Paris, My Sweet

by Amy Thomas

  Finally, a fun party at work! I thought, watching everyone laugh and mingle, the red tips of their cigarettes like little party favors twinkling in the air as they gesticulated in lively conversations. The bottles of wine were disappearing and everyone was cutting loose. As the summer sky turned from pink to dusty purple to black, the rooftop became a pulsing dance floor.

  I was in high spirits too. In addition to Isa, I had recently befriended an American expat with whom I instantly clicked, Melissa. She and I had been “set up” by my good friend from high school, Ben. When you move to a foreign city, all of your friends want to introduce you to their friends, friends of friends, or anyone they know who’s remotely sane and English-speaking in the same city. Usually these friend-dates are train wrecks as you have nothing in common with the other person aside from both being sane Anglophones. Lucky for me, Ben knew better.

  The first time Melissa and I got together, we poured our souls out to one another over Belgian beers on a café terrace. Not long after, we went slumming it to the Les Halles Cineplex to see Tom Hanks in Angels & Demons, a movie I would never have seen in New York but which brought me a strange sense of comfort and patriotism abroad. After that, I knew I had my partner in crime in all things cheesy, dorky, and American. Between Melissa and Isa, I felt like I had hit the friend jackpot in too-cool-for-school Paris.

  Then Isa, who had been making the rounds (she was loved by everyone, not just me), gave me her news. “Tu connais Alexi et moi retournons à Canada?” she asked over the blaring techno, which was being spun by a guy I worked with on the Vuitton team on a daily basis. Rocking his head to the beat, headphones held up to one ear, I saw a totally different side to his cerebral explanations of a proper website user experience.

  “Quoi?” I shouted back, thinking I hadn’t heard her correctly. She couldn’t be moving back to Canada—she was such an integral part to the Vuitton team and Ogilvy office. Her eyes were welling up with tears. Had I heard her correctly? If so, for better or worse, my French was really coming along.

  Isa guided me over to the quieter edge of the terrace. “Oui. Nous partons.” She went on to explain that she and her boyfriend were going to get married, and they wanted to be close to their families back in Québec. That as soon as Alexi was done with his baking apprenticeship, they were leaving Paris and returning to Canada. And that she had given notice to Ogilvy. I was stunned. My girl, my one fun female friend, was leaving. Say it wasn’t so! But I felt even worse for Isa. Her tears began to spill over, down her cheeks, and I could viscerally feel her torment. “Il me manque déjà,” she said, gesturing to the ridiculous 360-degree view of Paris we had. She already missed it.

  It wasn’t just the city’s beauty, though, with the Eiffel Tower’s lights dancing in the distance, of course that was a big part of it. But as we stood and talked about life and love and Paris, I understood her sadness and felt it as if it were my own. I realized how attached I was becoming to a lifestyle that ambled gracefully instead of blazing full-steam ahead. To a city where every neighborhood had not two or three, but four, five, or six boulangeries to choose from. To a world that valued pleasure above everything else.

  Would I one day, like Isa, be welling up at the thought of leaving? For that matter, would I ever be ready to leave Paris?

  My parents divorced when I was eight, and I left home at seventeen. After four years of college in Boston—including those five glorious months studying abroad in Paris—came my time in San Francisco, and then New York. All that’s to say, the idea of home has changed a lot in my life. My real, honest-to-goodness roots will always be Connecticut. But I think it’s important to feel at home wherever you are in the world.

  Early that summer in Paris, when I Vélib’ed home from work each night, it made me happy to be pedaling along my little route from the Champs-Élysées in the eighth arrondissement to the Montorgueil quartier in the city center. It made me happy to realize that I had a little route, one that I loved. Then again, zipping past Lanvin, Louboutin, Costes, and Colette on rue Saint-Honoré—what wasn’t to love? I’d arrive in my neighborhood, absorbing the buoyant energy of the cafés and shops and people. I loved how jammed the café terraces were, everyone enjoying a beer or wine before returning chez-eux for a home-cooked dinner. With daylight lasting forever, the sun hanging in the sky until well past 10:00 p.m., I’d have a few happy hours to myself to wander rue Montorgueil and watch the fabulous hipsters in their scarves and Wayfarers. Or I’d simply hang out in my tree house, writing about my infatuation with Paris or the day’s lost-in-translation moments on my blog, which I’d started to keep in touch with family and friends back home.

