President Wilson Market

I love going to the market. Well, now I do. It wasn’t always like this – when I first arrived here, I wanted to shop when I wanted to shop, not when someone else told me I could. I whined incessantly about grocery stores not being open on Sunday, which was my favorite day to shop back in Dallas, at the Whole Foods just down the street. Now I know better, and like generations of Parisians who’ve been shopping the food markets with their cute little straw bags since the 1500s, I schedule my shopping around the twice-weekly Avenue du President Wilson Market, a few blocks from my apartment. Every Wednesday and Saturday, I reorganize my schedule to make it to the market by 10 a.m., after which it’s so crowded with people with wheelie carts and dogs and children in tow that it’s impossible to negotiate through the traffic.

Of the 70-plus food markets held throughout Paris each week, President Wilson market isn’t the cheapest in town (that may be the Tuesday/Friday market in Belleville), and it’s not all-organic, like the Sunday “Bio” (pronounced BEE-oh) market on Boulevard Raspail in the trendy 6th, but it has the best vegetable seller in Paris, Joel Thiebault, along with two great bread stalls, fishmongers, meat and cheese places, a little guy who sells fleur de sel with all sorts of funny flavors (see photo), an olive man, where I bought the fluffiest, most delicious green olive tapanade the other week, and my favorite stall, where they sell only mushrooms and potatoes. Beautiful ones.

At the organic stall, I recently found four (!) different types of peppers – some mild, and one hot one, so said the man taking cash. I bought two fire engine-red round red ones that look like Scotch Bonnets on steroids, in hopes of using them instead of Thai chiles in pico de gallo and salsas, and these jalapeno-looking red ones, too. Good news is they’ll be around through November, he told me.

What’s great about the market, besides the bounty itself, and the funny scenes that you’ll witness (like the lobster that fell off of his cozy ice bed and was right there, on the ground, his pincers snapping at a curious black Chow), are the people that work there. When I was making duck pizzettas recently, I explained this to the potato-mushroom woman and she told me exactly which mushrooms would go best with the duck; same thing happened with at the cheese stand. I got the perfect goat cheese, one that was without a rind and would melt quickly.

But unless you want to be screamed at in French, as I was a couple of weeks ago (three times!), do not touch the produce — or giant shrimp, called gambas — unless you have been given permission by the person behind the veggies/fruit/fish to pick out your own. This will get you in a mess of trouble. If you decide to try this, remember, you have been warned. This ain’t the Piggly Wiggly, kids. Put those tomatoes down. Big monster shrimp, too. DOWN. Now.

Sometimes I fall off the wagon and get all sassy, and decide to touch something anyway, like earlier this week, when I grabbed a tomato at Joel Thiebault. It slipped out of my hand and fell to the ground. It didn’t splatter, but it might as well have. I felt like a criminal, letting one of his beautiful tomatoes escape its happy, secure home and into my hands – for what? To make sure it was perfect?

Of course it was.

I have once again vowed to keep my hands to myself. We’ll see how I do with that.

For people that want convenience, there are supermarkets. For people that want food that’ll make you swoon it’s so fresh – and with pain au chocolats to eat along the way! — there are the markets.