So, for your moveable feasting pleasure, I got out my little red book and whipped up a short list of favorite cheap eats in my Abbesses neighborhood. The joints listed here will not only save you money but enhance your overall travel experience.

As my grandmother would say, saving for a trip starts at home. So set down that fancy frappuccino, and wait to treat yourself to a “Sez” draft at a café above the Seine instead!

Getting there: Métro Abbesses, Pigalle or Blanche

1. Le Coquelicot (“The Poppy”)
24 rue des Abbesses
Boulangerie

Here’s where I buy my ham and cheese sandwiches, along with their award-winning “Piccola” baguettes.

Decor: Shabby-chic with hand-painted murals
Vibe: Fresh and bubbly
Perks: Fabulous view of the bakers kneading, perky staff, and terrace seating
Try: Jambon-fromage baguette, lemon bars, pain au chocolat, and Piccola baguettes

Tips: As always in Paris, takeout is cheaper, so make a selection and picnic at nearby Place des Abbesses and its little Square Jehan Rictus by the “J’taime Wall.” Love your bread straight from the oven? Ask and they will tell.

La Pignatta

2. La Pignatta
89 rue des Martyrs
Italian

Here’s where I buy take-out pizzas for my dinner parties. With their gravity-defying pizza tossing tricks and brick oven, they’ve never let me or my shindig guests down.

Decor: Old World charm accessorized with checkered tablecloths and travel posters
Vibe: ‘S Wonderful, ‘S Marvelous
Perks: Terrace seating, personable staff, hefty portions with Cheapo price tags attached
Try: Pizza Caprese or Pizza Pignatta, topped with a roasted egg and crème fraîche

Tips: Again, take-out is cheaper. From here it’s just a romantic stroll up to Sacre Coeur. For another picnic idea, check out their fresh Italian salads. I’ve got a thing going on with the tri-salad sampler.

The terrace at Le Saint Jean

3. Le Saint Jean
16 rue des Abbesses

Like the 25 little black dresses that hang in my closet, there really isn’t an occasion that le Saint Jean is perfectly suited for, night and day.

Decor: Classic Paris diner with cozy wooden booths, bar, and photography
Vibe: Where’s Edith Piaf? I’m sure she’s here somewhere.
Perks: Terrace seating and occasional live music and dancing
Try: Omelets, hand-cut fries, salads, crème brulée, and French onion soup

Tips: Order house wine by the pitcher. Traditional French dishes are always available. Lost in translation? Just ask. The staff is friendly and helpful. The best people-watching tables are located on the far left, next to the rue André Antoine steps.

4. Le Mono
40 rue Véron
Togolese

A birthday at Le Momo. Photo: Marcus Schubert

I love this place because the owner always manages to find a table for me, even on his busiest Saturday nights.

Decor: West African—bamboo, masks and popular art
Vibe: Very festive and so bruyant!
Perks: Large portions, engaging staff and a masterpiece playlist that includes King Mensah and Salif Keita!

Try: Djenkoumé (chicken in tomato sauce), grilled plantains and a cold Flag beer!

Tips: This is a great place to celebrate a birthday. Let them know ahead of time, leave your cake behind the counter, and they’ll happily stage a dramatic presentation—with music! (They won’t mention it, but it’s good form to tip for extra service like this.)

5. Le Relais Gascon
6 rue des Abbesses

Cheapos, this is where I go after a seeing movie at the historic movie house Studio 28, located just down the street. Here you’ll find big, inexpensive salads piled high with a variety of meats, cheeses and vegetables, and scrupulously topped with mountains of homemade, hand-cut garlic potatoes!

Decor: Traditional-rustic with wooden bar, mirrors, murals, and paintings
Vibe: Oh, so boisterous and bustling
Perks: Family-style seating on the second floor, terrace seating, and large portions
Try: One of the ten Salades Géantes with pommes de terre sautées à l’ail (think Mont Ventoux!)

Tips: The locals are also in awe of its old-school appeal, so arrive early to score seating. Also, order your house wine by the pitcher. It’s cheaper.

