One final highlight – before getting specific.
A few steps past L’as du Fallafel, that is, quite possibly, the most popular falafel shop not only in le Marais but in all of Paris, lies one of the hidden gems of the Jewish Quarter – le Jardin des Rosiers – Joseph Migneret. You can find several of these gardens throughout le Marais – if you know where to look for them. Fortunately, we had David, so we didn’t need either to know or to look for them.
David and Alison led us into the garden past this small memorial.
Joseph Migneret was the principal of the École élémentaire des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais – an elementary school about 200 meters from the site of this memorial. (It’s now called the Town de Paris.) Although the bronze plaque lists the names of the 165 children from the school who were deported – mostly to Auschwitz – Migneret was instrumental in preventing the deportation of dozens of others by making them false papers and sheltering them in his home. His name is among those listed on the Allée des Justes outside the Holocaust Memorial and in 2009 his name was added to the list of the Righteous Among Nations at Yad Vashem in Israel.
Now I’ll skip ahead to dinner and tell of
Giving it the old musician’s try.
If you watched the video of Jie and Tim’s performance of Le Pont Mirabeau, you might have noticed a chap turning the pages of the score for Tim. That chap is Franck Amsallem. Franck is a jazz pianist who had been a part of the cruise. He’d mainly been playing the role of observer because he was going to lead a similar jazz centered cruise.
As it turned out, Franck also had a gig scheduled Friday night at Chez Papa – a Jazz-Supper Club in Saint-Germain. He’d told us on board that the club was quite small and urged us to make a reservation. Despite making numerous call at random hours on Thursday and Friday no one from the club answered the phone leaving us reservationless.
Since it was an easy 20-minute metro ride to the Saint-Germain stop, Pat and I decided to take a chance and see if they could fit us in for the early show. When we arrived, the maître d’ immediately asked for our reservation and when we told him we didn’t have one, he shrugged and told us everything was booked.
It happened that Fred and Jie were seated at a small table just inside the door so we stopped in to say hello and express our disappointment at being unable to see Franck’s show. Both they and the maître d’ suggested we try to come for Franck’s second set. When Franck saw us, he tried to persuade the maître d’ to find us a space but after several minutes it became clear that even he didn’t have enough sway to get us a table.
Pat and I were both tired (Remember, these highlight posts have covered only a small part of our walk through le Marais and we also had the afternoon visit to Père Lachaise under our feet by that time.) and though it seemed unlikely we’d have the energy to stay, we chose to have dinner at a restaurant called Le Petite Saint-Benoit that was literally directly across the street from Chez Papa.
We sat outside next to a woman dining with her father and had an interesting exchange of a small breadbasket back and forth. They’d had enough bread and kindly offered it to us while we waited. Our server walked by and somewhat officiously moved it back to their table. They returned it to us and we shared a chuckle.
If you look at the photo below, you’ll notice that the dish appears to be sitting on a large paper mat. It is. The paper had a dual purpose. It added a layer of protection for the red and white checked tablecloth beneath but it was also the place where our server wrote our orders.
And speaking of orders, I of course had a Kronenbourg and then the Rilette de thon (tuna paté) for my entrée (appetizer). For my plat (main dish), I had the Risotto aux champignons (mushroom risotto) and happily found this picture of the latter on Trip Advisor:
Like nearly all my meals in Paris, it was a quality dinner – not spectacular but high quality. Simple and straightforward – a dish typical of the style the French might call “cuisine bourgeoise.”
As we expected, we were too tired to try to take in Franck’s second show and considering our plan for an early Saturday morning start, we headed home after dinner. For those reading along, the day is far from over. The next two titled posts will return to our morning in le Marais and then we’ll take a conventional and unconventional look at Père Lachaise.