I have done my best to avoid the busy little rue des Escouffes since a humiliating incident when I first arrived in Paris involving an order of pork bones (needed to make David Chang’s ramen broth) at what I had not realised (despite the extensive range of chicken sausages) was a Jewish butcher. Not kosher, not kosher at all.

So with head bowed I bolted past the boucherie and into Miznon, the pumping little cafe on the corner. Run by Frenchman David Moyle, Miznon is the Parisian branch of Eyal Shani’s excessively popular fast food pita restaurant in Tel Aviv.

When Kipfler Sutherland, Gwyneth Poultry and I arrived, on this particularly sunny Thursday, the place was utterly frenetic. Waiters were yelling out names Starbuck’s style over eclectic Israeli beats, and pitas were being ferried around like a game of pass-the-parcel.  The decor is rustic with its concrete floors, counters of polished wood and steel, mismatched industrial lampshades and random piles of vegetables sporadically placed throughout the room and the menu, which looks like someone has left it mid-way through a brainstorming session, is scrawled in multicoloured chalk on a blackboard at the back of the restaurant, and is nigh impossible to decipher.

Miznon offers a vast range of pita fillings to suit all palates, including chickpea topped with boiled egg and green chilis, freshly cooked minute steak with an optional egg, spiced fish, freshly marinated tuna, and hummus, amongst others. As it turns out there were no non-pita salad options (more’s the pita), and Miznon’s signature slow roasted chicken salad pita was not yet ready, so I went for the lamb kebab pita with sides of roasted cauliflower and ratatouille, Kipfler Sutherland ordered the boeuf bourguinon pita, and, on recommendation of the waitress, Gwyneth Poultry chose the minced lamb stuffed-braised cabbage leaf pita.

No sooner had we plonked ourselves on the free stools overlooking the open kitchen then our orders were ready, signalled by a man screaming Eenerande, which he thought was my name (and which all the chefs seemed to find wildly hilarious).

My lamb kebab (which I have only unappealing half eaten photos of due to excessive hunger), although it was more like succulent lamb meatballs, was utterly mouthwatering.  The fresh,warm homemade pita bread was light and fluffy, the meatballs were juicy, incredibly flavoursome and perfectly cooked and the salad was teeming with fresh herbs and spices. Unlike most pitas, with heavy slices of meat or deep fried felafels and overpowering garlic sauce that stays with you for 24 hours and limits all form of pleasant social interaction, at Miznon the pita’s are light and fresh and the sauce subtle.

It was hands down the best pita I have ever eaten.

Kipfler Sutherland claimed his rather Frenchified boeuf bourguinon pita was deliciously flavoured, although he ended up with beef sauce all over his new chinos, while Gwyneth Poultry’s mince-stuffed braised cabbage leaf pita was apparently divine.

The portions are very generous (apparently they do half serves) and by the time we were done with our pitas our jeans were literally bursting at the seams. However we battled on – the side of ratatouille with preserved carrots and a sprinkling of hard boiled egg was absolutely delicious, and had a beautifully sweet, caramelised flavour, and the whole head of roasted cauliflower was a simple, rustic addition and a definite must-order.

We emerged from Miznon and continued our consumption with a cold filter coffee at Fondation, swiftly followed by a spritz or two at La Perle, which inevitably led to glorious deep fried chicken and wine at Verjus Bar à Vin, and ended at 3am with Cucumber Fumant’s and a very spontaneous dancing session at Le Ballroom du Beef Club with Jude Slaw and Grease Witherspoon.

And so it was that in one fell(afel) swoop the detox was a distant memory and I was back to my greedy old self – what a pita indeed.

xoxo

Paris Stilton

And so it is that I found myself out to dinner last Saturday at a wonderful new steak restaurant with my favourite queens Elton Scone, Anchovy Hopkins and Quinoa Reeves – as well as the darling Robert Brownie Jnr and fabulous new Australian exports Penne Zellweger and Jus Barrymore.

Set in what was once The London Tavern – an up-market singles club that turned into somewhat of an institution in the 70’s – the lavish 3-storey steak and whiskey bar Steaking is the latest hip haunt to grace Saint-Germain-des-Prés with its presence.

When our merry team arrived for our 8.30pm booking we were the only people in the restaurant, and with the muted grey tones, opulent chandeliers and shadowy serpentine staircases conjuring up scenes from Eyes Wide Shut, I momentarily feared it may have been the preferred purlieu of a more ‘swinging’ kind of crowd – but the parlour quickly filled up with carnivorous young Kooples and groups of dashing men donning three piece suits and indoor shoulder scarves.

