Why Not Move to Paris? with Noora Raj Brown

Welcome to the VB Guest Edit, where each month, we tap the most inspiring friends, experts and muses in our orbit to share their own need-to-knows... This March, we’re passing the mic to Noora Raj Brown, the brand consultant, tastemaker and editor of “Objects of Desire” on Substack, who took the leap and moved to Paris last summer for a very chic second act.

My husband meets single women at the gym. Some are divorced. They’re nice mostly, often having arrived in Paris in search of something: reinvention or redemption, depending on the circumstance. A way to regain control after a tepid love life or an unceremonious firing. A second act.

He is always trying to set me up on lunch dates with these women. I suppose it makes sense. We’re all bound by the stretchy elastic of choosing “why not” instead of “why,” of reframing an era of our lives instead of accepting it for what it is. Picking up your life and moving to a new country, with a language you may or may not speak, and a social undercurrent you definitely don’t understand, can either be overwhelming or freeing, depending on the tint of your glasses.

For us, it was the latter. Doing something that we’d always flirted with, but thought we’d never actually do—especially as kids get older and life becomes more cemented—was an adrenaline jolt after a shaky year. I’m too scared to bungee jump, but I imagine there is an electric freedom in the moments after you land safely on the ground.

When people press on why we moved to Paris, I say, “Oh, we lost the house in the Palisades fires, so we needed to move.” As casually as if we lost our keys, not a life, in the rubble, and went on a search for a locksmith open on a Sunday. An inconvenience, at most. A wasted afternoon when we should have been in the pool.

I like to make it easy for people because it’s easier for myself. Losing your keys doesn’t invite a follow up question; if anything, it’s a platitude of familiarity, a bond of universal annoyance.

“Oh, my wife is always losing her phone!”

Fitzgerald, who also wiled away many of his days in Paris, famously said “American lives don’t have second acts.” I like the quote, even if it’s not really true (France is very linear career wise and America loves a comeback story).

But a second act—and all the tension that accompanies change—is easier to embrace with the Tuileries as your backdrop. There are days when I look around, the sun glinting off the Haussmannian buildings, the buoyancy of springtime more intoxicating than the glass of Sancerre sitting on the bistro table, and think there is nowhere as beautiful as Paris.

When we moved here, I set about finding our haunts. Places with soul, that if we went early and often, could someday feel like the trappings of home. Here, we didn’t yet have the obligations that come with years of living in the same place: the birthdays, the requisite quarterly dinners, the old colleagues. What we have is oddly what we always wanted: time, and the freedom to decide how to spend it. Even if that means indulging, as many Parisians do, in not doing much at all. In slow afternoons and in person errands, making a trip to the organic Sunday market on Boulevard Raspail the event of the day.

At Les Antiquaires, an institutional bistro on the Rue de Bac, the waiters joke easily with our four year old, sneaking her handfuls of chocolate cookies when she says something amusing (the Los Angeles part of me cringes at the sugar, but then I succumb to the refrain that got us here in the first place…why not?). In the summer, we sit outside, eating excellent oysters and drinking St. Germain spritzes, and in the grey of winter, we switch to Côtes du Rhône and steak au poivre.

A block away is the elegant Le Voltaire. It’s become our Balthazar, a bit more fancy than you need to be on a Tuesday night with its wood paneling and dim, moody lighting, but not excessively so. An oddly perfect fit for whatever occasion life surfaces: a long weekend lunch, a birthday dinner, a bit of buzz for friends in town for fashion week.

At lunch, you can often find me at Yen, on the same block as Le Relais de l’entrecôte, which only serves steak frites and salad, and has become TikTok famous for its long lines (they don’t take reservations), secret sauce and offering second helpings. Yen is probably just as busy, but sits in stark opposition: everyone is French, svelte and sharing plates of sashimi and homemade soba noodles. It is a fashion canteen, but not a scene, where you may have spotted a bare faced Jane Birkin (she lived around the corner) eating alone.

Before I moved here, I would fly across the ocean to go to the Saint-Ouen Flea Market, the sprawling antiques mecca on the outskirts of Paris. Now, it’s a frequent Sunday stroll, made sweeter by the curmudgeonly French men who recognize us and call out “Ca va?” as we walk by. Even when working, they often sit for a proper lunch, tables set up outside their stalls, with tablecloths and wine and saucy roast chicken on ceramic plates.

That’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? A second act can be running from something, but it’s also inching towards the lives we imagine for ourselves. A life of presence—not punctuated by moments of being present—but one with days made up of a million small joys. The familiar clink of the gamine, gap-toothed waitress at Le Voltaire as she sets down my favorite wine without asking. A last minute pop into the Musee D’Orsay as I walk my daughter home from school so she can visit Degas’s ballerinas.

A second act is bittersweet at times. It often arises from a plot twist, and we’re our own unreliable narrators. But it also lessens the fear, the tightly clenched control, the insistent voice that asks “Why should I?” and softly dissipates into “Why not?”…

Plus, subscribe to Noora’s Substack below…