La madrileña inglesa: Beyond Madrid

July's instalment of The Year of the City Break whisked us off to Paris to see Devendra Banhart playing live.

Rather lazily, aside from the gig we didn't venture far from our favourite arrondissments, the 3rd and 4th; Le Marais just has too much on offer.

Thanks for letting us know, Paris

One thing that did tear us away from the chic boutiques and scruffy cocktail bars of the 3rd and 4th was a reservation at Michelin-starred Yam'Tcha, one of the city's most exciting restaurants.

Opened by French chef Adeline Grattard when she returned from living in Hong Kong, Yam'Tcha is an exquisite fusion of French and Chinese flavours. The restaurant itself is tiny - seating just 20 diners - as is the open kitchen, but what emerges is innovative, delicate and delicious.

The tasting menus change daily according to the ingredients picked up that day. A creative touch is the choice between wine pairings with every course or tea pairings instead: keeping with the fusion theme, we went for a mix of the two.

After crab spring rolls came carrot and chorizo soup (above left), both bursting with intense flavour. Roasted squid, mussels and sweet potato noodles sprinkled with zingy sesame seeds was my favourite dish (above right), closely followed by a blue lobster, chanterelle mushroom and almond salad.

Steam turbot and black rice in a chicken broth

Chicken, corn and basilic with black rice vinegar

The tea pairings were beautifully matched to each dish, bringing a lightness and a freshness, as well as a welcome booze break in between wine pairings (it was lunchtime, after all).

Before the final sweet course our waitress asked if we'd like cheese as well. What a question - who doesn't want cheese? What arrived was an innovative mix of Chinese and European traditions: a steamed bun, tacky and slightly sticky just like in Hong Kong, filled with hot, oozing Stilton.

I'd go all the way back to Paris just for one more of these gooey parcels of deliciousness.

A fresh, crisp apricot and sorrel tart with almond sorbet woke us up again, ready to face the afternoon.

That evening we skipped off to Le Trianon, a beautiful, crumbling old theatre-turned-gig venue, to hear Devendra Banhart falsetto his way through his latest album (no surviving photos I'm afraid; I was too busy dancing).

On the ramble back to our hotel through the bars of Le Marais we dropped into Candelaria. We'd had a drink with friends earlier in the day at its new sister bar, Le Mary Celeste, and they'd recommended big sister Candelaria for cool cocktails in a cool setting.

So we were slightly fazed not to find a speakeasy-style, dark and intimate cocktail lounge, but a brightly-lit, shabby Mexican taco cantina, so small that just a handful of late night diners were squeezed up at the bar, gulping down margaritas and scooping up guacamole.

Before becoming a madrileña, I had a past life in Mexico City, so a late night Mexican feast posed absolutely no problems. We elbowed our way to the bar and wolfed down some spicy tuna tacos and several plastic tumblers of margaritas, before we noticed our fellow diners sneaking off through an almost-hidden, unmarked door at the back of the cantina.

The penny dropped. Sure enough, there was our speakeasy cocktail lounge, just as promised.

A change from the traditional Parisian café-et-croissant breakfast is Breakfast in America, Le Marais's very own American diner, not unlike our London favourite The Breakfast Club.

Having worked so hard to find our cocktail bar the previous evening, we'd been reluctant to leave once we'd found it. BIA's thick banana shakes, spicy Mexican omelettes and sweet raspberry and blueberry pancakes put us in a much better mood to face the day.

A lazy, sunny Sunday in Paris means one thing: a stroll along laid-back Canal Saint-Martin, which feels like a world away from the rest of the city.

The cobbled pavements and wrought-iron bridges are perfect places for lounging in the shade and people watching; there are plenty of shabby-chic wine bars and bistros along the banks and surrounding streets when it's time for an aperitif.

Merci Paris, à bientôt.

http://www.yamtcha.com/
http://www.letrianon.fr/
http://www.candelariaparis.com/
http://www.lemaryceleste.com/
http://www.breakfast-in-america.com/main/

The next instalment in The Year of the City Break was another weekend trip to Frankfurt, which I last wrote about here.

Being seasoned Frankfurters by now, we skipped the tourist sights and headed straight out for drinks. I arrived just in time to catch the last day of Opernplatzfest, the Opera Square Festival, a sprawl of buzzing food and drink stalls outside the beautiful Alte Oper, the old opera house.

Now that he's had a few months to settle in, Boyfriend has firmly decided on a favourite bar. Bar ohne Namen ("The Bar with No Name") is a tiny hole-in-the-wall which comes alive on hot summer evenings, when hordes of people spill out into the street clutching enormous gin and tonics and Aperol spritzes.

Frankfurt's Kleinmarkthalle is a bustling indoor market, a foodie's dream. On Saturday lunchtime we munched and sampled our way through the Moroccan, Turkish, German and Italian market stalls, before settling down to a glass of wine and some lunch on the sun deck.

On Saturday night we skipped down to Walon & Rosetti, a hipster Italian restaurant, where we shared seriously salty lamb chops and melting tagliata steak, before spilling out into the street to join the crowds making the most of the summer heat.

Just around the corner, nestled in the middle of the red light district, is "the off-licence" - not quite a bar, not quite an off-licence, where you can buy a beer or a can of whiskey and coke, pull up a plastic chair and hang out with the shop's resident DJ. With July temperatures up in the thirties, it was heaving.

The next morning we were feeling somewhat delicate. Boyfriend's apartment is just around the corner from Frankfurt's Botanical Gardens, the Palmengarten. It's a beautiful place for a stroll, and even has a sprawl of sunloungers set out on the grass if you're feeling lazy.

Being too scorching a day to explore the greenhouses, we made for the boating lake. Surrounded by willow trees, it's full of enormous carp, busy ducks and serenely floating swans.