One of my most amazing vacations was about 7 years ago. It was our first trip to Europe and an ambitious one. We tried to cover Paris, Rome, and Venice with a brief stop over in Pisa in about a week. We managed to do all that we had intended albeit a bit rushed. Our first stop was Paris- as exotic and gorgeous as I had imagined it to be.
I have to admit that the first day of cold baguettes put me off a bit but we quickly discovered that the real way to enjoy food as vegetarians in Paris was to make French Pastries our main course! Not very healthy I know but delicious all the same! There are two restaurants however that we sought out for vegetarian food.
The first one was a little vegetarian specialty restaurant called “La Petite Legume”. A tiny home run restaurant serving vegetarian/ vegan food. Not a very wide variety but good enough and not very expensive (which was not easy to come by in Paris!). Their mainstay however was a store the family managed rather than the restaurant, so don’t expect very prompt service. There was a little pastry store down the street though that was pretty amazing (Sadly do not recall the name)
The second one was a Indian restaurant “Gandhi”. The Manager was extremely friendly and hospitable and more than made up for the food which was as good as Indian food can get in Paris I guess. Jokes apart, the food was a welcome break from the otherwise bland sandwiches we had been living on. The food was spicy but not in the flavorful way that authentic Indian food is, but I would blame that on the ingredients and not the cooks who really had done a good job with what they had. The same spices tend to taste different in different parts of the world because of their different origins. The one thing that I remember well from the conversation with the manager was that he was a Pakistani who really enjoyed cricket- nothing unusual there since almost everyone from the Indian sub continent lives and breathes cricket; but he said he played on the French cricket team!! Now who knew France had a cricket team!!
