Umair
With its copper bar and brass-rail-backed banquettes, Lazare evokes a traditional Parisian brasserie, but registers as modern with its exposed ductwork overhead and wall units filled with stacked white plates, pitchers, vases and other objects. Similarly, the stylish comfort-food menu includes Normandy oysters, onion soup and roasted sausage with buttery potato purée, as well as contemporary dishes like scallop-and-oyster tartare with curry oil, and pineapple carpaccio with lemon-mint sorbet.
Usefully for a city with hidebound serving hours, Lazare is open from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday to Saturday, and Sunday from 11:45 a.m. to 11 p.m. There’s also seating at the bar for solo diners. One way or another, the people-watching is first-rate. Starters from €11 to €24, main courses €22 to €42. — ALEXANDER LOBRANO
Lazare, Gare St.-Lazare, rue Intérieure, Eighth Arrondissement.
London
St. Pancras International
London’s St. Pancras International station, a Victorian Gothic Revival icon that barely escaped demolition in the 1960s, is a daily crossroads for tens of thousands of travelers, thanks to rail connections that run across the metropolis and as far as continental Europe. The station offers uplifting architecture, an international vibe and a chance to watch sleek trains slow to gentle stops in the cathedral-evoking train hall that once formed the world’s largest enclosed space. The station and its environs also offer some excellent opportunities to drink and dine.
Attached to the station, in a red-brick-and-wrought-iron pile you’ll recognize from “Harry Potter” films and a memorable Spice Girls video, is the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Enjoy a Purity — an alcohol-free concoction that includes orgeat, jasmine tea and Everleaf Marine, a botanical aperitif (14 pounds, or about $18) — amid the classy-camp grandeur of the hotel’s restored Gothic Bar.
Next door is Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand, which recently opened in a space renovated by the Paris-based designer Hugo Toro in 2023. Bathed in the glow of the station’s facade and only yards from the humming rails that lead to Paris, this graceful dining room is a fitting London home for modern French cuisine. The vast mirrors and windows are arranged to suggest the ricochet of light and perspective within a moving railway carriage. Mr. Toro said that reimagining such a classic space was like finding your grandmother’s old coat and cutting it into something new.
