Keep it coming, guys. I’m gonna use this thread as my guidebook.
Just thought of a restaurant that isn’t very long away from your hotel and has an interesting peculiarity :
L’auberge Nicolas Flamel , is situated in the oldest existing house in Paris, originally owned by the famous alchemist going by the same name.
I can’t recommend it, since I never ate there, but the menu seems attractive and I had it in mind for a long time.
No. I’m not sure what these reviews are based on. I occasionally go there at night to buy cigarettes, because there are some restaurants opening very late there, and willing to sell a pack to non-customers (I live 20 minutes away from the station) and I never noticed anything hellholish… And during the day, it’s a perfectly normal neighborhood.
Do you have a link?
Keep a close eye/grip on your wallet/bag while you’re in the main part of the station; we took students over last April and stayed at a hostel that was maybe a five minute walk from the station. One student was pickpocketed before we even got out of the station.
Changed some £s to euros at the station a couple days later; as soon as I got my cash, dude walks up and says, ‘Oh hey, can I have that?’
So beware and keep your eyes open, and you’ll be ok.
Really Not All That Bright – buy metro tickets while you’re still on Eurostar to save yourself some hassle. Be prepared for some of them to be duds!
I am not entirely sure I have any interest in eating in an alchemist’s house - what if there’s still mercury dripping from the walls? 
- but I want to show my wife as many Old Things as possible (being American, I suspect the oldest building she’s seen is McSorley’s). So that will definitely go on the list.
I’ll give my usual suggestion for threads about what to do in Paris. Check out the
… duds? Like, they won’t work? 
Keep it coming, guys. We don’t leave until Saturday!
I got the unlimited pass, myself. You can get them all over the place (the zone 1-3 ones are probably sufficient for getting around the city). I got mine as I got off the plane in Charles DeGaulle Airport, same place I got my Museum pass. I did come back to Paris for one day before I left again, and I picked up some individual tickets for that day, and didn’t have any problems with duds.
Maybe the ticket machines are duds? I remember running into that problem a couple times in Paris a few years ago.
Late seeing this, but my question arose from reading many troubling accounts on TripAdvisor:
And this article, which was even more dire:
In other news, I was there yesterday and it didn’t seem that bad, albeit large and somewhat confusing. We didn’t enter or leave the station on foot, however, and most complaints seemed to be about the exterior areas.
Just back from a week in Paris, stayed in a lovely airbnb apartment right next to the Institut du Monde Arabe, which means within walking distance of almost everything I cared to see. I recommend airbnb to anyone, now. And definitely going back sometime.
But my wife did have her cellphone nicked the week before I got there, as did a colleague of hers. Hold onto your stuff, people!
We’re back (from the UK portion of the trip as well)! In what amounted to two days we were able to see nearly all of the Denon wing of the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower both by day and night, and the bits of the Musee d’Orsay we were interested in (the impressionist hall on the top floor, mostly). We also did plenty of walking and wound up at Cafe Leonard each night for drinks. Their service might have been my single favorite thing about the whole city.
Thanks for the advice, everyone! The d’Orsay recommendation especially, because that absolutely made my wife’s year.
Oh, and I can confirm that Gare du Nord is a hole. The station itself wasn’t awful, and the Eurostar-only area was actually quite nice. The area around the station, however, was awful. We were practically besieged by the most aggressive panhandlers I’ve ever seen (and I’ve visited Mumbai many times). One woman was slamming her fists against the window of our taxi the moment it stopped. Weirdly, we had the best meal of our trip across the street at Aux Villes du Nord. They had the sort of menu I was expecting (I didn’t see anything as simple as a sandwich with pate at any other cafe in Paris) and a friendly staff.
ETA: In the end we didn’t bother with the metro at all. We walked to all the things we wanted to see and took taxis back to the hotel (and to the station on the third day). Worked out quite nicely even though we were across the river from most of the touristy stuff.
This is changing fast. There are technical reasons why accepting stripe cards is a bad idea when you can insist on chip, so there is pressure to scrap the strip readers. Note that neither Velib nor the Paris Metro will accept magnetic stripe credit cards.
We were in Paris a couple of months ago, and, apart from Velib, didn’t have any problem with cash.