Today was a bit of a slow day because yesterday was crazy busy. Since we're only in Paris for 2 weeks we decided to do some shopping. On an old travel video Justine Shapiro talked about a shop called Tati that we never see in the guidebooks. On the number 2 metro we've seen Tati out the window so we knew roughly where it was. Our plan was to go to Tati and then to E. Dehillerin to see about picking up some more copper cookware.
Whenever I leave the apartment I go down a different street in order to get to know my neighborhood. Today we went straight east to Avenue de Clichy because we knew we could catch the metro at the Clichy stop. Surprise to us but Avenue de Clichy is lined with cheap clothing shops and kebab restaurants, score! We also found that it had it's own Tati shop. Natalya bought a few pieces of clothing and then we went to Tati and loaded up on Parisian clothes that made the girls look very nice. Paris is not the place to buy clothes as everything here is very expensive but Tati is decent. It's probably the French equivilent to a Factory2U or TJMaxx. Things that would have been $20 at home was probably near there here. They didn't have hardly any boys or mens clothes though so that will have to wait.
After leaving we took our clothes back to the apartment and headed to E. Dehillerin to check on pans. If you don't know Le Dehillerin it's a 150 year old cooking store that speciallizes in copper. Even with the horrible exchange rate it's cheaper to get your stuff in Paris and bring it home over going to Wiliams Sanoma or Sur La Table. A 9.5 inch Mauviel Sauce pan with lid at E. Dehillerin is $266 US dollars, at Sur La Table it's special order and costs $455. Almost $200 in savings is huge. You could ship it for $50, pay tax and still be $100 ahead. We chose to put them in our bags and carry them back. That way we can go to customs in CDG airport and have them stamp our documents and E. Dehilerin would refund our tax. We bought two sauce pans, one lid and another 11 fry pan which cost us a total of $477. At Sur La Table that same stuff would have been $865. Buying our stuff there paid for half of one plane ticket.
Even though you can get Mauviel pans at Williams Sanoma they aren't the same. They've adapted them for the American home cook. The copper walls are just over half the thickness and they have brass handles to make them lighter than the cast iron ones. Yes, they're more practical in the weight category but if you don't have 2.5 mm of copper than why are you using it? I don't think that 1.5 mm copper has any advantage over alluminum. The Williams Sanoma product liine doesn't match up exactly to the professional stuff you get in Paris but buying the stuff closest to what we got it would have cost $715 there. We saved $250 and we got the real thing.
We'll stop back by and pay for them at a later date.