Planning a Paris trip? This is Day 3 in a series recapping our ten-year anniversary trip, neighborhood by neighborhood, meal by meal, with the honest version of what made the list and what we actually did.
What I Had Planned
Sunday was built around the Orangerie (which has been on my Paris bucket list for years) plus a handful of other museums, a riverside lunch, and a dinner reservation I'd been looking forward to all week.
The planned day:
- Musée de l'Orangerie, reserved for 9am
- Église du Dôme / Invalides (museum pass, no reservation needed, 10am–6pm)
- Rodin Museum (maybe)
- Lunch at Riviera Fuga, reserved for 1pm
- Arc de Triomphe (backup, already done Saturday)
- Seine River Cruise
- Wander Saint-Germain
- Dinner at L'ouzeri Paris Odéon
The Orangerie
Let me start here, because it deserves the full attention.
Musée de l'Orangerie is the home of Monet's massive Nymphéas — the Water Lilies paintings — housed in two oval rooms built specifically to display them, designed with Monet's input on the light and how the work should be experienced.
I'd been wanting to see it for years.
Our hotel had a Nespresso machine, which solved the 9am caffeine problem from the day before. We arrived early enough to have the space nearly to ourselves for a few quiet minutes (seconds?) before the crowds built.
Here's my thing about the Orangerie and Monet.
I have a habit in every museum I visit of gravitating to one painting, standing in front of it longer than planned, trying to figure out WHY I'm so drawn to it.
That painting is almost always a Monet, even when I don't recognize it at first. Even when there are a hundred other works to look at. I keep finding myself stopped in front of them before I know why.
So standing inside rooms designed specifically around those paintings, with morning light coming through the curved skylights, landing exactly where Monet wanted it to land — it was exactly what I'd hoped for. There's no honest way to describe it without sounding dramatic. It's just a very particular kind of still.
I'd recommend booking first thing in the morning, with the museum pass if you have it. The line for pre-purchased tickets runs the same as the museum pass line, and both move quickly.
One scheduling note: the Dorsay is closed Mondays, and the Louvre and Orangerie close Tuesdays. Those off-days are typically the busiest at whatever major museum is still open, because crowds compensate. Plan around this.
The museum took about an hour, though you could easily spend longer sitting with the paintings. My first and only purchase of the entire trip was the small catalog book of all the Orangerie's paintings. No hesitation. I carried it for the rest of the day.
The Rodin Museum: Better Than I Expected
We'd already crossed the Arc de Triomphe and Eiffel Tower off the list on Saturday, so Sunday was for the Musée Rodin and Invalides.
The Rodin surprised me.
I'd expected a standard indoor museum experience: rooms of work, placards, the usual.
What I found instead was one of the more peaceful spots we visited all week. The gardens are expansive and beautifully planted, with sculptures throughout that you can walk around completely, viewing from every angle in changing natural light.
There's a particular quality to experiencing a three-dimensional work outside that you don't get indoors. You understand the sculpture differently when you can circle it.
The interior collection is also staggering in volume. Room after room of finished (and unfinished) work, spanning decades. I kept thinking about what focused, sustained attention produces over a lifetime when you're not competing with a phone for your own concentration. Just an observation.
Between the Rodin and our lunch reservation, we found a small café nearby that was open on a Sunday, La Routine Café, and had eggs with smoked pastrami and more coffee. A perfect low-key stop.
I found myself wondering if Ina Garten had wandered these same streets at some point and declared everything magnificent in that calm, certain way she has. Probably yes.
Les Invalides: Napoleon and the Great Big Very Large Tomb
We wandered into the War Museum, Musée de l'Armée, simply because we had some extra time. The war museum held a far larger collection than I'd expected. The French were involved in a significant number of conflicts that my American education had glossed over entirely. Interesting to see it from this side.
Again, not a must-see but okay to pop into if you have the museum pass OR if you're a huge history buff.
Next, we went into Les Invalides and the Église du Dôme, the burial site of Napoleon I.
Napoleon's tomb is enormous. Disproportionately, intentionally enormous.
The baldachin inside rivals the one at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The marble floors below are intricately patterned and absolutely beautiful. After standing in that room, I completely understand why "Napoleon complex" entered the language.
