by Amy Thomas
As keen as I was to learn French, always completing my homework and paying close attention to Josephine’s perfectly planned lessons, I soon learned that language is not my strong suit. But still, I did what I could and started a list of handy slang, picked up from colleagues and fashion websites, that was almost more essential than the passé composé and “er,” “ir,” and “re” verbs. I learned words and expressions like ça marche (that works, or, okay) and ça craint (that sucks); talons hauts (high heels) and baskets (trendy sneakers); malin (wicked smart or cool) and putain (literally, a whore, but used as an expression of frustration, anger, or awe). I learned that the French like to manger les mots, creating shorthand like bon app for bon appétit, d'acc instead of d’accord, and resto rather than restaurant. After years of being on cruise control, there was now something new to learn every day.
It was almost stupid how picture-perfect my new life was. The whole thing felt like a cliché, even to me. There I was, in the fashion capital of the world, working on one of the most recognizable and successful luxury brands. One day, as I wandered around the Louis Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Élysées—part of my professional obligation, for God’s sake—I literally pinched myself. Was this for real? Why was I there? How was I suddenly living in Paris, among the 2,000 evening dresses and 98 percent dark chocolate bars? Was it fate? I didn’t have the answers, but I smiled with giddiness, hopelessly in love with the entire world.
As smiley as I was, my enthusiasm was not infectious.
“Avez-vous du pain complét ce soir?” I asked, waltzing into “my” boulangerie one evening for some whole wheat bread. Surely, the squat, bespectacled madam behind the counter recognized me by now? I had been coming in for weeks, demonstrating not only my loyalty to her business, but also my appreciation for French culture. Each visit, I requested a different kind of bread: a round and rustic boule au levain; pain bûcheron, kneaded and roasted to crunchy perfection; the baguette aux céréales with its delightful mix of sesame, sunflower, millet, and poppy seeds. It was my duty to understand France’s abundance of deliciousness.
“Non, madame.” Blank face. She wasn’t budging. So what if I ate whole wheat? I was still une étrangère in her eyes, not a Frenchie. I felt a momentary pang of defeat from her indifference. With other recent roadblocks due to my inability to decipher the deposit forms at the bank, the milk labels at the grocery store, the processes (or lack thereof) at the office, and, generally, just what the hell everyone was saying to me, being unceremoniously shut down was a feeling that was beginning to edge in on my bliss more and more often. It was after seven o’clock and the shelves were nearly depleted.
I had a new bread addiction for which I needed a fix, tout de suite. Suddenly, as if my guardian angel and Houdini had been conspiring in the kitchen, a young man dusted in flour appeared from behind a curtain with a cylindrical basket of fresh baguettes. My smile returned. “Pas grave,” I declared. “Une demi-baguette, s’il vous plaît!”
The woman pulled one of the golden specimens from the basket—the man sauntering back behind the curtain from where he magically came—deftly sliced it in two, and slipped one half in a paper sack—une demi-baguette, perfect for the single girl. “Avec ceci?” she asked in that French sing-song way, drawing out the “ce” and especially the “ci,” peering over her wire-rims. The French were always pushing a little more on you.
“Non, c’est tout,” I replied, happy for this little exchange that made me—almost—feel like I belonged here. I grabbed the change she plunked on the counter and turned on my heel. “Merci, madame!” I bellowed, careful to enunciate each syllable like the good French student I was.
“Merci à vous,” she replied, the ingrained French politesse kicking in. “Bonne soirée.”
Out on the sidewalk, in the damp April air, my smile erupted again. Through the thin boulangerie paper, I could feel the warmth of the baguette, making it irresistibly squishy in my hand. It was one of God’s gifts to the world, I had decided: French bread, fresh from the oven. There was no way I was waiting until I was back at my tree house to indulge. I tore a piece of the baguette off, trailing crumbs behind me, and crunched into it. The crust resisted for a moment and then the crisp outside revealed the doughy, dense, and spongy inside. How could four little ingredients—flour, water, yeast, and salt—produce something so otherworldly? I stopped on the sidewalk, my eyes rolling in the back of my head as I chewed very, very slowly, savoring the baguette’s flavor.
