Passing Through

This is as close as we're going to get to Easter, an idiosyncratic little display in the window of a tiny old-timey shop selling beads, doll parts, and just stuff in the Passage des Panoramas in the 2nd arrondissement.  We had to go to the UPS store on rue Réaumur and then remembered the little enclave of passages just north of there when we wondered where to have lunch.

The clientele for most of these shops and restaurants are neighborhood working people, but in the last few years some of the restaurants at least have been getting fancier, or at least well-known, and Passage 53 now has two Michelin stars and is quite pricey.  We were looking more in the wine bar category and had heard of Coinstot Vin as being good value. 

Checking out the rest of the passage though brought us to this other kind of bar.

Opened just a few months ago by the Passage 53 people, they serve, you guessed it, gyoza.  And nothing but.  Ooops, I lie, you can get a bowl of rice to round out your meal and some canned drinks, including two kinds of tea.  No hot tea, no sushi, no anything else.

The marinated bamboo shoots come with the meal, which is either eight gyoza for E6 or 12 gyoza for E8.  You sit at a bar with 11 other people, wait patiently for the delicious gyoza filled with pork from one of Paris' best butchers and a citrus-y dipping sauce, eat, pay and go.  Simple, fast, and popular, judging from the line of people waiting when we left.  They do take-out too.

We'll have to try Coinstot Vin another time.