The menu offers a world-wide contiki tour of steak ranging from Australian wagyu, to American black angus, to Austrian Simmental fillet and an array of quality cuts in between. Robert Brownie Jnr, Jus Barrymore, Penne Zellweger and I all went for the ridiculously tender Argentinian entrecôte with a side of deliciously caramelised bitter endive salad and a pot of potato mash to rival that of Robuchon. The meat was beautifully flavoured and cooked to rare perfection.  Anchovy Hopkins chose the unfortunately named, but wonderfully tasty ‘chuck flap’  black angus, while Quinoa Reeves happily tucked into his 28 day dry aged prime rib from Galice.

Over a bottle or two of Pinot, the conversation merrily flowed from filet mignons and mignon fillies to the psychology of Grindr and Tinder – Penne Zellweger and Elton Scone both agreed that Paris fashion week was doing wonders for ‘online suitor shopping’.

After sharing an unmemorable chocolate fondant and a piece of cheesecake paired with an exceptionally tasty raspberry and basil sorbet, we rolled up the stairs, past the second dining room to the 3rd floor whiskey and cigar bar and entered an otherworldly room of smoke and mirrors and braces and bow ties and taxidermic peacocks, where indoor smoking is entirely au fait and wincing at straight whisky is not.

Our friendly waiter and whiskey-master Joud was a wealth of knowledge about all things single and malty. He whipped the team up some hard hitting old fashioned’s, while Quinoa Reeves and I nursed our Nikka Pure Malt Black’s straight up (it seemed the appropriate thing to do whilst lounging on a dark leather couch under seductive crepuscular lighting).

Although I generally have a proclivity for more laissez-fare Paris institutions, if you’re on the hunt for a good steak you really can’t go past this little gem; the service was prompt and friendly, the setting is truly something to see, and the steak was nothing if not sensational.

Alas, if only finding a tender piece of meat in the metaphorical meat market was as simple as this.

Xoxo

Paris Stilton

Take the microcosm of my street for example, it’s like clockwork – every morning at 6.35am the rubbish trucks rumble down the street and the rubbish men chide each other at the top of their lungs to ensure the whole neighbourhood is fully awake, at 9.30am the motley British bulldog at number 50 grumpily hobbles out for his daily walk, at 10.00am the angry homeless lady who sits outside the supermarket emerges from a cardboard box with her ‘I am hungry’ sign (I bought her a freshly made ham, cheese and salad baguette once and she threw it at me and yelled ‘I am not a bin’), at 11.30am a white terrier with an incredibly strange limp dances down the street to the local cafe, jumps up onto his high chair and watches patiently while his owner sips her espresso, at around 4.00pm as the second daily round of bread is coming out of the oven at the bakery below Monsieur Dupont saunters in, cuts to the front of the line and orders a ‘well cooked’ baguette, at around 4.01pm Monsieur Julien who works at the bakery tells him to go to the back of the line and stop pushing in, and at 7.00pm every night a bearded man stands below my building, whistles once, then yells something that sounds vaguely like “wally” into the distance, and repeats the process three times before leaving.

I too have become quite set in my routine. At 8am on Mondays and Wednesdays I meet Salmon Hayek for a run in Luxembourg Gardens (coincidentally the same time that a group of 50 Parisian fireman set out for their morning run), at 8.30pm on Thursdays Dolly Tatin, Robert Brownie Jr. and I convene for wine and cult movie night, and every Sunday at around 1.00pm I can be found chowing down a burger in a corner booth at Paris hotspot  La Perle with Edith Pilaf.

It’s hard to put your finger on how this unassuming old corner bar (once the scene of the infamous rant that cost John Galliano his job at Dior) came to be a trendy Paris institution.  It certainly isn’t the tired 70’s decor, the harried staff, nor the bitter coffee that keeps people coming back. And yet I seem to find myself there time and time again. I stand by Elton Scone as he flirts with the tribes of dapper dandies spilling onto the heaving terrace on balmy summer nights,  once a week Grease Witherspoon and I will duck in for a quick aperitif and a gossip (once a week Grease Witherspoon and I will stumble out 2 bottles of rose later) and Sienna Millet drags me in for the ‘Bonne Mine’ (‘the looking good’) juice whenever she comes to town. But what I really go back for is the burger – that delicious, sloppy, sauce filled, pickled-up morsel of goodness served with perfectly crispy shoe-string fries.

This burger is seriously something else. It could be the large juicy pickles, it could be the perfectly rare, cheese covered meat patty, it could be the unctuous tangy mayonnaise complete with tid-bits of shallot that is generously smattered on both sides of the bun, or it could be the fact that I am always hungover and ‘hangry’ when I eat it. Either way, it truly has my heart.

The world may be your oyster, but this burger is definitely the Perle.

xoxo

Paris Stilton

Until recently, Le Mosaique in the Marais, the long-standing red and white tiled, hole-in-the-wall hot-dog booth was one of the only purveyors of hot-dogs in Paris.  There is of course the french version which you will find stacked on top of each other in bad bakeries near The Pompidou Centre, but after a recent episode which I will call A Curious Incident of a (Hot) Dog in the Night-Time, I can safely say that there is nothing ok about a turgid boiled red wiener covered in melted emmental and lodged in a pasty white bun.

