Capucine Gougenheim
Alixia's bar corner: les enfants du marché, a sharing cellar in the Marais
It's one of those places in the Marais, like Les Enfants du Marché, where beauty and goodness come together. Once past the narrow aisles, crowded with curious onlookers and regulars of the marché des enfants rouges, we sit down at the bar of Les Enfants du Marché and the culinary journey begins.
There, at the far corner of the peeling wall, a meticulously dressed fauna is gathered. Oversized sunglasses, unstructured knitted sweaters, hair falsely unkempt, they laugh and chip away at the dishes to be shared. You can see them smiling. With one elbow resting on the table, the other waving a fork or a glass of wine, we watch this joyful theater from afar. The plates, colored like impressionist paintings, scroll across the white counter, while the chefs dance a lively waltz with the pots and fire. From the corner of the bar, half-seated on a high stool, you discover the menu, which changes with the seasons and moods, then shout out your order. At the moment, we're enjoying a ceviche of seriole fleuri, mussels marinière and salicorne, blue lobster with beurre blanc, their famous selection of charcuterie, including a Galician beef cecina, and a farandole of vegetables. Their "thirst-quenching" wines are a good enough reason to visit, and we get a taste of France through vineyards both famous and unknown. In front of us, cutlery in shambles, bottles of wine, drawn slates and stacked loaves of bread testify to the exalted life of the place: we pass, we pass again, we point, we sit and we leave, happier than we arrived.
