La Brûlerie

Seeking refuge from the rain in Lille, we stepped into an inviting café/teahouse just next to the Wazemmes market, called La Brûlerie.

The selection of teas was fabulous. I had a tchaï bio (organic chai) that was deliciously spiced, hot, and milky. Louis got a "cappuccino" - in quotes for real because instead of frothy, foamy milk, it was topped with a mountain of whipped cream!

If you get a chance to pass through Lille I would highly recommend stopping in to La Brûlerie when you're in need of a break from all that shopping you'll do at the market!

Coffee Grounds

You already know how much we love coffee. So it's no surprise that we buy fresh grounds and make our own. Part of it has to with a need/desire to faire les economies, as they say - to save money. Another part of it has to do with quality. "But you're in Paris!" you protest. "Surely every corner café has the best coffee 1 euro 20 cents can buy!" And you're right. We're not the first to note that at Parisian cafés, you get what you pay for.

So where do coffee snobs go for grounds? Normally I wouldn't know, since I'm no coffee snob (talk to Maggie). Luckily, though, we've randomly stumbled on two of the best places in the city to get beans, ground or whole. One is mentioned in the blog post I just linked to: Café Amazones, 11 Rue Rambuteau, 3rd arrondissement. That's where I got the snazzy coffee beans-container you can see in an earlier post about coffee. (Even if you're not into coffee, you should at least check out Rue Rambuteau. Starting with the Centre Georges Pompidou at your back, walk east along Rue Rambuteau from Rue Beaubourg to Rue des Archives, ending at the Archives Nationales. It's about 2 blocks, and it's jam-packed with all of the tiny artisanal food stores you could ever want, some of them high-end, most of them just your normal neighborhood places.)

The other place we've found is Torréfaction Guiraud, 21 boulevard de Reuilly, 12th arrondissement. "Torrefaction" means roasting, and when we happened by during an epic walk with Rachel and Adam, we were drawn inside by the sight and smell of the roaster itself:

Talk about witnessing the processing of your food or drink. We bought two bags of grounds on the spot and have been very pleased with the results. And we're not the only ones.

In a city full of coffee, we're surprised by how few torréfacteurs we've seen. People mostly seem to buy their grounds at the supermarket,or stop by the corner café for a quickie. In any case, we're happy to combine quick fixes at the café and the tastier (and ultimately cheaper) coffee we make at home, thanks to Café Amazones and Torréfaction Guiraud.

One of our Favorite Things

When we were making plans to move here, we imagined ourselves sitting in a different café every afternoon, reading and drinking espresso. 

That's one of the reasons we decided not to bring our cold coffee press (the other reason being that we knew there would be an Italian-style, stovetop coffee maker in the apartment already). But we also knew that buying coffee every day gets expensive very quickly. So when I stumbled across a coffee shop in the Marais during my ill-fated trip to the Archives Nationales, I was happy to invest in a bag of Central American blend. (Cafés are on every corner, but shops where you can buy beans are rare, as far as I can tell.)

What I didn't expect was that I would also invest in our first souvenir of the trip. When I asked the proprietor how long the fresh-ground coffee would stay fresh, he said that if we kept it in the fridge in a normal coffee container, it'd keep long enough. Fridge? Coffee container? I was intrigued. And so for only a nominal sum, I ensured that we could make ourselves coffee every afternoon for two weeks with this set-up:

Container, and "Café Amazone" Coffee

Coffee + Italian Coffee Maker = Hooray!!!