Wow! You did well. Bravo.

Rue de Bretagne is full of wonderful food shops. Ditto the gigantic Richard Lenoir markets, whose hours you can look up easily on the internet.
The marché Enfant Rouges have food stalls for lunch. Very nice on warmer days. It has a couscous stand that is not bad at all.
I love love love the Mosquée de Paris. Great place for tea. I have not liked its food so much. One mainly goes for the enchanting atmosphere.

Wonderful. Well done.

Wonderful report. And much to agree to. The handful of restos that I don't "agree about" are simply those I have never patronized, like Petit Dakar and La Cuisine du Bar.
And I trust anyone who uses the word philistine. The last person who did in writing was Vladimir Nabokov.

"my wife's in the mood for something simpler."
Why not Le Mesturet serving decent brasserie-y fare in a funky old-fashioned setting?

The problem is that croque monsieur belongs to the No-Big-Deal genre. A croque can range from bad to ok. It is something locals eat on the run. It is "do" food, as in: this'll do. I certainly don't even remember the ok ones. A couple of bad ones do stand out. There is no such thing as a croque that makes one want to cross town for. I'd be hard put to come up with a recommendation even if you widened the area to the entire Paris, and you want a recommendation for just an arrondissement or two.

Ferme de la Ruchotte is very small operation, and it is first and foremost a farm, with a side-business of restaurant only one or two nights a week. I would call instead.
In general, I would call insead of email for the kind of small, market-driven restaurants that I like. The more prominent or starred restaurants are the ones that have the money to run a website with an efficient reservation system. Definitely a minority of a minority in the French resto scene.

My fave restos in or near the places you cited:
My Cuisine, Beaune
Ferme la Ruchotte, Bligny sur Oouche
La Cabotte, Nuits St Georges
Reservation essential. I would reserve immediately.

"have you been relegated to a corner behind the kitchen door in Paris? I sure have not, and if I were, I would ask to be reseated."
I beg to differ.
That is the seat I specifically demanded, and it is now systematically reserved for me, chez l'Ami Jean.
That way I get to see the Gordon-Fucking-Ramsey effervescence in the kitchen, with Jégo screaming and delicately plating and hand-kissing in intervals of fractions of seconds.
Another reason why I sit there is to sacrifice myself for my friends who then don't have their eardrums pierced.
And I noticed: Jégo tends to seat his fave diners at the tables nearest the kitchen. Often he extends his hand from the kitchen and hands out experimental dishes for us to try. They are comps that are not real comps. They are dishes that he is considering putting on the regular menus, and he counts on us being the type of guinea pigs who will eat anything and have no pain-in-anus food preferences.
In conclusion, if I were dining alone, I would insist on having that seat, or the similar seat at bar in front of the kitchen at Saturne, where I get to see the chef and his crew in action. It is a most absorbing performance, and never does one feel alone or lonely or bored, not for a second.

Bivalve88 has the right idea. Dans Les Landes's dishes are in tapas style.
This means for a family of 4, you can very well order iinitally 5, 6 small dishes, see what everyone likes, the order more of the same, and/or try new things.
And need I add that DLL is a fave of many picky (as in discriminating) epicurean hounds here.
After all, jennim,
(1) you are adventurous epicure yourself;
(2) You are in Paris;
(3) You are the picky person's - kindly forgive me - parent, for heaven's sake. Is it so difficult a choice between having 3 out of 4 members of a family chancing eating well, and having one indifferent food-swallower eating acceptably while 3 others miss out the best part of a Parisian experience?

Jock is a wine dude. His recommendations should count as double.

"most Chowhounders don't have the sense of adventure to explore outside the very narrow and very deep Chowhounder rut."

The problem is not that chowhounds lack a sense of adventure. The problem is that the visiting hounds, regardless of their budget, do not have one luxury: time.
That is why sometimes they seem to over-plan to a transcendental degree, wanting to know as of today which restaurant will be open August and will take resa right now.
Having a sense of adventure when eating out means accepting that quite possibly one meal out of two will not work out (based on the highly personal and non-scientific stats of my dining experience with dear JT, trying out restos largely unknown to this board). When I imagine a visitor who just walks into a nice-looking eatery, one that has plenty of seats and does not require reservation, I can't help but think that this one-meal-out-of-two guess is insanely optimistic.
Asking a local to accept the possibility of eating badly one meal out of two is already a tall order. I dare this "adventure" with dear JT only because he keeps me in stitches during the entire meal.
In conclusion it is too much to ask an epicurean visitor to make fortune cookies out of their restaurant selection planning.

I agree with Parnassien. This finetuning is finetuning for the worse. Who played a joke on you and told you to go to Indiana Café ?

"We sat in the front area, right in front of the kitchen! I think others dislike this area, but I viewed it like the chef’s seat. All night I got to watch how the kitchen worked. Best seat in the house…"
Agreed. That is the table I specifically ask for.
Lovely report. Thank you so much for reporting back and sharing.

“rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré or Avenue Montaigne (shopping). There isn't too much of a budget”
If there isn't too much of a budget, then you are shopping on the wrong streets.
If you can shop in those areas, you must have a budget. A good 4-course menu in a nice bistro can cost less than 10% of an entry-level Kelly bag.
In any case, a planning of Ave Montaine type expensive-but-mainly-tourist shopping + no time to eat + low budget is extremely challenging and is not the type of requests this board usually gets. Fellow hounds usually have diametrically opposite priorities.

