Meeting Parisians at home and work enriches a visit to the City of Light

PARIS, France — A half-dozen boiled potatoes rest atop an electric grill on Jacqueline's dining-room table.

Next to our plates are three miniature skillets and little wooden paddles; a plastic tray with square dividers stacked with slices of three kinds of cheese; metal bowls filled with diced red and green peppers, mushrooms and herbs; a plate of smoked meats; and a jar of pickles.

This is raclette, a dish made by melting the cheese and vegetables under the broiler, scraping it onto the potatoes with the paddles and adding a garnish of meat and pickles.

"As soon as you get one in, start making another one," Jacqueline instructs me, poking the potatoes with a fork. I fill my skillet, stick it in the broiler, watch the cheese bubble, take it out and make another.

The dinner is a cook-at-the-table winter meal as casual and traditional in France as a summer barbeque in Texas. But I wouldn't trade this experience for a meal in a three-star restaurant.

Jacqueline gets out photo albums and shows me pictures of the artists and musicians she and her husband, José, an Argentinean architect, constantly invited in for meals, music and parties when he was alive.

After José died, she decided to continue the tradition of filling her home with visitors, this time through a bed-and-breakfast program run by an agency called Alcôve & Agapes, started by Parisian entrepreneur Françoise Foret.

We eat, drink wine, laugh and watch a video on her flat-screen TV.

"Between us, our two countries, we've had our problems," Jacqueline says, leaning toward me and smiling. "It's such a silly thing."

French connections

Booking B&Bs

Several agencies book B&B accommodations in private Paris residences. Prices vary according to the booking fee (usually nonrefundable and payable in advance), the location and whether or not the room has a private or shared bathroom. Hosts vary from musicians, gourmet cooks and artists to retired people interested in getting to know foreign visitors.

Alcôve & Agapes: Around 100 B&Bs in all parts of Paris. Prices: $84.50-$250 per night, based on the current exchange rate of $1.30 to one euro. Web site offers detailed bios of the owners and pictures. See www.bed-and-breakfast-in-paris.com or phone 011-33-1-44-85-06-05.

Good Morning Paris: Around 100 B&Bs and apartments in all parts of Paris. B&Bs: $70-$138; apartments from $135. See www.goodmorningparis.fr or phone 011-33-1-47-07-28-29.

Paris B&B & Apartments: Rooms and apartments in all parts of Paris (also London, Rome and Madrid). B&B prices: $90-$235; apartments from $120. Call 800-872-2632 or see www.parisbandb.com.

Meeting the French: Thirty-five B&Bs in central Paris. Web site with photos and descriptions. Prices: $67.50-$169. See www.meetingthefrench.com or call 011-33- 6-73-65- 62-19.

Hôtes Qualité Paris: This is a new B&B program run by the City of Paris to encourage more contact with visitors. Prices: $97-$195. Book online at www.hqp.fr.

Alastair Sawday's French Bed and Breakfast: Available at local bookstores and through online booksellers, lists names and addresses and contact info for booking B&Bs directly with owners. Prices range from $70-$130.

Traveler's tips

Keep in mind that B&Bs aren't hotels. Some buildings don't have elevators, and you may have to walk up several flights of stairs. Breakfast is usually a croissant, baguette, jam, butter, coffee, juice and sometimes yogurt.

Choose a location where you'll feel comfortable. The Paris subway and bus system makes it easy to get around from anywhere, but most Parisians like to stay in their neighborhoods for eating and relaxing in the evening, and so will you.

Meeting the French programs

Work-place tours ($6.50 per person) in March and April, coordinated through the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, include visits to a chocolate maker, a baker and a coffee roaster. Visits with artists in their studios ($6.50) and dinners with families (prices vary) in their homes, can also be arranged. See www.meetingthefrench.com or call 011-33-6-73-65-62-19.

Tourist information

Contact the French Government Tourist Office at 514-288-1904 or see www.paris.org.

It's late and I'm feeling a little tipsy, but no worries. My bedroom is right across the hall.

Meeting the French

Beyond the monuments and museums, travel for me is all about meeting people and soaking up the local culture.

Easy enough in a small town, but Paris? In a city with a reputation for being cool and aloof toward outsiders, can the average English-speaking tourist meet people other than waiters and shopkeepers and make some real French connections?

That's a challenge I posed for myself on a recent visit. France, is, after all, the world's top tourist destination, attracting 78 million visitors in 2006. And despite the whole "freedom fries" episode over French opposition to the war in Iraq, there will always be Americans in Paris.

"There's a lot of clichés," says Laurence Monclard, who's built a business called Meeting the French with the aim of breaking down the stereotypes. There's the perception "that we can be rude. That we're not talkative. That we're self-oriented."

Like Alcôve & Agapes, Monclard, 35, arranges B&B stays in Parisian homes. She also sets up dinners between locals and foreign visitors; works with the Paris tourist board on a program called "Meeting the Parisians at Work," and arranges visits with local artists in their studios.

"You see the facades of the buildings and the old houses, and you see lots of people on the street," she says, "but at the end of the day, you just can't knock on the door and say 'Can I come in?' "

With a little help, it turns out that you can.

A home away from home

It's possible to stay in any one of more than 100 private residences around Paris, from elegant apartments with views of the Eiffel Tower to artists' hideaways tucked into private gardens.

The location of Jacqueline's Latin Quarter apartment in a 17th-century building, around the corner from the Panthéon, near dozens of cafes and restaurants, couldn't have been better, but it was Jacqueline's warm welcome that made the four nights I spent in her spare room special.