6. Café des Deux Moulins
15 rue Lepic

The glow of the Café des Deux Moulins

So why is the “café of two windmills” so unique et magnifique? Because it was featured in “Amélie“, that’s why! Stop by for an apéritif or post-dinner indulgence and rub elbows with other pilgrims.

Decor: Old-fashioned seating, hand-painted murals and classic bar
Vibe: Frenetic
Perks: Photo-op with the house gnome or exterior neon sign. Make the kids back home ga-ga with envy.
Try it: Picon-bière, a bittersweet blend of oranges and deep blue gentian flowers, typically served with a small draft beer. Mix and tipple!

Tip: Arrive around 5 PM for happy hour, starring discounted drinks. The voluptuous sweets are also heavenly.

Cheapos, make every meal an experience, after all, it was Julia Child’s very first lunch in France that changed her life, and set her cookbook project in motion. Years later she wrote, “I can still almost taste it. And thinking back on it now reminds me that the pleasures of the table and of life, are infinite. Toujours Bon Appétit!”

Oui-oui, Bon Appétit!

The post Paris: 6 favorite cheap restaurants in the Abbesses neighborhood appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

The cafeteria conundrum

Without shame, I admit to being a fan of cafeteria food. I find the whole process, from lining up with a tray, to choosing a prepared entree and selecting accompanying vegetables, both fun and weirdly satisfying. (And let’s not even talk about the dessert and drink process.)

Perhaps it’s simple nostalgia for the grade-school cafeteria experience of decades past. Perhaps I like to see my food before I decide on what to eat. Or perhaps it’s a rebellion against “foodie” culture. Whatever it is, to this day I find something irresistible about cafeterias.

Many of my friends, of course, do not share this enthusiasm. They find a trip to a cafeteria to be a depressing experience—one of cattle-call lines, hospital-quality food, and bleak ambiance. Even worse, it could be a missed opportunity. After all, a meal at a cafeteria in Paris is a meal not at a cafe, or a crepe stand, or a boulangerie … or anything typically “French.” This has led to several “one tray at the table” moments for me.

No matter, when I travel I like to drop in on cafeterias and sample their wares. When living in Berlin, I ate frequently in the city’s Mensa cafeterias–and have written my own love song to that slide-and-pay experience. Mensa cafeterias not only offer a cheap lunch option, but also an opportunity to sample German-style (albeit somewhat institutionalized) dishes.

flunch it down?

In France, the flunch restaurant chain takes its name from mashing up “French” and “lunch.” (And not, as I previously thought, from “fast” and “lunch.”) It has even led to the coining of the verb “fluncher,” although I have yet to hear it used in a sentence.

Like most French restaurants, flunch offers several plats du jour, which change daily. Flunch prices them rather low—at €9.45 for one of the five available plats du jour and a drink (which includes a soda, water, beer or a glass of wine). Notably, the plat also includes an unlimited vegetable buffet, where you can graze all day on haricots verts, carottes, pommes de terre, epinards and so forth. Desserts and salads are extra.

And thus, flunch makes Cheapo sense, if it sounds appetizing to you. After all, flunch offers a cooked dish with unlimited veggies and a drink for the same price as a hamburger and a Coke next door at a McDonald’s. And the cafeteria set-up makes sense for non-French speakers. Just point and say, “s’il vous plait”. (And “merci!”)

flunch in Paris

The chain operates 200 restaurants in France, most of which can be found in shopping centers and along the highway. In Paris, however, several flunch outlets are located in super-central locations, including just next to the Pompidou Center and nearby on the street level of the Les Halles shopping center.

So, they’re cheap, convenient, and offer a healthier fast meal option than typical fast food. Why have I encountered so much “flunch-fobia”? A couple of thoughts:

Food quality:

Typical flunch. Photo: Denn

Considering my several flunch experiences, I have certainly never been wowed by the food. The entrees, usually chicken, beef, or fish, have been French classics of a quality that’s acceptable while certainly not exceptional. (Americans could think of it as a sort of Ponderosa Steakhouse “a la Francaise”.) My meals have been a bit salty, and I’ve found the vegetables quite tasty—because they’ve been smothered in butter. It’s not exactly a light meal.