I opened my eyes and a girl smoking outside a bar was staring at me. I had become infatuated with French women, more so than the slim-hipped, effeminate men, developing girl-crushes daily. Their lips were always painted perfectly in magenta or tomato red. Their eyeliner was at once retro and modern, like Brigitte Bardot’s. And their hair was always disheveled but perfectly so, as if they’d just had a romp in bed. They were sexy, stylish, and gorgeous. I felt horribly dull with my brown hair and au naturel makeup—both pretty much unchanged since the day I graduated from college. Whenever I was around a particularly jolie femme, I could hear Edith Wharton whispering in my ear, “Compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in kindergarten.” Touché, Edith.
The girl outside the bar was in Parisian uniform: slim jeans tucked into short cowboy booties, a leather coat hanging off her thin frame, and an oversized scarf, which, like her hair, was effortlessly yet studiously haphazard. I smiled. I felt a bonding moment between us, her looking at me, me looking at her, just two girls of the world. But she just pulled an impossibly long drag from her cigarette, tossed it in the gutter, and subtly rolled her eyes before disappearing back inside the bar. Paris was cool; apparently, I was not.
In fact, I knew I wasn’t. Edith Wharton wasn’t the only thing I had been reading. I had been dipping into all the tomes about living in and adjusting to France and I suddenly recalled a small but important gem. That in America, everyone smiles at strangers—your neighbors, the checkout girl, the cop giving you a ticket for doing 45 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone—as a friendly, pacifying gesture. In France, the only people who smile at strangers are mentally retarded.
I found the insight so ridiculous and funny and, if I were any example, apparently true. I laughed out loud and continued down the street with my baguette, looking “touched” for sure.
As American as I appeared with my big, dorky grin on the outside, I was beginning to understand—a deep, in-my-bones understanding—the French appreciation for food.
Nobody at the office deigned to eat lunch at their desks as we had habitually done in New York. Little pockets of colleagues broke off and ceremoniously ate together. A small group of twenty-something-year-old women would have their meals, packed from home, in the office kitchen, while most of the guys went out to local cafés. I tried not to mind not having anyone to lunch with yet, and quickly learned not to “eeeet in zeee streeeeet,” as one of my colleagues caught me doing one day—a true faux pas to the always-proper Parisians. Instead, I took advantage of the break to explore the neighborhood.
Offices cleared out and boutiques were closed from noon until 2:00 p.m., while the sidewalks, boulangeries, and bistros came alive. The French got so much pleasure out of shopping for and eating food every day. Mealtime was sacred. Food was celebrated. It wasn’t forbidden or an enemy for which the French needed gym memberships, cabbage soup diets, or magic powders and pills (though I did have my suspicions about French women and laxatives).
What’s more, there were entire shops devoted to singular foods: stocky, pot-bellied men in wader boots and white lab coats stood outside poissonneries, even in the coldest weather, showcasing filets of the catch of the day, while other boutiques offered scores of colorful and alluring tins of foie gras. On Sunday afternoons, so many people stood in line at the fromageries, boulangeries, and boucheries that I made a game out of counting them. How wonderful that families were stocking up for their big Sunday repas, doing all their food shopping the day of the meal, at sm
all neighborhood businesses. Back home, we’d load up a giant grocery cart once a week at a superstore, and then shelve the packaged goods in the pantry until memory or hunger called them forth. Fresh, local, and delicious was not the marketing mantra du jour in Paris. It’s just the way it was.
Before choosing my apartment, I hadn’t really understood why Michael was so gung ho about the second arrondissement. My previous visits to Paris had given me the impression that it was more commercial and touristy than residential and charming. But I soon discovered that my neighborhood was one of the biggest foodie meccas in the city, anchored by the four-block pedestrian stretch of rue Montorgueil. By my count, it had two cheese shops (fromageries), four produce markets (marchés), four butchers (boucheries), one of which was devoted to chickens (un rotisserie), a fish market (poissonnerie), four chocolate boutiques (chocolatiers), an ice cream shop (un glacier), six bakeries (boulangeries), four wine stores (caves au vin), an Italian specialty shop, and a giant market filled with heaps of spices, dried fruits, nuts, and grains that were sculpted into neat domes and sold by the gram. There was even a store devoted just to olive oils. And all of these were interspersed between no fewer than a dozen cafés, a couple florists (fleuristes), and myriad tabacs, where weathered old men bought their Lotto tickets and drank beer with their mutts and neighbors.
