FRANCE | FOODIE TIPS
Paris tasting tour: pastry, chocolate and other sweet pleasures
She was hungry for a tryst with something luscious and layered. Where better than the City of Light?
It's not my first pastry of the day, and it won't be my last. This one calls to me from behind the glass at pâtissier Pierre Hermé's thronged Paris shop on the Rue Bonaparte. It's a study in elegant, precise strata: layers of hazelnut dacquoise; crunchy praline mixed with crushed hazelnuts, Piemontese hazelnut paste and La Viette butter; and chocolate ganache and milk chocolate Chantilly cream sandwiched between fine sheaves of chocolate. One of Hermé's classics, it's an over-the-top dessert aptly named "plaisir sucré."
Which is exactly why I've come to Paris--for all of its plaisirs sucrés, or sweet pleasures. Because what is Paris but pastries?
Call it an obsession: I seek out vanilla-flecked custard, chocolate ganache, dense little cakes soaked in orange-blossom-scented syrup and rolled in coarse sugar, slabs of griotte cherry clafouti, macarons filled with peach-apricot-saffron buttercream. It's a spur-of-the-moment trip, an I-need-good-brioche-and-I-need-it-now sort of a trip. And because of a canceled flight, I have only a few days. But the moment is right--the city is enjoying a new wave of pâtisseries. Hermé plans to open not one but two more Paris boutiques by the end of the year. Famed pâtissier Philippe Conticini is back on the scene with a tiny new shop, Exceptions Gourmandes, in the Marais district. Upstarts such as Hermé alum Claire Damon (Des Gâteaux et du Pain), Fabrice Le Bourdat of Le Bristol (Blé Sucré) and former Pierre Gagnaire pastry chefs Didier Mathray and Nathalie Robert (Pain de Sucre) have launched their own pâtisseries.
My strategy is to focus on the pâtisseries of the Left Bank because the highest concentration of the best and the most inventive are in the 6th and 7th arrondissements. I'm traveling alone because I don't want to be slowed down; for maximum efficiency, I map out clusters of pastry and chocolate shops. You can keep your art, your fashion, your history. I'm here for the gâteaux.
For the most part, I won't need the Métro, a cab or even one of those Patrick Jouin-designed Vélib' (for vélos libres--"free bikes") that are all the rage. I'll walk to (and off) my pastries, which makes me fearless in the face of butter, cream and sugar-induced calories.
I've chosen a hotel with an ideal location at the edge of the 7th, on the Rue de Verneuil (the street where French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg once lived). I say ideal because it's about equidistant from Boulangerie Kayser down the block and oh-so-popular-in-the-19th-century chocolatier Debauve & Gallais around the corner on Rue des St.-Pères. That means easy access to a breakfast of brioche or petit pain mendiant (a small loaf of bread studded with dates, almonds and hazelnuts) and café crème at Kayser, as well as one, or maybe two, of D&G's gold-foil-wrapped, chocolate-covered praline and nougatine pearls (its chocolates are very ancien régime chic).
St.-Germain-des-Prés' winding, cobbled streets are lined with antiques stores, galleries and hard-to-resist boutiques (shoe-aholics, stay focused and avoid turning down the Rue de Grenelle). I plan a route between the Bon Marché (my favorite Paris department store, thanks to its extravagant Grande Epicerie food market) and the Jardin du Luxembourg. It's a course that roughly follows the unassuming Rue d'Assas, a veritable chocolate-and-pastry row. Not far from the Bon Marché is La Maison du Chocolat, the house that Basque chocolatier--a.k.a. "sorcerer of ganache"--Robert Linxe built. I already know what I want: a box of seasonal, mellow Marroni chocolates filled with a delicate candied chestnut mousse and a few chocolate-covered, candied griottes, those French dark-juiced sour cherries that are everywhere these days--in cakes, compotes, macarons--popularly paired with pistachio, as in a tart smeared with pistachio paste and dotted with griottes.
At the legendary boulangerie Poilâne, tucked into the north side of the Rue du Cherche-Midi, the morning crush jostles for croissants (better than at Kayser--they're more buttery-tasting), little apple tarts and sourdough bâtons.
I want the punitions, or "punishments"--fine-textured, scallop-edged cookies made with three kinds of butter. I love that they're called punishments. For what offense? I take samples from a basket--they're buttery (of course), not too sweet and melt-in-your-mouth tender--and I buy a box for later, along with a miniature sourdough loaf studded with walnuts.
After lunch at Hélène Darroze around the corner, in the restaurant's salon (where I'm less impressed by several courses of tapas than by dessert--Armagnac-soaked baba with citrus sorbet and chestnuts from the Ardèche mountains), I stop at Christian Constant for gianduja-filled chocolates and at the shop of Jean-Charles Rochoux, protégé of master chocolatier Michel Chaudun. A couple of well-coiffed ladies are cooing over his detailed chocolate sculptures--round-headed babies in various poses, a bust of Molière, teddy bears in embrace, the Arc de Triomphe, a crocodile with its head reared and tail curled.