Ambiance:

It’s hard for a room to escape the cafeteria aesthetic when there are tray rails lining every fixture. But they try to make the serving area cheery.

The dining areas, however, strike me as rather grim. In my experiences in the central Paris flunches, the dining rooms have been extremely crowded during the lunch hours. Sharing tables is not strange—in fact, during busy hours you’ll probably be seated next to and across from complete strangers. (But then again, I was dining alone!) These locations are also quite popular with bus and student groups—leading to sudden crowding, occasional horseplay and bathroom lines.

Prices:

Really, this place is cheap. If you’re fine with tap water, you can have a full meal for around €6.45.

Final thoughts

Clearly, flunch isn’t for everyone, but it does provide a fast, central, and cheap alternative to typical fast food. If you decide to “flunch it,” don’t expect fine French cuisine. Expect, instead, to experience another country’s cafeteria culture. And then head back for some more buttered veggies.

Have you flunched?

Have you been to a flunch restaurant in France? Have you experienced another cafeteria in the country? Tell us about your experience in the comments section.

The post Paris Cafeterias: To “flunch” or not to “flunch”? appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Instead, save your sterling for drinks at the pub and eat at one of these five stellar restaurants for under £10 a pop:

1.The Albion
2-4 Boundary St., 020 7729-1051

You wouldn’t normally associate Terence Conran, the London designer and developer, with inexpensive. The rooms at his just-opened East London loft hotel, The Boundary, for example, start at around $250 per night. The drinks at the rooftop bar are almost as pricey.

But the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel, the Albion, is the exception: Almost all of the dishes on the menu come in at under £10. And the food is amazing—the restaurant serves very lovely and refined takes on classic British dishes like Welsh rabbit, fish pie and kedgeree. (Remarkably, traditional British food is making a comeback on menus all over the city at the moment.) This being a Conran restaurant, the design is impeccable, too, right down to the hand-knit cozies for the teapots on the tables.

2. Little Georgia
87 Goldsmiths Row, 020-7739-8154.

I stumbled upon this little gem one day on a jog through a quiet residential neighborhood in Hackney (East London). It’s a little hard to get to, but well worth the effort. When you walk in, you feel like you’re entering a warm Tbilisi kitchen, circa 1940—there are black and white family photos and an old map of Georgia on the walls and a number of Soviet-era phones on the shelves.

Skip the more expensive main courses and focus instead on the appetizers—you can share a meze of six different starters for £12 total. The best bets are the lobiani (bread stuffed with spicy beans and pork), khachapuri (cheese-filled bread) and pkhali (a minced beetroot and walnut salad). My other tip: Bring your own wine (there’s no corkage fee).

3. Song Que
134 Kingsland Rd., 020 7613-3222.

Unbeknownst to most tourists, London has its own Little Hanoi—a stretch of Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland Road in Shoreditch. The best of the lot is undoubtedly Song Que, a massive restaurant short on style (the décor is bare bones to say the least) but incredibly popular for its delicious beef and seafood pho and summer rolls.

You’ll see all types here—local Vietnamese residents, club kids gearing up for a night out in Shoreditch, and always a handful of tourists who read about the restaurant in their Time Out London guide. This isn’t a place to linger—the staff will rush you out the door as soon as you’re done—but the prices can’t be beat. Expect to spend £10 a person, with drinks.

Gladstone Arms. Photo: Ewan-M.

4. Gladstone Arms
64 Lant St., 020 7407-3962

I’m not going to lie—I trust my Time Out guide. And it says that this may be the “coolest little pub in Southeast London.” I have to agree, not just because of the living-room-like set-up (comfy couches, lots of plants and board games)—it’s also got really tasty English pies made by Pieminister, a Bristol-based company that uses free-range meat and lots of yummy seasonal ingredients. Among the more interesting options are the Matador Pie (beef steak, chorizo, olives, tomato, sherry and butter beans) and the Mr. Porky Pie (west country pork, smoked bacon, apples, leeks, cider and sage). With a pint of Black Sheep bitter beer, your bill will total just over £10.

