Today's Featured Book:
Moveable Feasts:
Paris in Twenty Meals
by Chris Newens
Genre: Travel; Foodie
Published: February 3, 2026
Page Count: 368 pages
Summary:
Paris has a justifiable claim to be the center of European gastronomy—but beyond its trademark terrasses and zinc-topped tables, what can its cuisine tell us about the city? Chris Newens, an award-winning food writer and long-time resident of the historic slaughterhouse quartier Villette, takes us on a delightful gastronomic journey around Paris' twenty spiralling arrondissements, seeking out, sampling, and attempting to recreate a dish that represents each as it is today.
Hemingway wrote that "wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” From Congolese cat fish in the 18th to Middle Eastern falafels in the 4th, to the charcuterie served at the libertine nightclubs of Pigalle in the 9th, Newens lifts the lid on the city's ever-changing, defining, and irresistible food culture.
A Paris bistro is the stage of a thousand cliches. Surly waiters in their suits, barflies crowding the zinc, a terrace of small tables and rattan chairs that all face the street, coffee, croissants, steak frites.
Le Mistral, at the corner of the rue des Pyrenees in Belleville, fitted this description so perfectly it deserved World Heritage status; it was a place so familiar to the global imagination that, like Paris itself, I felt I knew it before I even came to visit the city, let alone live here.
THE FRIDAY 56 is hosted by Anne of Head Full of Books. To play, open a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% on your e-reader). Find a sentence or two and post them, along with the book title and author. Then link up on Head Full of Books and visit others in the linky.
The transubstantiation of raw into cooked is a low-grade miracle. You witness in real time something repellent become its opposite. Never, though, had I seen a change as profound as I did then. Raw, the kebab had looked like a prolapse, but now it was starting to resemble, well, a kebab. The layers of turkey and lamb were drawing into one another: sizzling, browning, beads of flavour escaping from within. And the smell: that commingling of proteins which hits somewhere at the top of the nose, combined with a base note of smouldering charcoal. It was actually working! Of course it was working. It was meat on a stick.
The purpose of THE BOOK BLOGGER HOP is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, and befriend other bloggers. THE BOOK BLOGGER HOP is hosted by Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer.
Do you read one book at a time, or juggle a few at once? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee-Addicted Writer)
Ha! I was reading fifteen books at one time at the start of this week. Ha!
I usually have four or five going at one time.
