Have you ever walked into a bar or a museum or any building that has any age and you felt like you walked into an old book? That’s exactly what this restaurant and café is like. It’s basically like walking into a book that’s 200 years old, at least that’s what I’m thinking as I’m walking in and around this restaurant and bar. Everything there seems so old – the paintings and some posters of old cabaret dancers. It’s a cross between the Leaky Cauldron in Harry Potter and the restaurant in Ratatouille. It’s beautiful but I’m snapped out of the moment by a nice Frenchman speaking to us. We ask him if it’s OK if we can just have a coffee and he says yes in the kindest and sweetest voice. 

We sit at a corner table where we can look up and see the whole restaurant. I am so amazed at the beauty of this place as everything is perfectly polished and the art and knick-knacks on the walls is so old. It seems as if everything has been placed with extreme precision and then left there to rot. I sit there and consider all the tattered pictures of people that seem long since dead set on the walls. Was it an owner, a past lover or a famous person? The gentleman comes back to us so we both decided to get a simple delicious tea and coffee, and he then leaves us. As we are sitting there, I feel a slight brush against my leg so I look down to find an old tabby cat as orange as the sunshine. I hear a small squeal as Rachael smiles and I’ve never seen a face so happy. There’s something about a beautiful big orange cat. He actually jumps on to a table as the gentleman comes with our drinks and says sorry. We both laugh and say it’s perfectly fine so he shrugged his shoulders and told us the cat is friendly and shouldn’t scratch us.

We go on to pet the cat giving it all our love and affection as we talk about how beautiful this place is, and how this cat just made our day better. The cat proceeds to stare out the window looking at the people going about their day. Rachael and I do the same eventually as the cat gets bored and walks towards Rachael, curling up on her lap and falling asleep. Rachael says we have to stay here as long as the cat is asleep so we order another latte or maybe a glass of wine.

After a couple minutes of chatting about life and how beautiful Paris is, I just had to go wandering around the restaurant so I give Rachael a kiss on the forehead and go walking about. I walk to the top floor and see the beauty of the building – the walls are decorated in a beautiful red cloth. I pick up a random knife from the table and look at it – it seems like it has a lot of age to it. I think to myself how fancy it would be to eat lunch in a place like this. After taking a couple of photos I start walking back downstairs and told the waiter how amazing this place is, he says thank you and I can see the kindness of his heart as well as a kindness within the kitchen staff as I walk past the kitchen. I sit back down with Rachael and ask her how her day is, she laughs and pets the cat making it all love-drunk. We finally pay for our drinks as it’s about time we leave, we don’t have all day! As Rachael stands up she is covered in cat hair so we brush it off and walk out of the café hand-in-hand thinking how beautiful and how lucky we are to go to such a place.