Walking that stretch of food paradise that was my new neighborhood, which I made sure to do at least once a day, made all my senses tingle: produce—towering stacks of purple-flecked artichokes and pyramids of pert, shiny clementines—was displayed like kinetic sculptures, changing shape as the day went on and the inventory decreased. The pungency of ripe, stinky cheeses duked it out with the smell of savory fat drippings falling from chickens that roasted on spits into pans of peeled potatoes below. And even though I hadn’t eaten red meat in over ten years, I still took the time to peer into the charcuteries, marveling at the coils of sausages and terrines of pâtés and how wonderfully they were displayed. The food was treated so respectfully that I had no choice but to genuflect. It was glorious.
And then there were the pâtisseries and boulangeries. While I had arrived in Paris with the names of only two friends scribbled on a scrap of paper, I had a carefully researched, very thorough two-page spreadsheet of must-try pâtisseries. I got right to work.
Within weeks, I had explored all the boulangeries and pâtisseries near me and quickly became obsessed with Stohrer’s pain aux raisins. Come to find out, Stohrer wasn’t just the prettiest and most charming bakery on rue Montorgueil, but it also had the most illustrious roots, having been started in 1730 by King Louis XV’s royal pâtissier, Nicolas Stohrer. I’d never been interested in pain aux raisins before, always preferring a rich and melty pain au chocolat, a rectangular croissant hiding two batonettes of chocolate inside, to something with ho-hum raisins. But one morning when I saw Stohrer’s pastry pinwheels, filled generously with crème pâtissière and riddled with raisins looking especially puffy and inviting, I gave it a try. It was still slightly warm. It was sweeter than I expected. I was smitten.
Inspired, I set off for other boulangeries and pâtisseries in the city. There was Les Petits Mitrons, a cute little pink pâtisserie in Montmartre that specialized in tarts: chocolate-walnut, chocolate-pear, apple-pear, straight-up chocolate, straight-up apple, apricot, peach, rhubarb, fig, fruits-rouges, strawberry-cream, mixed fruit, and on and on. From there, I ventured east to one of the city’s only other hilly quartiers, Belleville, searching for the best croissant in Paris.
As I pedaled through the working-class neighborhood on my way to La Flute Gana, a boulangerie I had read about, I had a happy jolt, suddenly remembering one of my favorite all-time French movies: The Triplets of Belleville. The image of those three crazy animated ladies, snapping their fingers, swinging their derrières, and singing on stage evoked such unadulterated glee, which was matched once I arrived at the boulangerie and bit into my long-anticipated croissant: a gazillion little layers of fine, buttery pastry dough, coiled and baked together in soft-crunchy perfection.
Every weekend, my sweet explorations continued this way. On the chichi shopping stretch of rue Saint-Honoré, I indulged in Jean-Paul Hévin’s Choco Passion, a rich nutty and fruity cake with a flaky praline base, dark chocolate ganache, and chocolate mousse whipped with tart passion fruit. In the Marais, a neighborhood alternatively known for its Jewish roots, gay pride, and fantastic shopping, I sampled Pain de Sucre’s juicy and herbaceous rhubarb and rosemary tart. I discovered that the wonderful 248-year-old, lost-in-time candy and chocolate shop in the ninth arrondissement, À la Mère de Famille, carried dried pineapple rings, a treat I had been obsessed with for three decades (don’t ask; I think it’s a texture thing). And I started developing a new weakness for Haribo gummies, available at any old crummy supermarket.
As I cruised by the Jardin du Luxembourg, just beginning to burst in an array of spring greens, with a belly full of matcha-flavored ganache from the nearby Japanese pâtisserie Sadaharu Aoki, I rationalized that pastry hunting was a very good way for me to get to know my new hometown. But as I continued Vélib’ing around town and eating up Parisian sweets, no one could have been more surprised than me to discover that cupcakes were now storming the Bastille.
I think it’s safe to say that by 2007 or 2008, cupcakes trumped apple pie as the all-American iconic sweet. And I witnessed their rise to sugary stardom firsthand in New York.
