Essential Paris Cafés and Wine Bars

for the love of my two favorite food groups: coffee and wine

When Ling Ma wrote, that “the first place you live alone…is the first place you become yourself,” what she failed to mention is that the same can be true for travel. That the first time we travel by ourselves is uniquely posed to change our pursuit of self actualization. Or such has been the case for me, at least. The first time I traveled by myself, was to Paris my freshman year of college to visit a friend who was living there at the time. When I returned, I quit the sport I had played for over a decade, I took a job at a coffee shop, I met mentors for long conversations over butter croissants, I read up on Buddhism, I read up on baking, and I closed the door on a version of my life that had, up until that point, felt inevitable.

It’s not lost on me that self-actualization, not unlike travel itself, is a privilege. And that Maslow’s hierarchy, as it’s it written, is not always feasibly fulfilled by one person in one lifetime. That I have found work I enjoy from traveling to a city I love, is not in small part due to the generations before me who were, simply. meeting. their. needs. That I get to form an opinion on Paris, is indicative of the sort of hubris one contracts when they travel there for the first time at 18 and suddenly think they know everything.

Paris, much like New York, is a city on which everybody has an opinion. History is full of them. Stories and essays and lists from first time visitors and seasoned locals alike have informed cultural history, each one offering a different take on city’s greatest haunts and landmarks. Places one must visit, the right way to dress, the restaurants one must go to, the best baguette, the best glass of wine, the best place to have a cigarette. Thoughts on Parisians, thoughts on the French, thoughts on their public transport. And while it’s true I do have an opinion on Paris—a highly favorable one, no less—it’s predicated on a certain willingness to always be proven wrong. To be shown something or somewhere new, that will change my understanding of the city in its entirety. Every time I return to Paris, I am different, the city is different, and thus my entire relationship with it, and my relationship with myself, can never be the same. Who I am today, is in large part due to the parts of Paris I have come to rely on, the food, the culture, the coffee, the wine, the parts of the city that have run through me and changed over, like the regeneration of blood cells. When so much of our approach to travel is to consume, we often neglect that it is just as import to be consumed.

For the full list on Google Maps, click the link at the bottom of the article.