Live and Let Live!: France vacation post 2 - First encounter with real french food

I have read a book call "French Women Don't Get Fat". It's not a diet book or recipe book but about the way of life of French, how they view their food and about their elegant lifestyle. I am not very familiar with the French cuisine; I guess, french cuisine has never been a popular choice in my social circle. None of my friends actually say "Hey, let's go to a french restaurant today". My only impression of French food is that they come in small portions, consist of weird stuff like snails, smelly dairy products and always eaten with hard and cold breads.

I'm glad we visited France, it is time to know more about this country and its distinctive culture.

We touched down early 7am feeling hungry as the flight meals were bad, as usual. My first meal in Paris was a baguette bought at the airport cafe. The baguette was crispy and the vege inside was very fresh. I thought it tasted really good.

**But by the end of the vacation, I got really sick of sandwiches liao.

Brioche Doree

Our second meal of the vacation is lunch at a randomly picked restaurant on our way to the Eiffel Tower. We had our first experience of a two-course/three-course French meal. Now I understand why Europeans have light lunches. I will too if I have to spend 2 hours for every meal.

I was quite surprised that contrary to my impression, French cuisines are not always in small portions, but the food are always nicely arranged. For the first few days, we had trouble reading the menus but after the explanations of a few waiters/waitressess, we got the hang of it. There's always a menu du jour (menu of the day), and there are set menus, which is a combination of entree + plat or plat + dessert, or entree + plat + dessert. Great thing is french restaurants gladly serve tap water, saved a bit of money.

Le Suffren

Entree (starter) was really nice. It's a tarte de formage (cheese pie).