Paris Is Easy to Find

On kumquats, simulacra and Décret Pain

May 29, 2026

My stomach starts to hurt as soon as we get to London. Not for hunger, I’d eaten a $26 salad in JFK like seven hours before then. And not for nausea either because I have too much self-respect to get nauseous. It hurts because I’m struck just then with yearning. One that pulls at the place behind my belly button, leaving me feeling hollowed. Scooped out. Hooked and tugged, gently, gently, making a gap I know I’ll be hard-pressed to fill as soon as I see the London rooftops with so many little rounded chimneys sticking up like stubbed cigarettes. London homes lining narrow, curved streets, standing on the same footprint they would’ve in the age of horse-drawn carriages, turnips.

I want to swallow them all whole. I want to belong to one. I hurt and ache and yearn for who I’d be if I’d grown up behind a doorway with its knob in the center and a mom called “mum.” And I hurt and ache and yearn to know I won’t come close in the span of our four-day visit, and even worse in knowing that I’ll try as hard as I can despite myself.

We’re trading places with three girls in our tube car just back from their own holiday, they’d call it. One that, judging by their glittering belly buttons and the weight of their false lashes, will be very different from ours. I am wearing pedal pushers and I can’t pull off mascara. Eyes too deep-set.

The girl right across from me is straddling her pale pink roller bag and composing an Instagram carousel. Her friend says she’ll be happy to help her think of a caption if she’d like and she says that’s okay, she’d saved a Tik Tok with a bunch of cute ones that are really good. I write them down as she lists them off:

I am the vibe
something sweet
made you look, twice
pure confidence
soft glam
growth season
my presence is a privilege

I melt at her accent, at the way she says “glam” and how “knackered” she is. I melt at the way the recorded voice over the loudspeaker says “Picadilly” too. We get off before I can hear which caption she chooses. I hope the “made you look” one.

The ache doesn’t go away while we’re walking through Bloomsbury, nor when we drop our bags with Jeff at the front desk of our hotel. He’ll have them waiting in our rooms for us when we return. In the meantime, I’ll go back out looking for London. For what I’d glimpsed of it through the window of the tube.

I’ll spend the rest of the stay looking for London. But London is hard to find. Mostly, I find New York. Good food and men in suits on the phone saying “let’s just get the deck to a good place by Friday,” tourists and vape clouds and pretty public parks, albeit with far more plaques thanking HRH for her patronage. Ivey and I sit for breakfast at Towpath on Regent’s Canal and take turns guessing where every passerby is from, going quiet and listening for their accents when they get close. Usually we’re wrong. Usually they’re American. We agree that Shoreditch feels a lot like Williamsburg. That Soho is like Soho.

In looking for London I try to buy it, too, paying £40 for mushroom hot chocolate powder from a woman called Naomi just because she’d told me about the calming benefits of Lion’s Mane in a British accent. We walk Portobello Road and I quiver at the folding tables covered in Beatrix Potter dishware, fingers itching to take home the Miss Tiggy Winkle cup and saucer set. But in the same moment I know I can find it all on Etsy. I consider buying the tote from Jolene, a corner bakery with cinnamon rolls and slices of strawberry pandan cake, just so I can carry it around back home in the hopes that someone stops me and asks if I had a good time in Stoke Newington. I duck into Spitalfields Market on the way back to the tube, vaguely recalling I’d read about it in Dickens. It’s overrun with patrons of a popup for The Ordinary, a line eighty people long.

On our second day we go to Choosing Keeping, a paper goods shop I’d visited once before that makes me believe in a life more beautiful than I’d yet dared to imagine, makes me want to learn calligraphy and send letters sealed with wax. The ache grows more violent while I’m filling up one of the little cloth baskets they have waiting by the door for girls like me, girls who won’t be able to resist the handmade journals and embossed notecards decorated with a bunny and a snail.

When my basket’s full I’m ushered over to the till by a kindly cashier, one who can no doubt see the tears of joy brimming in my eyes at the bundle I’ve accrued. “You’ve made such lovely choices,” she says. I blush with pride, tell her truthfully that this is my favorite shop on earth. “Oh! Well, you’ll be happy to know we ship worldwide then!”

I am not happy to know that. I feel then that I must do something I can’t get in New York or I’ll implode. I go to the Churchill War Rooms and am delighted to learn he invented the romper, and that he loved to paint.

My error, I think, is in looking for a simulacrum of what I believe “London” to be. A scene you’d find in a snow globe or emblazoned on a souvenir tote, one with Big Ben and Harry Potter and Paddington Bear and the word “tosser.” Instead, I find London only when I’m not looking for it.

I find it at V. V. Rouleaux, a fancy trimmings store in Marylebone laden with racks lined with rows of thick silk ribbon and hats displayed in happy clusters like the feathers of a peacock. I stand in the corner touching every tassel they have while the prim attendant with a haircut like Mary Berry’s helps a young blond woman who came in not long after I did. Mary Berry holds up two fascinators.

“It doesn’t have to be an occasion for a boater, in fact,” she assures the blond. “Is there an occasion?” Her head tiles to the left with the inquisitive elegance of one of the queen’s own Corgis. “Yes, actually, I’m going to the Ascot,” the woman replies. Mary claps her hands gently, like she’s wearing silk gloves. “Well,” she says, “let’s get you a ribbon then.”