She's 67 and moved to the neighborhood 43 years ago when 60 people shared two bathrooms in her building. Now, with the Luxembourg Gardens and direct train to the airport just a five-minute walk down the hill, it's prime real estate.

My room (third floor, no elevator) was furnished with two twin beds, a desk, a wardrobe, lots of light and had a private entrance and bathroom with modern fixtures. Covering the walls were black-and-white photos of the couple's musician and artist friends, including one of singer Paul Simon sitting at the same table where we shared the raclette.

The price was $124 a night, more than I would have paid off-season for a two-star hotel (the rate for a single was only a few dollars less than for two), but this was more than just a place to sleep.

Jacqueline (Alcôve & Agapes, asks that the full names of B&B hosts not be used for privacy reasons) steered me to the Sunday market on the Rue Mouffetard where she and José used to go to dance and sing to the street music, and we shared stories in front of the TV over glasses of her homemade raspberry liqueur.

"It's important for people who are away from home to feel they have a home," she said.

At the end of the day, when the shops and museums had closed, it was too rainy to go out walking and I had done all the cafe-sitting I could, that's just how I felt.

A visit with an artist

Monclard's "Meeting the French" program is how I happened to spend an hour and a half one afternoon talking with Sophie du Buisson, 36, a sculptress who works in bronze, stone, clay and papier-mâché in her studio and home in the hilltop artists' quarter of Montmartre.

I picked Buisson from a list of English-speaking artists who welcome visitors into their studios, and sent a credit-card payment of $6.50 over the Internet to "Meeting the French" to set up the appointment. Then I followed instructions to take the subway to Montmartre, find the address, punch in a door code and "ring at the brown door at the end of the corridor on the first floor."

Buisson welcomed me into her workshop, a brightly lit, ground-floor space with skylights, right off the kitchen. Many of her pieces were on display in her living room. One stood out: a life-size papier-m&acir;ché figure of a tall woman in a red dress.

Over espresso and almonds, we talked about her work, Paris, her husband's restaurant, her 7-month-old son, my work and our families.

She specializes in figurative art — sculptures of women, men and children. Lately, it's become more abstract as she strives to work social messages into her pieces. She's involved with a charity that focuses on people with rare and crippling diseases, and is working on a bronze fountain she hopes to sell to raise money.

Everything she makes starts with a found object, like a pole lamp, a scooter or the piece of wire she bent into the form of a Christmas tree.

"I just look in the street at what I can find for free."

Parisians at work

Another afternoon, through a "Meet the Parisians at Work" program Monclard coordinates for the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, five of us went backstage with Katia Lauranti and Nathalie Hacker, fashion designers who own a Left Bank clothing and jewelry boutique called Ka'Na.

What I liked about this visit is the way it drew me into a part of Paris filled with offbeat art galleries, pastry shops, cafes and churches I might otherwise have missed.

Lauranti and Hacker share a shop and studio space on a side street in a shopping district between busy Rue de Rennes and chic Rue Cherche Midi.

To get there, I walked by St. Sulpice church of Da Vinci Code fame and popped into a gallery called Espace EDF-Electra, where I browsed through an installation of 1,000 live plants that transformed the room into an indoor rain forest.

Lauranti, 56, is a clothing designer with a love of bright colors. She specializes in fluid, geometric creations such as her trademark expandable pants that can be worn four ways. Hacker, 44, gave up a career designing perfume packages to craft bold necklaces from materials such as pig's teeth from Africa and seeds from Madagascar.

Their clothing and jewelry sells for hundreds of dollars, but neither woman fit the stereotype image of French fashion designers working in huge workshops with lots of assistants.

Hacker wore pin-striped suit pants and a black vest and showed up carrying a motorcycle helmet under one arm. She works in a space in back of the shop with shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling with plastic bins holding her beads and stones.

Lauranti sews everything on a machine in a basement cubbyhole filled with bolts of colored cloth and spools of thread. She took up sewing 10 years ago after losing a secretarial job, and now counsels others thinking of midlife career changes.

Mingle with the locals

Paris is a collection of neighborhoods, and on certain streets, life goes on as if this were a country village instead of a big city.

One of the best ways to get a feel for Parisian life is to get out on a Sunday into one of these neighborhoods and mingle with the locals as they shop, eat, push their kids in strollers and sing along with the street musicians.

Rue Cler, a pedestrian street near the Eiffel Tower lined with food shops and a lively outdoor market, used to be one of these streets. Guidebook author Rick Steves discovered it a few years back, and it's been so overtaken with tourists that it's been nicknamed "Rue Rick Steves."

So where's the new Rue Cler?

If you're on the Right Bank near Montmartre, walk or take the subway to the bottom half of Rue des Martyrs, starting at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, northeast of Galeries Lafayette and below the domed Basilica of Sacré-Coeur.

Like many similar streets in neighborhoods that lure few tourists, this part of the Rue des Martyrs is closed to cars Sundays between 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Lasting memory

The smell of ripened cheeses mixed with the scent of oranges and roasting chestnuts on the day I walked here. A woman cradling a dog and three baguettes in her arms stopped to sing along with a trio called the Nag 'Airs. The song was a Corsican folk song called "Tchi Tchi," and everyone seemed to know it.

I love neighborhoods like this. After you've done the monuments and museums, it's what Paris is all about.

Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com