The jeune homme bearing our $24 club sandwiches (you'd never call him a garçon) is wearing an impeccably styled Joseph Abboud tuxedo, the kind Nordy sells for six or seven Benjamins. The hostesses are in stylish Christian Lacroix miniskirts or tights with designer tops, depending on rank. They walk as if on a fashion runway, which, in a sense, they are.

The floor is aluminum, the chairs white leather, the tables translucent and each adorned with a single tall red rose. A DJ at the entrance is spinning tunes. Silver-painted tubes shaped like giant molars anchor the back of the room. The outside walls? Well, this is the seventh level of the Pompidou Center in Paris, so the outside walls are all glass. And they overlook, well, pretty much all of Paris: Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sacré Coeur.

It's a café called, simply, Georges, a jewel run by the reclusive Costes brothers atop the now-30-year-old modern art museum.

Could have had a carpaccio of scallops and salmon, could have had osetra caviar, or a veal chop or turbot with béarnaise. We don't. We have the perfectly fine club sandwich with homemade gaufrettes (so much more civilized than Tim's Cascade), a salad of fresh green beans, and a half bottle of Sancerre. Not the sort of lunch that tourists expect; the one Merkin family we spot sits down, puzzles over the menu for a couple of minutes, and takes French leave.

But it's all about da view, boss, da view! You're not up too high (Eiffel Tower) or too far away (Sacré Coeur). You're front-row center. The closest thing in Seattle, sigh, is probably the SAM Taste Café in the glass-sided Paccar Pavilion at the Olympic Sculpture Park. It's run by Bon Appetit Management, a catering outfit serious about sustainability and local sourcing. But they'd be the first to admit that Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower trump Calder's Eagle.

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Paris may well be a movable, moveable feast, but the shops of the rue Montorgueil are fixed. Pâtisseries, bars, cafés, sandwich stands, fruit and vegetable stalls, butcher shops, cheese mongers, fish mongers, charcuteries, a florist, a news vendor, they're all on our doorstep.

Bread is essential. An ordinary croissant, pulled apart and dunked into a frothy grand crème while standing at the zinc-topped counter of a corner café, tastes astonishingly wonderful. A tartine, French bread slathered with unsalted butter, is even better. The best is a long, thin loaf called a flûte, very Parisian, with Echiré butter (from a remote area of western France where the cows feed on unique local grass). The best of the flûtes is called Gana, invented by Bertrand Ganachaud over 40 years ago.

The Gana difference is a pre-fermentation process that produces a starter known as poolish, which gives the bread a nutty taste. The dough is formed by hand and baked in a wood-fired oven under licenses the Ganachaud family has granted to some 200 bakers across France. Cost of a half-pound loaf? Buck fifty.

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More bread in Paris

Once you've had breakfast, there are few occasions in France that butter is automatically served with meals. Inevitably, though, you get brown bread and butter with oysters. A dark rye. At the best places, you get the best butter, too-from the Isigny cooperative in Normandy.

If you order bulots (whelk, a sort of sea snail poached in aromatic broth) as well as oysters, as we did at the grande brasserie La Coupole, you get mayonnaise as well. Chewy and spicy, absolutely delicious.

The oyster assortment was quite lovely, including the prized flat oysters from Belon and several "special" Gillardeau oysters from the intertidal waters of the Marenne estuary, on the Atlantic coast south of La Rochelle.

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Japanese in Paris

"Eating a variety of foods, for the French," says Sandra, "is like learning to read." Half-Argentinian, half-French, she's chief executive of a tour company that takes visitors to out-of-the-way places. So, being both literate and hungry, we walk through the Japanese quarter of Paris, behind the Palais Royal, between the Louvre and the Opera. Elegant, minimalist sushi joints are everywhere.

It's just after noon, and already there's a line outside Higuma, a nondescript spot on the rue Sainte Anne that's often called the neighborhood's lunchroom; it's the most authentic lamen-ya-noodle parlor-in Paris. Businessmen, salarymen, Japanese regulars, and local bargain-hunters hunch over steaming bowls of ramen dished up by terse, fast-moving waitresses. Huge, filling portions of noodles, vegetables, calamari, pork and broth. Delicious! And the tab is under $10, a heck of a deal in any language.

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Dinner Chez Jim

On the phone, Jim Haynes invites me to come for dinner on Sunday, something he's been saying to visitors for decades. By now, well over 100,000 people-most of them total strangers-have accepted his invitation. They're mostly, but not exclusively, American visitors.

In a not-particularly-fashionable neighborhood in the southeast quadrant of Paris, a high metal gate swings open. You walk into a courtyard and enter a high-ceilinged artist's studio. Jim is on a stool next to the stove, welcoming new arrivals (or on the phone, talking to strays who got lost). By 9 p.m., the apartment is crowded with perhaps 75 or 80 guests.

A few of the guests are newcomers; some come regularly; others whenever they're in town. To be sure, some are just cruising, but many are couples. "It's a nice way to spend a Sunday night in Paris," says a Belgian expat.

The three-course menu is unpretentious and tasty: Salad, boeuf bourguignon over pasta, ice cream with poached pears. On the landing, you help yourself to decent, bag-in-box wine. And you meet people, you converse. Jim makes sure of that. He calls out names. "Pierre, talk to Julie! Mitch from Cleveland, right? This is Suzanne. She lives in the neighborhood." He doesn't refer to his guest list, has it down pat. "Ronald, Seattle, Bruce, Seattle." Bruce ignores me; he hasn't come this far to meet neighbors.

"Ronald, you speak French. Sit over there by the bookcase with Martine and Danielle!" Jim is from Louisiana, a theatrical type (as if you couldn't guess), clearly enjoys his role as stage manager.

Why does he do it, this whole permanent floating crap game of an international dinner party? A pause, a smile. "Why not?" he answers.

Martine and Danielle, who live in the suburbs, tell me they've heard about Jim's soirées for years, finally decided to see for themselves. And yeah, by the end of the evening, they've both given me their cellphone numbers.

To reserve a dinner spot, call Jim directly at 01-43-27-17-67 in Paris, or visit his website, jim-haynes.com. To see if he's available to spend a couple of weekdays with visitors, contact InTouchTravel.com.

Final note: Carol Pucci of the Seattle Times had a terrific feature about how to meet Parisians earlier this month; Jim's dinners are supposed to be in next Sunday's paper.

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On the home front, Trattoria Mitchelli down in Pioneer Square is getting ready to celebrate its 30th birthday. That's a full three decades of lasagna, Garfield!... Karma has settled on a less ambitious, all-Asian menu, priced at about $10.... Belltown's Le Petit Bistro is up for sale... Leslie Mackie of Macrina is one of five nominees for the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Pasty Chef in the U.S. She was nominated in 2005 and 2006. Here's hoping the third time's a charm!

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Restaurant reviewer Ronald Holden welcomes news and comments from foodies and feeders alike. His Belltown-based Tasting Notes & Culinary Dispatches, www.cornichon.org,was named one of the Internet's "Top Ten Food Blogs" last year by About.com.

More tasting notes and culinary dispatches are at www.cornichon.org, Recently named one of the Internet's "Top Ten Food Blogs" by About.com..