You have been reading the wrong sites. Many Americans, those who are serious about food and who are open-minded travelers, have had great experience at Joséphine chez Dumonet. I too was scratching my head that anyone on chowhound - a site devoted to the quest of finding good food - would chose the Grand Colbert over JcD.

"would love to go to a place where food is religion"
If food is religion, why o why would the word vegetarian be in the same parag ?
Try to reduce your ambition to very good.
Le Café des Musée always has a vegetarian main.

An overwhelming majority of the restos in Paris and Nice do not know their exact closure dates for August.

Agree to all.

- Esp Jean-Luc Rabanel and La Chassagnette in Arles
- Le Vieux Pont in Belcastel, the picture-perfect village of France

"Le Vieux Castillon, near Nîmes and le Pont-du-Gard--a lovely medieval village, charming hotel"
Agree, agree, agree. May I add that the name of the village is Castillon du Gard

Noting for myself
L'Epicurien in Villefranche de Rouergue, which has one of my fave markets in France, up there with the one in Arles and St Jean de Luz and Cancale, way above l'Isle sur la Sorgue and Vaison la Romaine.
Chateau de Longcol near Najac, another enchanting village.

I also would like to add that not only the above great addresses are destination eateries, but the towns and villages where they are located are all enchanting spots by themselves.

And when you are sick of pigging out, try my fave street food of France: a tielle (pizza crust outside, runny St Jacques inside) in Sète, If Paradiso (11, quai de la Résistance) is closed, which it should never never happen if there is a god, the tielle stand in the nearby covered market has a hell of a consolation prize tielle.

Café des Musées. Beg and grovel for a resa now.

I don't know, but just want to let you know I enjoyed your reports thoroughly, including every "and" and "but", if I may paraphrase Mary McCarthy.
I can't thank you enough for reporting back and sharing your experience so generously. I wish all visitors who use this board would do that.

Ô ciel, dear dear John, bouillabaisse, not bouillabaise, unless you mean a Boiled F#ck.

"without spending a fortune"
Please define. In the past, kind chowhounders have come up with a wealth of suggestions, only to realize after 30 time-wasting posts that the OP means 20 euro, or 200, euro per head.

“ I am also not sure the izakaya Isse on rue de Richelieu is still going on”
Yes it is. I passed by yesterday in the middle of the afternoon.

My in-laws, and we too, loved the service at Grand Véfour always, but there's no thigh-slapping, and the waitstaff did not flirt with MIL The sommelier did utter a most dignified "Oui, Monsieur," when FIL ordered what he always drank with every meal of his life, a glass of milk.

Shiiiiiiit !

Yes, Daisy is right. It is great of you to try to please your long-distance. She has great suggestions on how to make things smooth for them.

Agree with cosmo. Paris is not Parisland. I have not met more rude waiters here than elsewhere.
Both Pti and Cosmo have mentioned cultural differences. I can't agree more. American waiters who immediately call me by my first name make my flesh crawl. I am ready to tip them like Frank Sinatra just to get them to stop. Last year when I dined at Delphina's in San Francisco, the waiter was so loudly cheerful I was obliged to ask him to reduce his personal decibel.
No French waiter would ever scream Hi at me or call me by first name, and I am deeply grateful.
Another important cultural difference in dining is that the best trained waitstaff here tries to be omnipresent but invisible. The dining moment belongs to you and your companion(s). They are trained to bear in mind that you are supposed to talk to - and enjoy - your dinning date, not to yak it up with the waiter and chef and manager.
And the waitstaff-and-kitchen always do a kind of timing that gives you some time between courses, about 10 minutes, for you to have conversation with your companions. Waiters who rush are considered rude. But many visitors mistake this for inefficiency.
Good service? All the board's usual suspects' faves deliver good service. You need not worry at all.
But jovial banter and jokes? That's a tall order. I can only think of Mario at chez L'Ami Jean (and some visiting diners don't get him and don't like it at all) and cutie pie Serge at Dans Les Landes, who always fed me falsified Barça goal scores on game night. But don't expect thigh-slapping there or anywhere else.

I picked Café des Musées not only for the food. The food is very good bistro food, but not virtuoso like the starred places ( most of which are not open wkends). Sunday lunch has a social-cultural specificity in France. It is not brunch, ciel ! It is a very lazy, leisurely affair, often with family, therefore a very local, very French (vs tourist) moment, an atmosphere not found in every place. When I think Sunday lunch, I think of taking a long time finishing the last drops of a good bottle. Eating slows down, drinking slows down, desultory conversation halts and resumes, everyone is vague and smiling. Brasseries like the old Coupole and Balzar were such perfect spots. The old Couple even had a great curry, a real Sunday tiffin, LOL.

The word "best" has no meaning.
Fave spots, yes, and others have had good suggestions.
My fave lazy late lunch Sunday is Café des Musées, with a very local crowd, and a staff in much friendlier and more mellow mode. Last time I was there for Sunday lunch, we chanced upon présalé on the day's menu. Byzance !