Seven Days A Parisian is a nourishment

I’ve been feasting on Jiawa Liu’s stylish, picture-packed new guide to the French capital, 7 Days A Parisian (Murdoch Books, $45).

And “feasting” is an appropriate word: Liu, a Chinese-born resident of Paris raised in Australia, has some fascinating things to say about French cuisine, not just in the book but in our interview.

For example, in France, a loaf of bread is always placed directly on the table and not on the plate — and never flat-side up.

As Liu explains, this practice goes back to medieval times when bakers would mark the executioner’s loaf by placing it upside-down. “It’s the kind of detail that says everything about history, habit and daily life overlap in Paris,” she tells me.

After practising as a lawyer for seven years, Liu made the “impulsive decision” to move to Paris in 2016 without any plans. She’s been there ever since, flaneuring (as opposed to sashaying) through the city in what she calls a “perpetual state of wonder” while carving out a career as a creative director, contributing editor to Vogue Australia and Harper’s Bazaar Singapore, and founder of luxury creative agency Beige Pill.

Vogue has called Liu the “master of living, dressing and thinking simply”. Her book — structured around seven day-long itineraries — is a distilled decade of living and working in Paris. And yet, as she says, the legal brain has never really switched off — even when the wig and gown were hung up for good.

“There’s an almost compulsive need to understand why things are the way they are: why are the neighbourhoods arranged the way they are?” she says. “Why do Parisian house parties inevitably dissolve into 80s karaoke, when most guests are far too young for it to be genuinely nostalgic?”

Hence the two years immersed in deep research that resulted in a book which, despite its aesthetic appeal, is really “an attempt to understand Paris itself”.

A Parisian itinerary should therefore, in Liu’s mind, never be merely a checklist. The book’s seven itineraries move from the cinematic to the sequestered, from the bewildered to the becalmed. Day one: icons such as the Louvre. Day seven: closer to life as lived by locals.

When pressed to nominate the day that captures the soul of Paris most accurately, she picks day four: quieter, less monumental, centred on the inner neighbourhoods of the Left Bank. For those craving a full movie-set experience first, there is day two: cinematic Paris, centred on Montmartre.

I’m keen to get Liu’s thoughts on French cliches. She says she has a genuine affection for them, partly because so many of them are true. But she does agree there’s a tale of two Parises to be told: The Paris of the Grand Palais and the Palais de Chaillot, which her fashion career has taken her into; and the invisible Paris of the antiquated neighbourhood restaurant with no menus in English.

“Most Parisians live almost oblivious to the monuments surrounding them,” she says.

“There are people born and raised in this city who have never been to the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

For those of you who reckon you’ve already “done” Paris, Liu has some further advice: “Don’t plan, just wander deeper into the neighbourhoods, and leave yourself open.”

I couldn’t agree more.