Paris' Bar und Café in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Picture: Tariq Tassadaq and Karl Wurm at Paris' Bar und Café with a beer to finish off a long evening with wines

For newcomers, this seems to be a French wine bar. But it is not. It is the wine bar of Paris Kosmidis, a film maker, author and journalist from Greece. He is usually there in the evening. Look out for a man with grey hair and chat with him about wine, art, theater or whatever.

It is a wine bar and a café. It caters to an intellectual crowd during the whole day. You can have breakfast there in the morning, and cheese, cold cuts and vegetables during the day and in the evening. They do not have a kitchen and everything is prepared in a little corner of the bar.

Paris' Bar and Café offers about a dozen wines by the glass. The focus is clearly on German, Austrian and Spanish wines. As often in Europe, New World Wines are not popular with the crowd that you meet at Paris' Bar and Café.

Pictures: Paris' Bar and Cafe in Frankfurt am Main

Paris' Bar and Café provides a very relaxed atmosphere, where you meet interesting people from the banking sector, university or art scene. “Meine Bar ist ein Treffpunkt von nicht-kleinkarierten Menschen" says Paris. "Die Schweizer Straße ist der urbanste Teil Frankfurts", she says, "hier wohnen so kosmopolitische Menschen wie der Museumsdirektor Max Hollein und der Schriftsteller Bodo Kirchhoff.” Clearly, the bar has an intellectual touch. No wonder. Frankfurt is the town of Goethe.

In London, a new trend is wine bars that offer Tapas kind of food. Paris' Bar and Café is a bit like that with a menu of cheese, cold cuts and vegetable dishes, like the Serrano ham or the manchego cheese, which I like very much. My wife is a fan of the salami with truffles. She is a big truffle fan. Truffles have a long history as a gastronomic delight, and for her there is nothing to compare with their intense, musty, intoxicating fragrance. There are numerous varieties of truffles, yet the most prized are the black truffle from France's Perigord region and the white truffle from Italy's Piedmont.

We always try to sit at the communal bar table in the middle of the bar and meet nice people there. If you want to shift from grape wine to apple wine, the national drink of Frankfurt am Main, two of the many cider brasseries are just around the corner, Adolf Wagner and Gemahltes Haus, on Schweizer Strasse.