À Dejeuner

I've been trying to take part in the French thing of big lunches, small dinners. A habit that makes sense, really -- even though I love a nice big dinner. But so far this ladies-who-lunch thing has been successful.
On Tuesday I met a friend at Le Loir Dans La Théière in the Marais, which is a cozy place with wooden tables and a kind of coffeehouse feel to it. I ordered a creamy/zesty linguini dish that was yummy and my friend got a zucchini tart that was FULL of zucchini. The best though was dessert -- a lemon meringue which consisted of 10% really tart lemon and 90% huge, really dense and sweet and yummy meringue. I never liked meringue pies, the kind offered at my church cafeteria -- the meringue was airy and tasteless, I thought. But this stuff was so good and I am thus converted.
Today we went to a local place called Le Reveil du Xème which is a modest little bistro around the corner. The people there are super nice and the food is no nonsense. Most of the dishes were incomprehensible to me and I was too scared to order something called "Tête persilée" (parsleyed head?), which made me believe that this must be "real" french cuisine. I ordered the saucisse dish which came on a mound of dense mashed potatoes with not a green veggie in sight. It was really good. My one friend ordered the duck confit with sauteéd potatoes -- really moist and yummy. And the other ordered the salad with chevre chaud that came with two huge mounds of chevre. We also ordered escargot to start and what I suppose was a modestly priced pôt of beaujolais (since our "addition" wasn't that overwhelming, about 20e/person). And we got an eggy (kinda quich-ey) peach dessert (i forgot what the kind of tart is called). I liked it.