I came to Paris with the intention of eating an alarming amount of pastries and desserts, expecting to gain a few pounds during my two weeks in France. An expanded waistline was worth it if I could gorge myself on foie gras and laminated dough.
My husband and I had three days in Paris with our 18 month old. This wouldn’t be a sexy honeymoon or jaunty girls trip. Late night dinners were out of the question, replaced with bakery mornings.
We were staying in the neighborhood of Le Marais, which I chose for its proximity to the Seine, romantic vibes, supposed lack of tourists, and the ridiculous amount of high end boutiques and patisseries it holds. This area is an absolute feast for the senses. It’s clear why window shopping translates to “window licking” in French. Every storefront beckons. We passed one shop whose windows were filled with almonds placed just so on a bed of crimson brocade and I wanted IN.
To prepare for the trip I did extensive research on the best patisseries in the city and arrived with a Google Map marked with over two dozen spots. For our first morning I chose the famed and award winning Yann Couvreur, only a five minute walk from our apartment. Being a tiny establishment, my husband Carl and baby Charlie waited outside while I ventured in. For anyone who doesn’t speak French, the experience of ordering in a high end patisserie is slightly uncomfortable. I trained up on food vocabulary before the trip, but wasn’t equipped for how complex items were — The following was neatly printed on a laminated placard and described a single item:
pate sucree
agar citron vert shiso
cremeux citron vert shiso
meringue craquante
julienne de citron verts confits
In my toddler French and the two seconds I had to translate I came up with “lime green meringue cream”. What sits behind the label is a perfectly golden pastry shell encasing a jade green translucent dome. The translation:
Sweet pastry
Lime shiso agar
Creamy lime shiso
Crunchy meringue
Julienne of candied limes
Imagine asking your brain to do that kind of gymnastics across an entire pastry case in under a minute. My husband is a fluent German speaker and the most confused I’ve seen him speaking the language was at an upscale Berlin restaurant when the server recited their dessert specials, which included a charcoal infused dark chocolate emulsion and smoked salt foam.
When ordering from a single file line there’s no time to enlist the help of an app. I order by doing a three-point gut check: 1) Does it look good? 2) Do I understand a single descriptor? 3) Have I seen the item made on the Great British Baking Show?
To make things even harder, desserts are in the first case and pastries the second, so I have to pass up cake before noon to get to the croissants. Well played, Paris. This is the French equivalent of putting gum and Snickers in the grocery store checkout.
I left with a pistachio tart (satisfied question 1), pain au chocolat (question 2) and kouglof (question 3). During my time in Paris I’d order based on the most basic translations I could muster, choosing the “butter blueberry” or “sugar pear”.
Tip for any non-French speakers about to visit France with a kid in tow: Study hard on fruit and nut vocab. Unlike meat and vegetable heavy dinner menus you can digest prior to ordering, in a patisserie or boulangerie you need to think and move quickly, and fruits and nuts are often the star of the show.
We took our lot of pastries to the nearby Square Charles-Victor Langloise and ate them while people watching from a park bench. Charlie inhaled the kouglof, which is essentially a yeasted, smaller version of a bundt cake. I was far more impressed with the kouglof than the croissant, but to be fair, I’ve had 700 croissants in my life and 0 kouglofs. The bar for “best croissant” started at an Olympian-height, whereas the kouglof bar was shin-high at best.
The pistachio tart set its own bar. On the outside, it’s a golden shortcrust pastry topped with a pistachio mousse that has a single pistachio ganache dot in its center (how do the French manage to make all desserts look like breasts?). Open it up, and you’ll find the base is a gooey, salty, and crunchy, pistachio praline. This six-bite tart has four layers of pistachio, creating a multi-textured flavor bomb in all shades of green. It was exceptional.
I had the self discipline to stay out of patisseries for the rest of the day. Gelato shops, no, but I need to take pride where I can, especially given my complete lack of restraint the following day.
Day two, Carl and Charlie took an afternoon nap while I took a 90 minute walkabout Le Marais. I did some book shopping and stopped at two patisseries and a chocolatier. Physical transformation into the see no evil monkey emoji complete.
Patisserie number one was Aux Merveilleux de Fred, which specializes in two things: meringue and brioche. You know a decades-old business is good when they specialize in something incredibly specific like red beads or hand carved clogs. I ordered a speculoos meringue and am handed what looks like an egg coated in shaved white chocolate. Beautiful, it ain’t. Delicious, it most certainly is. Of all the desserts I had in Paris, this is the best one. It’s a decadent pillow of sugar. It’s what the fluffiest clouds taste like. Bravo, Monsieur Fred. Bravo.
Patisserie two is Maison Aleph. It’s tiny and bougie looking and every item is pristine. I selected the mango and violet tarte that looked almost too pretty to eat. What I experience eating it is the antithesis of Aux Merveilleux de Fred. Instead of an amorphous blob that tastes like heaven, I’m given an angelic looking patisserie that tastes…fine. Decent. An adequate label in other cities, but blasphemous in Paris.
My last stop is Edwart Chocolate. Before settling down for a nap Carl asked me to bring back some chocolate, a request that’s not difficult given the neighborhood is studded with so many chocolatiers that I wonder how they all stay in business. Are there truly enough people shopping for hand-painted hibiscus ganache they need to choose from 30 businesses in a one mile radius?
