Cuisine Trois Pièces

Well, the beginning of the day was...early. I got up much earlier than usual to get myself ready to take the new group of students off to the UCParis center. Things went reasonably well. Everyone made it to the center (eventually) and settled in. After giving them a short tour of the building, I ran off to my office to get settled in. From there on, the rest of the day was spent taking care of IT issues that often come up on the first day of classes (although I'd like to point out that a lot less of them would happen if certain instructors wouldn't request their Chalk websites the morning of the first class meeting).

Sometime during that day, I get an email from DJ saying, effectively, "Let's get out of here and eat." And, thus, I have inaugurated the DJ+LuisEat label for my blog. Between eating out and eating in, we'll soon have enough material to write a cookbook and a restaurant guidebook.

Anyway, DJ took me to this great little bistro west of Montmartre (near métro Rome, on line #2) called Trois-Pièces-Cuisine (trans: "3 rooms plus kitchen"). It's this adorable corner bistro / bar that is (surprise!) arranged into three rooms, with a bar wrapping around the wall between two of the rooms. The third room has essentially been annexed by the largest room, with the dividing wall nowhere to be seen. The walls have ancient wallpaper that may now be retro but was probably once earnest, the chairs and tables seem to be mostly second-hand, and the décor is generally very functional.

As the review in LeFooding.com suggests (see previous link), this place is full of young'uns. As the night progressed, however, things got a bit older, but never losing its core audience of late-high-schoolers. Most of the servers were, as DJ termed it, "pretty young boys," which was certainly true of the guy who served us; he was slim and well-groomed and stylish and just a wee bit fey.

What was also true about him was that he had one dead eye that would never focus on you. This isn't something I would normally find particularly noteworthy, but it was the subtleness of his condition that made it somewhat distracting. It was only after he visited our table 3 times that I figured out why his stare seemed so unsettling. Afterwards, every new visit to the table was an opportunity for me to try to puzzle out whether his eye was lazy, glass or simply non-functional. That much being said, he was a very effective waiter, one eye or two.

Both of us had salads. Or, rather, we had salades, which are dinner-sized portions of fresh greens with piles and piles of toppings. In the process we polished off a bottle of wine, several beers and a coffee. As we were getting ready to leave, our server realized that there had been an error at the cash and another table had paid for our bill and their bill was...well...substantially smaller. So we quietly paid their bill, thanks Bacchus for our luck, and headed to the métro station.