Skip to main content

Breakfast in Paris


Our mothers always told us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and that we have to be sure we include all food groups or the ‘pyramid’: bread or cereals, fruits, dairy,…

But breakfast traditions are different. In Belgium we were used to eat ‘heavy’ breakfasts with bread, butter, eggs, cheese, and ham. The British eat baked beans, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, black pudding, toast and marmalade and in Scandinavia fish is on the breakfast table.

But not in Paris!
Breakfast in Paris is, like lunch, mostly an ‘outdoor’ activity. Only few families have breakfast together during weekdays as most schools offer breakfast for the kids before classes and the parents have ‘something’ on the way to the office.

During my stint in Paris, I usually took my breakfast in the bar/restaurant Le Barbusse in front of our office building. In every neighborhood with offices or workshops there are plenty of those small neighborhood bar/café/restaurants offering breakfast from early in the morning.

What are Parisians calling ‘breakfast’?
Standard is ‘pain beurre’, sliced fresh baguette with creamy butter, sometimes with a little jam and coffee. I always had a ‘café noir’ (strong espresso served with a small sachet of white sugar) but my French colleagues mostly ordered a ‘café crème’, an espresso with steamed milk, served in a larger cup.                                                                                     
Parisians have a sweet tooth when it comes to breakfast. Think of the ‘croissant’, that delicious golden brown pastry made of buttery puff pastry and, even more delicious, the ‘pain au chocolat’, a pastry with melting pieces of chocolate inside. If you are lucky the pastries are oven fresh and still warm when served. Very often Parisians replace their café creme with a hot chocolate and enjoy their bread and butter or croissant dunking in the creamy chocolate drink.

But the neighborhood café/restaurant as the breakfast place to go, have more and more competition of the bakeries whom invested in an espresso machine and a few tables and chairs and offer their fresh crusty baguette with butter and still warm pastries to the customers.



And then there is McDonalds!

In 2004 McDonalds opened the first McCafe in Paris La Defense, where no burgers and fries are served but sandwiches, soups and breakfast! During the day customers can enjoy cakes, pastries, macaroons and specialty coffees as a direct competitor for Starbucks.

Today there are more than 200 McCafe’s in France, a number that is still growing. Globally the McCafe formula seems to be successful with more than 1300 in more than 20 countries, from Paraguay over Australia, Malaysia to the Philippines.

McCafe is a total different style, it’s more like Starbucks, as the breakfast formulas offered all over the world in the typical ‘McDonald’s fast-food’ style where every country has an adapted menu.


But breakfast in Paris is part of the Parisian way of life and surely no fast food! The café-culture will be Paris forever.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lunch in Paris: Le Plat du Jour

When we lived in Paris all of us had, during the weekdays, lunch outside. My wife had her lunch with her colleagues at the school she worked as assistant teacher, the kids in school and me in the simple café/restaurant Le Barbusse across the street of the bank. Le Barbusse, by the way the same place I had my breakfast or at least an espresso in the morning, offered every day choice of ‘Plat du Jour’, mostly one fish dish and one meat, poultry or in wintertime a stew. The Plat du Jour are simple, rustic, grandmother–style dishes prepared with seasonal products and offered at a very competitive price. And they are not only prepared ‘grand-mother style”, they are grand-mother serving sizes and quality also! The variety of the dishes, the fact you can choose makes the Plat du Jour very popular and appreciated by the regulars.  In fact, most neighborhood restaurants like La Barbusse make their business with the regular customers of the offices in the street passing by f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lunch in Paris: Sandwiches and Burgers

Paris and sandwiches.  A real love story for so many years and still going strong as every year the consumption of sandwiches is growing.  You can buy sandwiches of all kinds, with cheese, salami (Rosette the Lyon is really good), pate but the ABSOLUTE STAR of the sandwiches in France is the world famous ' JAMBON BEURRE', a sandwich of  fresh and crispy baguette with good butter from Normandy and high quality lean cooked ham.  My all time favorite. And obviously I am not alone! I did some research and I learned that in 2016 the French (and the expats and tourists too) consumed 2,350,000,000 sandwiches...yes far more than 2 billion! And 1,200,000,000 of them where 'Jambon Beurre'! If that is not the absolute star! Because the French are so attracted by their favorite lunch that even MacDonalds in his French restaurants is selling the Jambon Beurre, Says a lot about the popularity isn't it? But the French are also eating a lot of Big Macs an...
Post a Comment
Read more