  I was happy that Paris was finally feeling like home. It was comforting and exciting, and both familiar and new. In a city that’s a gold mine of clichés, I thought of a real gem: Paris was where my heart was.

  Christophe Vasseur, meilleur boulanger de Paris en 2008.

  Pas beaucoup de variété, mais de la grande qualité et des chaussons aux pommes faits avec des vraies pommes!

  irrrrrrrrrrésistible!

  With Isa’s departure on the horizon, she suggested a special outing for our last date. Her fiancé was wrapping up an apprenticeship at Du Pain et Des Idées, one of the best boulangeries in the city. Did I want to go visit him and get a private tour of the kitchen? Um, does a baby cry when you take away its candy?

  So late one afternoon, we arrived at the award-winning bakery, which is wedged on a corner in Paris’s greatest bobo paradise, Canal Saint-Martin. Though it’s hipsterville outside, the inside of the bakery is infused with old-time charm. Antique wooden furniture, copper cookware, and giant sacks of flour add a rustic dash to the original Beaux Arts painted glass ceilings and gilded mirrors. The woman at the counter, recognizing Isa, gestured to the kitchen door, giving us the okay to go back. I felt like a rock star bypassing the customers who curiously watched us, two fair-skinned étrangères, go behind the closed doors.

  Her boyfriend, Alexi, welcomed us into the compact kitchen, where he was making the evening baguettes. He showed us how the raw dough was shaped and placed on giant slabs of rolling canvases. He explained how the ovens were stacked, with the hottest ones at floor level. This is where the bakery’s signature bread, the pain des amis, a wonderfully nutty-crusty-chewy bread that is now served at Alain Ducasse’s renowned Plaza Athénée restaurant, was baked. The traditional baguettes were assigned a couple drawers above.

  When it was time, we watched him yank open the oven doors and drag the baguettes onto a contraption that looked like a cross between an ambulance stretcher and grocery store conveyer belt. Some of them were bien cuit, cooked crisp and golden. Others were moins cuit, a smidge undercooked and chewier. He deftly scooped them all into cylindrical wicker baskets, which were then delivered to the front, where the line of eager customers was growing longer, now that it was later in the day. Funny being on this side, I thought, remembering all the times I had been one of those salivating customers, waiting for the evening’s bake to appear fresh and warm from the kitchen.

  We snooped around a bit more, inhaling the fermenting bread dough and peeking at the tools and equipment. Then it was time to sample the goods. Isa and I left Alexi, fatigued with his eight-hour shift coming to a close, to finish his kitchen duties while we returned to the front to choose our snacks.

  Christophe Vasseur, the charming young boulanger behind Du Pain et Des Idées, prides himself on doing a few things and doing them extremely well. No candy-colored gâteaux or theatrical chocolate sculptures for him. Just honest to goodness breads, hand-crafted viennoiserie, and a select few seasonal tarts.

  Isa and I started with a chausson aux pommes. Whereas many boulangeries fill these apple turnovers with jam or compote, Du Pain et Des Idées uses actual slices of fresh apples, and there’s no mistaking the difference. The tender but chunky fruit was sweet and tart with a bit of bite, delicious in the summer afternoon sun. We then tore into a mind-blowingly flaky croissant. There w
ere so many paper-thin golden layers, it looked like a sculpture. It was more exquisite than any other croissant I had seen before—crispier too, leaving a mosaic of pastry flakes scattered in our laps and down around our feet. And, saving the best for last, we tucked into l’escargot chocolat pistache, another lovely puff pastry creation, this one spiraling outward in the shape of a snail, like pain aux raisins. Except these superfine layers were piped full of pistachio crème pâtissière and flecks of chocolate. Everything we had was fresh, delicious, perfect.

  It was a bakery and an afternoon every bit as exceptional as Isa.

  Just as it takes time for friendships to develop properly, you can’t rush a great croissant. It’s a truism I will never be able to deny after experiencing Christophe Vasseur’s pastries that day.

