Weekend Hospitality

I'm in Paris on an academic trip. The bad news it that I need to be here for Shabbat. The good news is that I finally found the correct neighborhood in which to stay. The traditional jewish tourist neighborhood is mainly old mizrachi (algerian and tunisian). Its very close to the tourist sites. The problem is that its not a particularly nice neighborhood and that all the food is mizrachi. If you like honey in your pastries, then go there. This trip, I am staying in the 17th Arrondissement. Its much more of a white collar place and the restaurants reflect that focus. Its a bit far from the touristy things, but the metro is everywhere and easy to use. Here is a map I made of the kosher locations. On Wednesday night, I ate at a fancy at a french restaurant called Brasserie Belvedere, 109 Avenue de Villiers. I tried to order saurkraut in wine, but the waiter suggests that it was a "special" dish that I would not like. Instead, I had salmon and then chicken and no...

From Paris OneLab2 Operations Meeting I had the opportunity to spend three days in Paris this week.  Contrary to the general opinion of the french as anti-semitic and ungracious, I found the place to be very nice.  Our hosting organization (LIP6) were generous and helpful.  It is traditional is such meeting to have a group dinner one night.  Since two of us keep kosher, we were able to find a nice kosher chinese/japanese place call L'Asiatik .  The place is small, but the food was reasonably priced and no-one seemed to complain. We arrived around 2pm on the first day and had meetings until after 6pm.  My compatriots and I had missed lunch and were really dragging.  We tried to find our hotel, but probably because of our low blood sugar levels, we confused the address with the cross street.  After walking about two miles with our luggage, we took a cab back to our starting point.  Our hotel was about two minutes away!  After that experience, we needed to find food and fast.  It took...