Every Saturday, if I am in Paris, I go to the street market that runs down the Avenue du Président Wilson in the smart 16th arrondissement. Even when it rains, it is a hugely enjoyable experience. The vegetables, the cheeses, the live langoustines are some of the very best you can find in the French capital, with prices to match.
There are always tourists taking snapshots of the well-garnished stalls, where Parisian bourgeois matrons queue-barge each other to be served. One of my favourite fruit and vegetable stalls is run by an extremely lively Chinese woman assisted by her hen-pecked husband and sons. The other Saturday, I was buying some spring onions, ginger and hot red peppers and I told her I had just returned from Chongqing.
Now, I don’t think everybody knows exactly where Chongqing is, or that it is one of the world’s biggest urban districts with a staggering 32 million inhabitants. But my stall keeper’s face lit up and she squeaked that Chongqing was one of her husband’s favourite Chinese cities because he simply loves its local culinary speciality – the hotpot, or huo guo.
