Stuff Parisians Like: Discovering the quoi in the Je ne sais quoi; by Olivier Magny, Berkley Books, New York, 2011 is one of the funniest books I've ever read and one of the cleverest concerning the French. Normally I'm turned off by these cultural diffrences tomes but this isn't one of them anyway.
Magny, in case you've been sleeping through the last decade, is the same guy who straightfacedly runs the wine tasting/wine bar/restaurant called O Chateau but it's clear he has done a lot of thinking between sips.
The "stuff"referred to in the title includes everything from black clothes to Barack Obama and scarfs to Clint Eastwood and only mentions three food references, O Chateau, Le Reminet and Hugo Desnoyer. The chapters are zippy two page things with at least a laugh a paragraph - and they're in almost perfect English, no translator involved, which is all the more impressive.
Anyway, I give it my highest endorsement.
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