We passed a house from the 1500s, tall and half-timbered; a seventeenth-century turreted mansion; a boutique featuring colorful lava lamps, bizarre chairs, and other kitsch and wildly modern things that baffled me but apparently not the throng of shoppers inside. Posters covered the burgundy front of a theater, advertising its plays and comedians. Someone was trying to start a milk bar, in tones of white and ice cream pastels. A milk bar? Well, come to think of it, it made a lot more sense than the water bars that were currently in style among society’s absurd. I checked the menu, but it did not, in fact, serve fresh, creamy milk from different cows raised on different grass in different regions, which I would certainly have stopped to taste. No, it was mostly milk shakes and yogurt, and I snorted and continued on. I’d spent months trying to get a good milk shake in this city. I’d pleaded with the people making them; I’d shared the recipe; I’d paid extra. I’d gone to Baskin-Robbins, where you would think the staff would have been trained in the great American milk shake way. All to no avail. Eight ounces of milk and one minuscule scoop of ice cream in a blender do not a good milk shake make, although the combination does give you some fairly sweet, flavored half-and-half. I gave the Marais’ Baskin-Robbins an embittered look as we passed it. Why put something that ridiculously pink in such grandiose surroundings if you can’t get a good milk shake out of it?

Grandiose our surroundings indeed were. The fashionable quarter of France’s golden age under Louis XIV, the Marais featured the greatest density of magnificent seventeenth-century mansions in Paris and was a shopaholic’s fantasy of expensive boutiques. It had also been a Jewish quarter for nearly a millennium, and a conservative Jewish enclave remained in perfectly functioning symbiosis with the more recent gay residents. Thus the rue des Rosiers curved in a narrow arc filled with restaurants selling falafel through their windows, bakeries with pastries and breads of types never seen anywhere else in Paris, colored store-fronts with Hebrew printed neatly in the windows. The line wasn’t too bad in front of L’As du Fallafel for once. The name means “the Ace of Fallafel” but, in a beautiful play on words, also sounds like “Sick of Fallafel”—something that might express its highly successful owner’s feelings some days. L’As du Fallafel is reputed to have the best falafel in Paris; some, in extremes of hyperbole, claim the best falafel in the world. Myself, I wavered between L’As du Fallafel where the brusque staff did indeed reveal how heartily sick they were of serving falafel to tourists through their window, and a neighboring rival with crispier eggplant. We went for L’As du Fallafel this time so that Sébastien could start with the most famous.