I find it again when walking through Queen Mary’s rose garden and pass a little blonde girl singing “Yellow Submarine.” And again at Columbia Road Flower Market, when a man with a Cockney accent thick as sticky toffee pudding offers “FIFTEEN POUNDS FOR BEEEE-U-TEE-FUL PEONIES. HYACINTHS, FIFTEEN POUNDS A BUNCH.” And again when I pass a pub overflowing with a crowd of people who look eerily similar, only to look up to see a vinyl sign that reads “Half Off Pints for Bald Men” hanging over the door. And again at Regency Café, sat next to two construction workers each mopping up the run off of their respective full English breakfasts.

I resolve to stop looking, and to be patently delighted for the rest of the stay. We go for lunch on Lamb’s Conduit at Honey & Co., the first restaurant I visited when I came to London with my mom at twenty-one. I order the aubergine, a dish that’s been on my proverbial “last meal” list ever since then. It is just as good as I’d remembered.

When we take the Eurostar to France that afternoon, Ivey and me and the boys and Kenna, we find Paris as soon as we get off the train at Gare du Nord, the sun slanting through the clouds, dappling soft light onto cobbled sidewalks through the leaves of the plane trees. Jack can speak French better than he’s let on and I wonder aloud where mimes came from. I swear I can just hear the sounds of an accordion floating on the breeze.

We’ve lost an hour on the way and we leave our apartment in La Marais for a late dinner at Chez Janou, a restaurant on the corner just blocks from us that seems to pulse from within, like it has its own heartbeat. We sit for wine at a bar on Place des Vosges while we wait for a table for six to open up. We all order a glass of the house red and the waiter looks at us sidelong and wordlessly returns with two bottles, his eyes smiling as he pours.

We empty each glass, and the rocks glasses of stale pretzel he’d brought, too, and walk back to the restaurant to claim the long table in the back. I’m drunk now, or deliriously happy or both, and Chez Janou all but glows. Technicolor lamps that shine like the ribbon candy my mom gets at Christmas light up every corner. A fleet of little dishes full of garlic-marinated olives lines the bar, laying in wait.

I get the farçis Provencaux, someone picks the duck confit, we all split another bottle of the house red and talk about where we were when Michael Jackson died. Our waiter has a thick accent and the sweetest face, sweet like how a field mouse would look if he were turned into a man. We order the chocolate mousse and he brings it out in a great terrine, scooping two heaping mounds onto clean white dessert plates. We squeal. We pay. He brings us the check and six shot glasses and fills each with melon liqueur. “It is your first night in Paris. It should be perfect,” he says. He leaves the bottle on the table when he goes.

I find nothing but Paris for as long as we stay, just as soon as I wake up in the morning to sit on the sidewalk with another flat white, Ivey joining me to order her own and a chocolate croissant not long after. I watch women with tousled hair and neck scarfs close the door to their apartment buildings and straddle road bikes in ballet flats, nylon trench coats billowing behind as they ride down Rue Charlot. Grown men stand at crosswalks, half-eaten baguettes jutting out of their messenger bags. Two boys army crawl across the back lawn of the Musée Rodin, trying to get as close as they can to one of the bunnies who lives in the sculpture garden. We order the assiete de fromage at Clown Bar and it comes out with a dollop of kumquat jam in the center. A jogger gets tangled up in a dog’s leash, its owner calling him a “PUTAIN!” as I paint a little bit of the orange gel onto a piece of chevre.

At night people ooze and pour onto every sidewalk, like the whole city’s been tipped on its side. Every restaurant and bar, none of them noticeably distinct and many of them appearing more or less mediocre, is overflowing with patrons who seem to know what they’re doing. This is an undercurrent of every day in Paris. Every ouef mayonnaise I eat is just as good as the next, every house wine, every “light red” tastes the close to the same. A piece of blue cheese is a piece of blue cheese. The city upholds a standard, there are laws about the quality of baguettes. But beyond that, the commitment seems to be less about finding the best glass of red wine and more about having a good one on a beautiful night with people you like. I do it over and over again.

I am the spitting image of “girl who just got back from Paris” as soon as we leave and before I’m even off the plane, cracking the spine of A Moveable Feast in my aisle seat and annotating with abandon. I come home a collage of things I want to carry back. Not just the handmade ceramics and the custom comb with my name on it, emblazoned in gold. But new habits, ways of being, a new ache — “a different kind of hunger,” like the one Hemingway writes he’d seen in Cezanne. I unhook my tray table and list them all in my newest custom-made journal:

Things to Bring Home:

1. Kumquats

2. A bottle of the cheapest wine they have, split four ways

3. Spending on good things with abandon, knowing it will all come back

4. Bread and cheese outside

5. Writing everything down in the moment it happens

6. Hand crème thick as cement

7. More mustard

8. Should I become an au pair? Perhaps to a young widower…

9. Reasons to use a knife rest

10. The best in little bits

11. Oeuf Mayonnaise

On my first Saturday back in New York I go to the farmer’s market and buy green garlic, mustard greens, a quarter pound of good blue cheese and a bunch of pink radishes. I loiter around a jam stand, scouring the shelves of strawberry preserves and orange marmalades for a jar of kumquat jam anything like the one they’d served at Clown Bar. The jam man asks what I’m looking for, says “you’ll need to make that yourself” when I tell him. Ivey and Josh and I split the blue cheese and a baguette on the steps of BAM on Tuesday night.

I still feel the tug, just duller now. I find a recipe for kumquat jam. It helps.

The Best Things I Ate