Its Not About The Food

LIZ SAYS: It started with a news story on France24. It was an interview with a writer announcing the end of France, specifically the end of French cuisine. The report said that France was the number 2 outlet for McDonald’s, known here as McDo, in the world. Say what?

Now, this also coincided with an interest in venturing out into the nearby exotic land of the 13th. Of course, the 13th is very nearby, we cross the street and the 13th begins. Chinatown begins a bit further away where the architecture and atmosphere changes. This area of the 13th referred to as Chinatown, is nothing like the Chinatowns in the US. It is in a part of Paris with 1950-70’s architecture and pan Asian restaurants. A lot of the restaurants are combinations of popular Asian cuisines like Vietnamese slash Thai slash Cambodian slash Chinese restaurants. There are a large amount of students in this area, so it has less of an ethnic feel than a convenient, cheap food kind of feel. There are some Asian food stores, but they look more like French fresh food market stalls. There are no long streets of red roasted ducks and baby pigs hanging in windows. Although, there are the uniform red and gold baroque “here is a Chinese restaurant” signs.
The combination of non-french cuisines is not just Asian, there are Gyros slash Pizza places with Crepes. Some of these places had the greatest windows filled with colorful idealized pictures of every possible kind of sandwich or plate lunch. My fav was the Hummer. Just the idea of calling a sandwich a Hummer was enough to make me laugh out loud.
Bakeries also offer huge baguette sandwiches or quiche in wax paper and heated for lunch on the go.
So why McDo? Got me, I guess its foreign, exotic. I did notice their ads on TV show their burgers with huge slabs of floppy blue cheese. They make a big effort to show they use French cheeses, which is a very big deal to the French. Maybe its because there are no waiters? Who knows. It is sort of like living in a recent high rise here. You can live in an ugly building with a newer, bigger elevator and an American style kitchen, as long as you look out on a nice Hausmann building that reminds you, you are still in Paris.