Chez Vong
  • 04
  • Dec
  • 2009

This is the kind of Les Halles restaurant you head for when you’ve had your fill of grand cuisine and pretensions.

The decor is soothing mix of greens and browns, steeped in a Chinese-colonial ambience that evokes early 1900s Shanghai. You could easily imagine James Bond coming in with a nice woman at his side.

The chef’s speciality is lacquered peking duck with shrimp, we did try it some years ago and it’s very tasty but rather expensive.

Chez Vong, 10, Rue de la Grande-Truanderie, 75001 Paris, tel 01 40 26 09 36, M° Etienne-Marcel or Les Halles, reservations recommended.

Big sale of fashion 2009
  • 02
  • Dec
  • 2009

“La Grande Braderie de la Mode 2009″ will be held as every year the first weekend of december (5 and 6 of December) of which the profit goes to the Aids organisations.

On this event people can buy fashion clothes signed by well known style icons at high reduced prices from 50 to 80%.

More or less 150 participants of fashion, beauty and decoration will be present : Agnès B, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Cartier, De Fursac, John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, Isabel Marant, Mat & Jewski, Petit Bateau, Elie Saab, Yves Saint Laurent, Séquoïa, Philippe Starck, Chantal Thomas, Editions Actes Sud and Taschen.

Passage du Désir  ,85/87, rue du Faubourg Saint Martin, 75010 Paris, M°

David Lebovitz’s Sweet and Savory tour of Paris
  • 01
  • Dec
  • 2009

David Lebovitz’s new book  The sweet life in Paris, is just published and some of his foodietips are here 

Start the morning with bread from artisan boulangerie Du pain et des Idées (34 Rue Yves Toudic, 75010 Paris) or from Eric Kayser ( 85 Boulevard Malesherbes, 75008 Paris- plus other locations around Paris) or from La boulangerie par Véronique Mauclerc (83 Rue de Crimée, 75019 Paris).

As an afternoonsnack pick up some chouquettes (cream puffs covered with sugar and baked until brown) at Aux Péchés Normands (9 Rue du Faubourg du Temple, 75010 Paris).

If you love Alsatian kugelhopf (a semisweet confection somewhere between a cake and a bread, spiked with rum and almonds). It’s available but only at weekends at Vandermeersch (278 Av. Deaumesnil, 75012 Paris).

For a morning pastry look for a bostock(a disk of light almond cake topped with crackly almonds) which you can pick up at Ladurée (75 Av des Champs-Elysées, 75008 Paris)