Παρίσι tips

Paris is the kind of city that draws you back again and again, but once you’ve mastered the usual suspects — the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées — exploring the less obvious places will allow you to get to know the city more intimately. Here are some, I hope, fresh ideas for you.
The gardens of Musée CarnavaletThe gardens of Musée Carnavalet.

Visit the avant garde art museum Palais de Tokyo (13, avenue du Président-Wilson; 33-1-47-23-54-01; www.palaisdetokyo.com), open until midnight. Andrew Ferren’s Cultured Traveler column on small Paris museums (Aug. 27, 2006) described the often overlooked, and free, Musée Carnavalet (23, rue de Sévigné; 33-1-42-72-41-13; www.carnavalet.paris.fr) as an impressive collection on the history, art and architecture of the city with “no end of surprises.”

Vintage photographs make special souvenirs, and the shop profiled in the June 10 Foraging column by Elaine Sciolino, “Des Photographies,” is worth exploring (21, rue St.-Paul; 33-1-48-87-69-27; www.desphotographies.com). In “Sofia Coppola’s Paris” (T: Travel Magazine, Sept. 24, 2006) by Lynn Hirschberg, the young director Sofia Coppola visits a number of great shopping boutiques, including Dary’s antique jewelry shop (362, rue St.-Honoré; 33-1-42-60-95-23) and K. Jacques Leather (16, rue Pavée; 33-1-40-27-03-57), a shop specializing in classic leather sandals.

Mark Bittman praised the falafel in his Bites column about L’As du Fallafel (Dec. 31, 2006), a small Middle Eastern place in the heart of the Marais (34, rue des Rosiers; 33-1-48-87-63-60) — as did a number of Times readers. One wrote that once you have a falafel there “you’ll never be satisfied with another one anywhere else.”

A number of dining options are included in Seth Sherwood’s “In the Heart of Paris, an African Beat” (Dec. 18, 2005), including the “cult-favorite Moroccan-Algerian restaurant” Le 404 (69, rue des Gravilliers; 33-1-42-74-57-81). He recommends several night-life options in “Where Parisians Go After the Sun Goes Down” (Oct. 1, 2006), including the bar-nightclub-concert space Le Point Ephémère (200, quai de Valmy; 33-1-40-34-02-48; www.pointephemere.org). You may also want to check out the hip Gogoparis.com, first-rate for new dining options and coming concerts.

(πηγή: travel.nytimes.com)