Never fear, these days hip hot-dog stands are popping up all over town. The team from Hutch Hot Dog House in the 10th whip up a mean New York style chicken dog topped with confit onions, red hot ketchup, cabbage and American mustard; while across town, the messiah of the burger, Little Fernand, has now branched into gourmet dogs with recipes such as the cider-honey mustard sausage – I guess we would call it a haute dog.

There is even a vegan hot dog and burger parlour, East-Side Burger, for those who are more about the soy-sage than the sausage.

So, not wanting to fall behind in the fast-moving world of food trends, Robert Brownie Jr., Katy Peri-Peri and I decided to try our luck with the ‘chien-chaud’ at Glass, the latest venture from the trendy crew behind Candelaria and Le Mary-Celeste.  Located derrière an eery unmarked black door, next to a seedy flourescent-lit sex-shop in a side street in SoPi (South Pigalle) this hot-dog parlour/ speakeasy cocktail bar is pretty darn cool.

The dimly lit room is decked out with walls of broken mirrors, kitsch disco balls and beautiful bobo-chic Parisians sipping novelty cocktails and imported craft beer at the bar. Meanwhile the not-so French clientele sit in booths slugging pints of Brooklyn Lager, knocking back boiler-makers (a shot followed by a chaser of beer) and chowing down hot-dogs.  We were, obviously, the latter.

For the hot-dog, we had the choice between two flavours – the Classic and the Chihuahua. I personally am not into small dogs.  I had images of ordering a Chihuahua and being stuck eating a small fluffy bun with a nasty bite to it. So Robert Brownie Jr. and I went for the Classic – good pure organic beef sausage in a freshly baked bun, ketchup and mustard – it was ok (I wouldn’t want to give a dog a bad name) but it wasn’t wow. 

Katy Peri-Peri’s misleadingly named Chihuahua, however – stuffed with homemade guacomole and pico de gallo, topped with a fresh side order of pickles and oozing with mustard and ketchup, was amazing. It was the god of dogs.

Robert Brownie Jr. and I were seething with food envy.

But, not ones to be upstaged in the food ordering department – we got back on the horse and ordered another dog.

The first hot dog was rather large.  And added to a pint of Brookyn lager, there was definitely no need for a second.  It was gluttonous and greedy and not altogether ideal before a week of sun-bathing in Normandy. But geez was it worth it. The Chihuahua exceeded all my expectations.

As we were munching on our Chihuahuas, I caught a few judgmental stares from the elegant French girls around us, sipping their cocktails and delicately nibbling on their singular hot dog.

But I brushed it off – this mad dog was worth the fatness. And in any event, people in Glass houses really shouldn’t throw stones.

xoxo

Paris Stilton

Nestled in Kings Boulevard in the heart of Kings Cross, there is certainly never a monotonous moment at Eat Street; the fare changes daily as wheeled vendors tour the London market circuit, and new vans are constantly popping up (although an application must be made to, and approved by, the Eat Street team).

When I arrived, with sister Sienna Millet and little brother Burrata Obama on a steaming hot, lazy Thursday afternoon, only a handful of the peripatetic purveyors remained due to a migration southward for the Olympics. But Eat Street made up in quality what it lacked in quantity, and our stomachs were not disappointed.

For a little(ish) bite to whet the appetite, the steamed pork bun from Yum Bun was nothing if not sensational.  The hot soft slow roasted free range Blythburgh pork belly nestling against the cool, crisp cucumber melted into the doughy bun, and generous squirts of hoisin and chilli sauce ran down my smiling face.

One would think the vegetarian counterpart that health-writing herbivore Sienna Millet insisted we get would pale in comparison, but pale it did not. Juicy meaty Portabello mushrooms topped with a sweet miso sauce and crunchy roasted walnuts left me wanting more.

But there were other treats to be sampled.

The Indian spiced burger stall, Bhangra Burger, run by jolly jokester Alec Owen was mine and Burrata Obama’s pick for mains. Spicy, juicy lamb patties with a multitude of hot homemade chutneys, pickles and slaws wrapped up in pitta, with a creamy mango lassi to soothe the tastebuds – nom nom nom.

While dishing up our Crazy Lamb Jalfrezi, Mr Owen, who goes by the stage name Simple Jackson, informed us that he is also releasing his debut rap album today.

Rad wrapper by day, mad rapper by night. What a dude.

I just hope his beats are as hot as his pickles.

For desserts it was a wholly unnecessary but awesomely flavoursome and refreshing watermelon sorbet from the Sorbitium Ices team.

Belt in hand, top button undone, I fell into a smiling slumber on Sienna Millets shoulder in the cab home.

Eat Street is my sort of address.

xoxo

Paris Stilton