PARIS WITHOUT RESERVATION

We have been recommended Chez Prune, a waterside restaurant with lots of outside tables. By seven on a Saturday evening it is absolutely heaving, so we head to the aptly named L’Atmosphere for a drink, before heading to L’Epicerie where we eat well on the pavement and watch the world go by. This is so much less frenetic than the better known quartiers just a few blocks away. In fact this is somewhere I could happily live.

Sunday morning, and we head up to Montmartre, hoping for a good view over Paris. What we didn’t know is that the whole area around Sacré-Coeur is now closed to cars during the day. We’re not too sad to leave the tourist throng and sleaze of Pigalle behind us, as we head back to the bustling Marché des Enfants Rouges. This fantastic food market takes its name from the red capes worn by the children who lived in the orphanage which once occupied this site. After buying delicious bread from a flamboyant baker in a seersucker jacket, and a bagful of gargantuan beef tomatoes, our appetites for Morrocan food are satisfied at Traiteur Marocain, where we queue amongst a dishevelled morning-after crowd for steaming plates of Couscous du Chef for just 12 euros.