A long delayed post about food! After all, the French are supposed to be great cooks, right? So where is all the food?
The first few days, food wasn’t that impressive… a panni for lunch, steak & frittes for dinner, nothing out of the ordinary… It was hard to find food at all, much less good food… until I figured out the problem. Being used to eating right around sunset, I had been delaying dinner until just about when restaurants were closing! 8, 9pm is too late for a decent meal, and sunset isn’t until 10pm. More effort is necessary to get to restaurants in time for dinner!
About restaurants… I’m not sure, but I think the word "Brassiere" means restaurant in French since I’m seeing that word everywhere. Their restaurants tend to have a small indoor, and a large outdoor section just on the street where you can sit down and just watch traffic flow by. Waiters are friendly and speak limited English unless you’re right next to a tourist area.
First "interesting" food item, Forie Gras and Millie Fille, two pattie dishes that are served with bread. Normally a starter item, they make a good mid-afternoon snack. The forie gras was among the best that I’ve ever had, and paired with lightly toasted bread, was just heavenly. This was at a small cafe near Versailles.
For dinner, Steak Tartare, that is, raw beef! 
This dish actually looks very daunting! I mean, look at it! It looks just like raw minced beef with a raw egg on top! I wasn’t exactly sure how to start on this, but after just digging in, it turned out to be very good! The various pickles around the beef do a good job in contrasting with the taste, and the egg provides just enough moisture to make it roll off your tongue. Also, look at the presentation of this dish, every component carefully laid out around the main course.
With a little time to burn before tackling the Eiffel tower, dinner consisted of escargot. I was expecting this dish to be served in a specialized dish, with the snails already out of their shells, but in France, they are served inside the shells! The shells themselves are filled with the cooked snail soaking in butter and garlic, making a very tasty appetizer. You have to go in there and dig the snail out yourself! The waiter recommended that the garlic & butter sauce be used with the bread for even more flavor.
Oh yeah, dining in France is a very slow affair… From what I’ve seen, many Parisians sit down and spend at least an hour, if not more on a single meal. They’ll sit, talk, read, smoke, or just relax while looking out on the street, and the waiters will just let them sit and not disturb them, none of this "how is your meal" business like in the U.S. If anything, the way I’m eating is much too fast. We’ll sit down, order, eat, ask for the bill, pay and leave in the time it takes for a Parisian to go through their appetizer!
One cute little thing about presentation… On the way back to the hotel from Les Invalides, I stopped by a small bakery/pastry store on the way back to the hotel and 
bought a chocolate eclair (one of my desert weaknesses!) for a late afternoon snack. Instead of simply dumping the eclair into a bag, or just handing it to me since I wanted to eat it right there, the waitress wrapped it up elaborately in paper that would almost be origami! There’s an eclair sitting at the bottom of that pyramid!
Alright, that’s it for now. Should have more interesting stories next week, especially since I’m supposed to be having a formal dinner as part of the study abroad program! I wonder what food in London will be like…
Oh yeah! Nearly forgot… every hotel I’ve been staying at so far includes breakfast. It appears that a standard French breakfast includes corrisont, bread, orange juice, coffee or tea, plus French bread with either jam, or cheese, and sometimes a hard boiled egg. Quite a breakfast, though very bread heavy!
Final thing… as part of the study abroad program, a few companies, and the local business school here, ESCP-EAP have been hosting us for lunch. The ‘take out’ lunch box they serve here is incredible! Served in a huge box, with professional placemat, excellent presentation, an actual glass cup for water… I can’t imagine anything similar in the U.S. Waiters on Wheels looks worse than McDonalds! And a ‘buffet lunch’, which was really embarrassing… we descended upon the buffet area like a pack of ravenous dogs, grabbing everything, piling the plates up, preparing to stuff ourselves with just that… Then the host comes around and tells us that it was just the appetizer course, and that the main course would be served in a few minutes, followed by desert and coffee. They eat right out here!