The team at Le Bal Café serves the greatest Sunday brunch in Paris. Every detail of the experience - from the NYTimes-worthy coffee, to the squeezed-to-order orange juice, to the perfectly-streaked bacon - belies an approach to brunch that is as simple as it is heart-winning: they try to present only the best possible versions of things. Even if it involves staffing someone to do nothing other than squeeze orange juice for six hours straight.
The only problem is the hordes of fellow brunchers, who have risen earlier than you and taken all the tables and eaten most of the food by the time you arrive. Even then, Le Bal Café theoretically has the institutional advantage of the attached bookshop and photography museum, with which one is free to distract oneself during the interminable wait for a table.
Except, as my friend H and I discovered the other Sunday, the fellow who runs the bookshop is a raging lunatic.