When I moved to the city in 2001, the trend was just taking off. At the time, I was also on the brink. I was almost thirty years old, excited and hopeful for all that might be. After spending my twenties in San Francisco, much of it in a seven-year relationship that ultimately wasn’t “the one,” and in an advertising career in which I always felt the desire to write for a glossy magazine tugging at me, I had moved back east to pursue my dreams. I had proven to myself that I could be an advertising copywriter. Now I wanted to be a New York writer, who had a byline in the Times and lunched at Union Square Café. The world was my proverbial oyster. But, since I don’t like briny delicacies, I considered the world my cupcake instead: sweet and inviting, familiar yet new, indulgent but only modestly so. And just when I thought I had tasted every possibility—yellow cake with chocolate frosting, chocolate with vanilla buttercream, peanut butter cup—a new cupcakery would open, and there would be a whole new inspired menu to bite into.
As I blazed my personal cupcake trail, Carrie Bradshaw and Miranda Hobbes sent the whole world into a cupcake tizzy. Once those two sat chomping into their pink frosted cupcakes, dishing on Aidan, in the third season of Sex and the City, the petits gâteaux became inescapable. And Magnolia Bakery, the location of their sweet moment, went from modestly successful to insanely popular to polarizing and reviled.
Magnolia was started in July of 1996 by two friends, Allysa Torey and Jennifer Appel. On a quiet corner in the West Village, they launched a genius concept: old-fashioned baked goods—perfectly frosted three-layer cakes, freshly baked pies dusted with cinnamon, fudgy brownies, and tart lemon squares—served up in an adorable, wholesome space that could have been Betty Crocker’s own kitchen. But as the business soared, the women’s relationship soured. Three years after opening, they split, with Allysa running the original bakery solo, and Jennifer moving to Midtown to open Buttercup, a bakery with virtually the same exact menu and aesthetic. Both of them churned out pretty pastel cupcakes, and the city ate them up.
Buttercup, probably because of its unsexy midtown location, fared just okay, but Magnolia went gangbusters. The more popular it became, the more people loved to hate it. The staff was infamously snippy. The lines, which grew so long they snaked out the door and around the corner, started annoying the neighbors. Then the Sex and the City tour buses rolled in and put everyone over the top. The bakery and its cupcakes became synonymous with Carrie Bradshaw wannabes, tottering in their heels and not caring about on whose front stoop they were dropping their frosting-laced wrappers.
The cupcakes t
hemselves were hit or miss, love ’em or hate ’em. While cake flavors were the standard yellow, chocolate, and red velvet, and generally tasty, it was the frosting that sent everyone spiraling. It was über sweet, pastel-colored, dotted with vibrant sprinkles, and swirled on in abundance. These little cakes became the downtown must-have accessory, as fashionable as the T-shirts and coin purses Marc Jacobs was peddling across the street.
Meanwhile, other cupcakeries were popping up all over Manhattan. A near Magnolia replica turned up in Chelsea when a former bakery manager jumped ship to open his Americana bakeshop, Billy’s (the one AJ and I frequented). Two Buttercup employees similarly ventured downtown to the Lower East Side and opened Sugar Sweet Sunshine, expanding into new flavors like the Lemon Yummy, lemon cake with lemon buttercream, and the Ooey Gooey, chocolate cake with chocolate almond frosting. Dee-licious.
Other bakeries opted for their own approach. A husband-and-wife team opened Crumbs, purveyor of five-hundred-calorie softball-sized juggernauts, in outrageous flavors like Chocolate Pecan Pie and Coffee Toffee, topped with candy shards and cookie bits. There were also mini cupcakes in wacky flavors like chocolate chip pancake and peanut butter and jelly from Baked by Melissa and Kumquat’s more gourmet array like lemon-lavender and maple-bacon.
Revered pastry chefs also got in on the action. After opening ChikaLicious, the city’s first dessert bar, Chika Tillman launched a take-out spot across the street that offered Valrhona chocolate buttercream-topped cupcakes. And Pichet Ong, a Jean-Georges Vongerichten alum and dessert bar and bakery rock star, attracted legions of loyal fans—no one more than myself—to his West Village bakery, Batch, with his carrot salted-caramel cupcake.
