OK, fine. I guess I’ll eat brunch.
My grousing on this subject has multiple sources, so take your pick. For one, while I do enjoy a handful of breakfast foods (blueberry pancakes with a fried egg on top, everything bagels with lox, my mother’s [and only my mother’s] home fries, and full Scottish breakfasts with sausage and black pudding hold the bacon please and thank you), I am not a breakfast person. My first meal is usually taken at 1pm (or sometimes 4pm, depending on what kind of writing fever dream I’m in). I attempted intermittent fasting for work years ago, found that it made me a far nicer person in the morning, and I have thus been running on black coffee and spite in the a.m. for over five years.
TLDR: Breakfast = not my thing.
I’ve found the right country for my morning eating habits. Breakfast in France, as I’ve written before, is usually a small, sweet affair defined mainly by coffee, usually taken at home, and frequently foregone entirely in favor of a few more minutes of sleep. That said, as with other American imports like le donuts, le burger, and le muffin, le brunch has been a mainstay of Paris specifically for a few years now. And while it has thankfully supplanted tourist breakfasts (i.e. 15 euro for a length of baguette, jam, fridge-cold butter, a stale croissant, a glass of OJ, and a hot beverage), it’s not my cup of tea (or coffee).
Look, brunch’s existence is fine (unlike the “Everything” bagels from Bagelstein, which are absolutely not fine given the presence of both flax seeds and dried herbs on them [God for someone who doesn’t eat breakfast I sure have a lot of opinions about it…]). But what I don’t love is that the French have taken what is meant to be a free-for-all of bottomless mimosas and coffee accompanied by food and turned it into a complex prix fixe with way more food than any one person can consume, especially first thing in the morning.
If you ask me, the reason for this is simple: Restaurants who served the tourist breakfast have just sewn American food into the offering. As a result, for most brunches, you’re forced to pay something around 30 euro for an imposed menu comprised of juice, a hot beverage, eggs, bacon, salmon, hash browns, yogurt, granola, fruit, and pancakes.
I grew up going to IHOP, and even there I don’t think you get quite so much food.
If I want brunch (and if I don’t want to make it myself, which would odd, because the one recipe my mother ever gave me was for the best hash browns in the world, and I can fry an egg like nobody’s business), I want a simple à la carte menu and excellent (preferably bottomless) coffee.
Enter 5 Pailles.
I first came across 5 Pailles thanks to the inimitable Lindsey Tramuta years ago, and while I quickly fell for the excellent coffee and cozy space (and allusion to Le Péril jeune), I never made it a regular part of my coffee shop rotation, due mainly to distance. But now that I’m a resident of the 10th arrondissement – and have become a convert to its chai, which is neck-and-neck with Ten Belles for my very favorite in the city (and second-favorite in the world, after the one from Small World in Princeton) – I decided to circle back for brunch.
While the coffee at 5 Pailles is not bottomless, it is excellent… and the menu is à la carte. Plus, they deal with their queue in a manner that makes me not want to kill anyone. (Via app. The French cannot stand in lines without cutting. It’s stressful at the best of times, and worse when one has a hangover.) And since they sell coffee to go to patrons patiently waiting for their table, it ticked all my brunch boxes.
The menu here is mercifully short – ideal for the decision-averse among us – with just nine choices of main dish. While the oeuf burger certainly looks enticing for messier mornings, featuring avocado, fried egg, cheddar, mushrooms, and fried onions on a bun, on this visit, we zeroed in on two other savory offerings. The first, the Nordique, sees two poached eggs settled atop an English muffin, draped with delicious smoked salmon and served with hollandaise. The side of salad lightens the dish up nicely.
The cilbir, meanwhile, sees two poached eggs settled on country toast and dolloped with yogurt, avocado, mint, za’atar, and walnuts, for a breakfast with decidedly Turkish inspiration. It’s served with a drizzle of chile oil and – if you ask nicely – extra hot sauce. I loved both, but this one took the cake.
Fans of sweeter breakfast might opt instead of house-made granola, pancakes with fruit, hazelnuts, and maple syrup, or even cinnamon rolls. And in addition to excellent cold brew, you can snag kombucha, lattes, chai, and more. Plus, each main hovers at somewhere between 11 and 14 euros.
Bingo. This is now my brunch go-to. A word of warning, however, should you ever cross my path there before noon: First, check my hand for coffee.
79, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, 75010