PARIS IS BEST KNOWN as a welcoming destination for lovers, but for the solo traveler there are many charms as well, as Stephanie Rosenbloom, the Getaway columnist for the New York Times travel section, wrote in a recent column. She has an eye for both the small corners and broad vistas of the city — look at this description of a lunch:
“I sliced through an oyster with my cocktail fork, loosening it from its shell. A pulpy Utah Beach, it was brimming with lemon juice and its own slightly salty liquor. I lifted it with a thumb and forefinger, and tilted it to my lips.
A lonesome chair in the Luxembourg Gardens
“It was early spring in Paris. To my left, a white-haired woman with red lipstick disappeared behind a newspaper. To my right, a man and a woman flirted over starters. We were at the center of one of the last sprawling brasseries of the 1920s, where a large basin into which the artists’ model Kiki de Montparnasse used to climb has been replaced with a comparatively demure sculpture of a couple forming an orb with their outstretched limbs. A waiter paused at my table to rotate the platter of oysters so that the overturned shells faced the empty chair across from me.
“’Voilà,’ he said.”
I missed her column when it appeared last week, but found it today in one of the helpful links that run across the top of the Times’s redesigned web site. The link was actually to the paper’s “Times Insider” blog, which describes the newspaper’s internal doings and interviews the journalists about their work. In this case, Stephanie Rosenbloom’s Paris piece was included because it rose to #1 on the most-emailed list. Go here for Times Insider. I’ve linked to the blog itself, rather than the interview, because several of the posts are worth reading. (There’s a paywall, but try anyway.)