Edwart feels like an upscale boutique. The chocolate saleswoman (yes, that’s a thing) wanted to know what I was shopping for and when I said my husband sent me, she asked if he preferred chocolates that were floral or herbal, and what I wanted to sample. I looked at the multi-page menu and asked if there was an option smaller than 16 chocolates. She responded by saying I could do a la carte and the size was dependent on my budget. Granted she had no idea what I’d done in the last hour, but I replied saying that the amount is really dependent on my stomach space.
I settled on eight chocolates total, including coriander, baobab praline, pepper, mango, and oolong. After paying she insisted I sample any chocolate I wanted. I asked for whatever her personal favorite was and she gave me a lemon ganache. Magnifique.
Back at the apartment I gently roused Carl from his nap with chocolate. He nibbled on each piece and guessed the flavor, which sent me leafing through the flavor booklet I was given that proved to be an invaluable chocolate atlas. Each chocolate is handpainted with a unique print, which serves as its identifier. Differences in print are subtle. I’d match the burgundy swirl Carl was holding up with the burgundy swirl in the book, not to be confused with the burgundy polka dots because the difference would be something as drastic as rose vs. sriracha. Carl was thrilled with every selection until he bit into the curry & fleur de sel and looked at me like I was insane to buy him a chocolate filled with chicken tikka.
The last day in Paris came with a difficult decision: Where should we go for our final patisserie? As someone who has intense bouts of sentimentality who simultaneously craves novelty, I chose to revisit the best places we’d already been, to try new items.
At Yann Couvreur I ordered a L’amande tarte, an almond shell filled with mandarin, thyme, lime, and mandarin cream, and a Fraisier cake. The Fraisier cake is a staple in French baking that consists of strawberries (fraises – I know that one!) cream, and sponge. This dessert is the French equivalent of the American strawberry shortcake. Except where Americans say “serve this by tossing everything together in a bowl and stirring until it’s a baby pink mush” the French say “create a cake that resembles a peacock fanning its feathers and serve it in precise two inch slices”.
In Aux Merveilleux de Fred I had no restraint. I ordered miniature meringues in four flavors: coffee, caramel, chocolate, and speculoos.
Back at the apartment I placed my beautiful patisserie boxes in the fridge and spent the rest of the day sightseeing. In the evening, exhausted, I opened the Yann Couvreur box and was disappointed in the Frasier’s appearance. It was no longer the majestic dessert it had been earlier. Instead, the cake had begun to sag and the cream wept through the strawberries. It tasted good. But just good. I was expecting something that put shortcake to shame.
The L’amande tarte looked as regal as ever, and was even more impressive once cut into. Eaten though — Meh? There were a lot of flavors happening. I tend to love desserts that straddle the line between savory and sweet and don’t mind herbs being tossed into the mix, but this one just didn’t do it for me. A thyme, almond, and mandarin medley has too much going on.
Fred’s meringues, however, oui, oui, a thousand times oui. With four to nibble I was positively cloud hopping. Speculoos remained the winner, because love at first bite is damn hard to top.
In the morning we left for Gare de Lyon and overcompensated for traveling with a toddler by arriving with an hour to spare. There’s not a ton to do in a train station with an 18 month old, but I did spot a Pierre Herme shop. As a lover of macarons, I’d somehow not stopped into any of the renowned macaron spots in the city. Our Airbnb hostess told us that if we were to stop at one it should be at Pierre Herme. This came with a warning that Laudree, the famed and once prided macaron destination now outsourced its baking outside of France, and is shunned by Parisians.
I joined the line of disheveled looking tourists in the train station and must have blacked out when it was my turn to order because within moments I was paying $23 for 6 macarons. I don’t even remember everything I ordered. I’m certain I got the rose, lychee & raspberry, the salted butter caramel, and the orange & basil flower. Beyond that, who knows. One advertised saffron as an ingredient, and another was half orange and half black.
Carl and I split the rose and lychee while huddled over our luggage in a corner at the station. I thought it was divine and he said it tasted like ketchup. As for the other flavors, unfortunately the stash didn’t fare well during the voyage to Dijon. I tossed the macaron box into Charlie’s diaper bag that I’d cram water bottles and toys into throughout the train ride so that the box’s contents, filled with the most delicate of morsels, were crushed beyond recognition by the end of the day. What I tasted was great, but the magic is gone when you’re not sure if you’re tasting fig, basil, hazelnut, or all three. It was the equivalent of ordering a macaron suicide — In my days of youth, a suicide was mixing all the fountain sodas together at a fast food restaurant to create a mystery flavor. Turns out that whether you’re at a Wendy’s or Pierre Herme, the suicide flavor winds up being “brown and sugary”.
When I reminisce about the pastries and desserts I had in France, which is not infrequent, the memories are so deeply coupled with memories of my husband and son. I remember how I brushed kouglof crumbs off Charlie’s lips while he watched a bucket-hatted man play ping pong with his granddaughter in the park. The moan Carl made when he took his first bite of meringue from Aux Merveilleux de Fred. Of eating chocolate croissants while Charlie crawled, teddy bear in tow, through immaculately groomed gardens.
Subsisting off butter and flour may not be Michelin-starred dining, but it’s unfussy, delicious, and creates memories more dear to me than many a meal eaten on a white table cloth.
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