartier's menu is full of classics: steaks and chops, grilled sea bass with fennel seed, sweet chestnut purée, and wine-soaked prunes. What girl could resist the charm of a restaurant that allows you to order a bowl of crème chantilly- simple whipped cream- for dessert?”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“Falling deeply in love with a pastry is easy.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“No better way to avoid making a decision than burying yourself in a big fat book.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“The woman's face was like a stone tablet, as if the president of the chess club had wandered over to the Goth corner of the schoolyard and asked to touch a tongue piercing.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes