You can hardly move for top-notch restaurants and cafés around the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière, so if you do need some guidance, Café Soucoupe, a coffee shop-cum-organic canteen is certainly worth your time. It’s often quite busy (especially at lunchtime, mainly with local 9th arrondissement office workers), but if you can’t bag a spot in the flowery inner courtyard, you can usually squeeze onto one of the narrow benches inside.
Placing a clear emphasis on high-quality, organic ingredients (things like goats’ cheese, parma ham, Prince de Paris ham), the café offers many a vibrant, scrumptious salad, full of homey flavours (fennel, white cabbage, carrots, parsley, and so on). The green risotto is gorgeously creamy and very generous, and also successfully debunks the myth that healthy food can’t be filling.
To sample a decent range of Soucoupe’s offerings, we suggest you try the set menu (€11/€12.50), which includes a small salad, a main course and a beetroot juice. And if the thought of all those vegetables is turning you green, you can also treat yourself to a slice of freshly baked cake (of which the marble and banana varieties are particularly great).
TRANSLATION: FLORA HUDSON