5. Brick Lane
120-122 Brick Lane, 020 7247-0397

Last but not least is the old standby, Brick Lane, a road stretching through the East End, famous for its Bangali restaurants. Yes, it’s touristy and yes, you’ll have to fight off the touts trying to push you into their restaurants, but it’s an experience worth having in London and the food couldn’t be cheaper.

There are a ton of places on the strip, so choose carefully—cruise the strip and check out the menus first. And if you loiter outside a place long enough, the tout will offer you a free bottle of wine with dinner. One of my favorite places is Preem & Prithi, which serves an excellent balti lamb vindaloo.

The post London: 5 great eats in London for under £10 appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.

Sure, the language spoken in Cyprus is Greek, but the accent is distinctive and so is the food. For one thing, Cyprus recently made its mark in the Guinness Book of World Records with a 41-meter sausage, dedicated in a big ceremony complete with traditional costumes in a town up in the Troodos Mountains.

Adventures in Cypriot Cuisine

The easiest way to get a handle on Cypriot cuisine – and a way to kill several hours trying to put away what looks like not much food – is to order meze, a selection of anywhere from a dozen to 20 hot and cold traditional dishes that most sit-down restaurants offer with little to no variety in the lineup.

First will be the dips, served with pita bread: among them tahini, made from ground sesame seeds and lemon juice, and taramosalata, made from fish roe and thickened with either a lemon-potato mixture or mayonnaise. Grilled halloumi cheese is always on the list somewhere, squeaking as you chew. There will also be meat dishes, leaning heavily on pork. Souvlaki will be among them, but so will hiromeri, a type of cured ham; loukanika, a pork sausage that is often grilled; and lountza, another ham-ish offering. For the pescatarians, there is fish meze, but vegetarians may have a hard time finding an acceptable version of the full menu.

Vegetarians will find that souvlaki joints don’t need to be off limits, since most offer grilled halloumi in place of the meat. Cypriots also eat a lot of veggies and legumes, and many restaurants offer a bean or lentil dish of the day.

Any serious restaurant in Cyprus will let you pick your fish when ordering.

A Cheapo-friendly pick in Nicosia

An inexpensive local favorite in Nicosia for vegetarian and carnivore-friendly homestyle cooking is Mattheos Restaurant, tucked unobtrusively in a corner of Plateia 28 Octobriou alongside the tiny Stavros tou Missirikou Church with its easy-to-spot minaret.

Coffee and dessert

To wake up after a big meal, there’s always coffee. There is not much love lost between Cyprus and Turkey, so locals call the brew Greek coffee or just order it by their preferred sweetness – glyko (sweet), metrio (one sugar) or sketo (black). For those who prefer their caffeine with milk, Italian-style coffee is very popular here, as is Nescafe, which is served hot, chilled or as a frothy iced frappe.

Most of Cyprus’ offerings to the sweet tooth will be familiar, but there are a few things that are typical to the island. Soujouko looks like a length of tan garden hose, but it’s made from dipping strings of almonds into thickened grape juice. Loukoumades are fried dough blobs served hot out of the oil and drizzled with honey, and are usually sold at small stands starting in the late afternoon, or at festivals. Shamishi is the same fried dough filled with a sort of cream made with semolina and flavored with mastic, which has a flavor slightly reminiscent of rosewater.

As you might expect in a hot climate, Cyprus produces its own ice cream. Three big companies, Papafilippou, Erakles and Pahit-Ice, have stores all over the country and a presence in the freezer cases at supermarkets.

Tomorrow: Heading to church

About the author: Alex Christodoulides is one of those push-me-pull-you creatures known as a dual citizen. When not at home in New York City (where she is a freelance writer) or in Cyprus (where she is a freeloader taking advantage of her relatives’ hospitality), she is probably dreaming of a trip to someplace where vaccinations are required and Fodor’s fears to tread.

The post Cyprus Journal: Adventures in eating appeared first on EuroCheapo's Budget Travel Blog.