The marble patterns in the floors and wall stopped me for a different reason: I want to explore them in a future art piece. There's something in those inlaid patterns that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.
Lunch at Riviera Fuga and an Afternoon Pivot
Lunch at Riviera Fuga on the water was good. It's a cute little restaurant parked on a boat in the Seine. The setting on a beautiful Sunday afternoon was genuinely pleasant. We had oysters, a spritz, ravioli with beef cheek, and crispy octopus. Everything was well done.
My honest caveat: Paris has so many extraordinary restaurants that this one wouldn't make my shortlist if you're making careful choices. It's solid and worth it in the right circumstances, but I'd prioritize the other spots in this series first.
Mid-afternoon, we made a panicked realization: we had no gift for our daughter, Bonnie. Emergency mode.
We headed to Galeries Lafayette, which is beautiful, overwhelming, expensive, and ultimately unproductive for our purposes.
I appear to be allergic to all malls, French or otherwise. We walked out with nothing. I've made my peace with this.
We rallied at Notre Dame — no reservation needed, and the line moves quickly (10–20 minutes, in our experience), so don't let the queue intimidate you. When I last visited, pre-fire, the interior was much darker and more worn.
The restored version is bright, clean white, with scaffolding still present in places but the space itself feeling remarkably new. Stunning in a completely different way than it used to be.
The Cramique Discovery
On the way back from Notre Dame, my sister-in-law's recommendation finally clicked into place.
She'd told me about a specific bakery before we left — a place known for their cramique, which is a chocolate chip brioche loaf bread served warm from the oven.
During the Montmartre food tour the night before, Nathan and I had noticed a shop with a line of genuinely inexplicable length outside. We took a photo of it because any line that long in Paris is worth investigating.
We looked it up. Same bakery. Same brand. And there was a location around the corner from our hotel, close enough that I could see the awning from our hotel window.
We got one on the way back. Ate it standing on the street, warm, chocolate just barely melted. It was simple and wonderful and exactly the right thing after a long day.
(The bakery: Aux Merveilleux de Fred. The cramique sells out — go early or go again.)
The Wine Bar, the French Lottery, and the Ramen
We decided against the Seine river cruise. We'd walked most of the Seine that day and the overlap felt redundant. Instead we stopped into a wine bar in the 6th, L'Avant Comptoir du Marché, for a glass and to be surrounded by a lively bunch of locals.
We tried to reach the Luxembourg Gardens in the 5th before they closed, but arrived just after 6pm. They looked beautiful through the locked gates — there's a famous fountain visible from outside. If you can get there earlier, do. It's on the must-see list for next time.
For dinner, we'd spotted a Michelin Bib Gourmand ramen spot nearby, Kodawari Ramen.
We wandered over, and stood in what we thought was the queue.
Turns out, it was for people who had already been called from the virtual queue (QR code on the side!). Ah! Note: join before you arrive from their website.
Through a combination of looking visibly confused and the hostess being genuinely kind, we eventually got ourselves on the list using her phone after our area code refused to cooperate with the online booking system.
We waited at Eta, a wine bar nearby, for the text confirmation.
We never got a text to confirm we were actually ON the list, we only saw a confirmation on the hostess's phone.
All this to say, we weren't too optimistic about actually getting in to eat ramen. So, we proceeded to order a cheese plate.
Which was large. And being hungry, we dug in.
An hour later, miraculously, we got the text that our table was ready.
It felt like winning the French lottery.
And it delivered completely. The house special ramen for me, traditional with chicken and egg for Nathan.
The wheat comes from French farms, milled into noodles for the restaurant. The chickens are French. The broth was serious in the way that good ramen broth is serious — hours of work invisible in the bowl. I had no notes.
We went to bed embarrassingly full. A large cheese plate plus a massive bowl of French-sourced ramen is a reliable route to being unable to move, which was appropriate for 10:30pm on Day Three.
Next up: trains to champagne country, a 70-euro lesson in French ticketing rules, caves full of a million bottles, and a train cancellation that somehow didn't ruin anything.
Enjoying the series? Color, cooking, travel, studio life — it all lives in Studio Vibes, my twice-monthly newsletter. Join here →
0 comments