At Sadaharu Aoki, eager patrons are mesmerized by the Technicolor display of the Japanese pastry chef's pristine desserts--domes of chocolate cake layered with ginger mousse and caramel, and large violet macarons filled with raspberries and Earl Grey crème brûlée. Shopping in this starkly white boîte is a stylishly distilled experience, Paris through the lens of pastry--elegant, modern, perfect--each green tea opéra or black sesame éclair a symbol of joie de vivre. I wonder what it might be like to dive into one. I mean literally--crashing through the thin, brittle wafer of a meringue-topped tart and landing in all that soft, luscious pastry cream.
At the Jardin du Luxembourg, I find a bench where a cranky-looking, gray-haired boule player takes a seat next to me. He looks me up and down, then mutters something in French that I think means "nice macarons." I am not inclined to share.
The next day, I wake up not grossed out, but reinvigorated. My hotel room is littered with chocolate wrappers, chic boxes of bonbons and butter-soaked bags of half-eaten croissants. Still, I want more. So (after coffee and a canelé at Kayser) I trek east a mile and a half across the 7th, past the National Assembly, through the Esplanade des Invalides and into Michel Chaudun's tiny corner chocolate shop on the Rue de l'Université. A relaxing vacation? Mais non! Pastry is serious business.
Chaudun's shop is crammed with chocolate sculptures of soccer balls, Hermès bags, sausages, a sphinx. His pavés are tiny cubes of silky ganache dusted with cocoa, so delicate that you use a tiny wooden skewer included in the box to pick them up. The saleswoman tells me I should eat them within 10 days. Ha--it won't take 10 minutes.
On the Rue Jean-Nicot, just past the Bellota-Bellota store packed with Spanish jamón, Pâtisserie-Boulangerie Secco is stacked with croissants, lemon tarts, fluted vanilla cakes and cheesecake. Neighborhood office workers drop in for lunch--quiches; pissaladières, or pizza slices, covered with caramelized onions, anchovies and olives; and gratin dauphinois with thinly sliced potatoes, cream and Gruyère.
I ask for a slice of the pissaladière "chaud" (heated), walk down the Rue St.-Dominique and do that non-French thing of eating on the street. It's so warm and delicious that I don't notice that I've dropped a glove until a passerby taps me on the shoulder and hands it to me. I head a little farther east and am rewarded with a sudden view of the Eiffel Tower. I love Paris!
What is it about marshmallows (guimauves) that so captivates the French? They're everywhere. As I make one more pastry run before dinner in the 6th, I find them at Pierre Marcolini's polished boutique on the Rue de Seine. The Belgian chocolatier is known for the refined, subtle flavors of his bonbons, but just as delicious are his chocolate-covered guimauves. They're fantastic--a thin coating of dark, crisp chocolate covers the vanilla-scented marshmallow. At the even-older-than-Debauve & Gallais confiserie A la Mère de Famille, they tie long strands of them in knots. At Pain de Sucre in the Marais, they're displayed in big glass vases in several flavors or served on a stick like a lollipop or even en brochette (skewered).
Down the street on the Rue de Seine is Gérard Mulot. Everyone has their favorite macarons (Ladurée's, Pierre Hermé's and so on), and the macarons at Mulot are mine. They have a crisp exterior and dense interior, the perfect amount of filling and a deep, dark chocolate flavor. A luscious lemon tart is only 3.25 euros--$5 for a slice of Paris!
The near-closing-time crowd at Pierre Hermé is jockeying for (yet more) macarons--25-year-aged balsamic vinegar, black truffle, fleur de sel caramel, olive oil with vanilla. I slip into the store just before the silk curtain is drawn over the sliding glass door, and then I see them--rows of chocolate and foie gras macarons--really beautiful red macarons burnished with gold dust and filled with chocolate ganache and a daub of foie gras in the center. As weird as they are, I can't resist them, as well as the intensely flavored rose-raspberry-litchi pâte de fruit (despite already having loaded up on pâte de fruit--and lime caramels--earlier at Patrick Roger) and one of the plaisirs sucrés. (Hermé also has the best croissants in Paris, according to Le Figaro, which determines such things.)
By the time I get to dinner at the bistro Le Gorille Blanc, I'm so hungry from all that walking and carrying bags of pastries (marshmallows can get heavy, if you tote enough of them) that I order a terrine de canard (duck terrine), a lentil salad with pork-cheek confit and duck confit croustillant with sautéed potatoes. Yes, it's great to eat something savory. But what I really want is, you know, dessert. The problem is, I can't decide which to order. Shall I have the croustade, layers of buttery filo filled with apples and Armagnac-soaked prunes? Or an apple-topped flognarde with Calvados?
Well, I have so little time left in Paris. I have both. Sans regret. *
Contact Times assistant Food editor Betty Hallock at betty.hallock@latimes.com.
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