  “Making croissants is 2 percent theory and 98 percent practice,” he told me when I tracked him down for his baking insights after that beautiful experience with Isa. He was referring to the importance of using your own hands, practicing again and again, versus relying on courses and training. And he should know. Vasseur’s own apprenticeship—which he started at the age of thirty after ditching a glamorous job in fashion sales—didn’t amount to more than three months. He learned everything through his own passion and tenacity.

  “Lots of people said, ‘You’re crazy. It will never work,’” Vasseur remembers of his early years, when he was toiling eighteen hours a day, six days a week. Nobody understood the dramatic change in his career path. But that didn’t stop him. Being a baker was something he had wanted to do since he was a boy when, growing up in the French Alps, his three town bakers simultaneously inspired and tempted him with their creations. “It was always like going to a magician’s shop—the way you could smell things even before opening the door. It’s an environment of pure magic to me: using your hands to transform something so simple into something so good and beautiful.”

  So despite everyone’s skepticism, he kept at it, pursuing his life dream. He searched for and found the perfect space: a bakery that had been around for 120 years. It had also seen three bakers go bankrupt in seven years. It wasn’t exactly a good omen, but the space had soul, which was all Vasseur needed. Adopting the words of French novelist Marcel Pagnol as his mantra—I’m gonna make a bread like none other has ever tasted before and, in this bread, I will put a lot of love and friendship—he opened his boulangerie in 2002.

  “I didn’t do it for myself, but I did it to share with people,” he explains. “Baking is more than bread, more than flour and water and yeast. It’s the desire to be more human and go back to the simple things. To go back to roots.”

  Vasseur makes it all sound so simple. But can the artful blending, rolling, folding, and baking of his fine and flaky croissants be easy? Sublime, yes; simple, mais non.

  Of those dreamy, buttery, million-layered viennoiserie, which have earned him legions of fans and awards from the renowned Gault et Millau and Michelin Guide, he credits his drive and that he’s always been good with his hands. Of course the ingredients matter as much as the passion and technique that get poured into them. Vasseur insists on top-quality organic flour, butter, milk, and eggs whenever possible. Equally important is the time and care invested.

  Whereas industrial croissants can be churned out in thirty minutes thanks to premade dough, Christophe invests thirty-four hours. This is because he makes his own dough from scratch and gives it time to rest and develop its aroma—or, in his words, to benefit from “the magic of fermentation.” He then takes that lovely, fragrant handmade dough, layers it with butter, folds and rolls it again and again, making way for those many fine, buttery pastry layers. Then they’re cut into triangles, folded into the distinctive crescent shapes, and baked for fourteen minutes. The croissants puff, they expand, they turn golden brown in the oven. And, finally, heaven is served.

  Of course I was familiar with croissants before moving to Paris. But like all Americans, the samples I had grown up on were farces: ridiculous, oversweetened commercial attempts at French finesse. To get a quality croissant, you had to really search and sample. Or have friends in the know.

  At a previous advertising job in New York, my friend Mary waltzed into the agency one morning carrying two paper bags, butter weeping through the thin paper. She gathered us girls—we were a klatch of five who loyally boozed, lunched, and commiserated with each other—and revealed the otherworldly contents. Inside the first bag were five golden croissants, folding in on themselves from their warmth. The other bag held just as many precious pain au chocolat, also still a titch warm from the morning bake. We huddled on the couch for an impromptu breakfast and with every one of our first bites, there were waves of ecstasy. Where did these come from? we demanded. We flagged the token Parisian in our office, whom, of course, I had a crush on. He confirmed what we already knew to be true: these were exquisite croissants. Probably the best in the city. We were buzzing with this delicious and unexpected discovery for the rest of the day.

  From then on, we all took our turns periodically bringing in bags of croissants and pain au chocolat from Pâtisserie Claude, the source of the buttery beauties. Going to the wee West Village bakery was part of the experience. Instead of a charming café or fancy pâtisserie you might expect of a French bakery in New York’s most picturesque neighborhood, it was a shabby tin can of a place. Linoleum floors, fluorescent lights, and a few framed photographs on the wall revealed nothing of the prowess in the kitchen. And instead of a charming French baker like, say, Christophe Vasseur, Claude was cantankerous. He was a burly Frenchman who had been running the bakery for decades. He couldn’t be bothered with press and didn’t have time for adulation. He baked. That was it. Ça suffit.

  But we—and scores of other cultish worshippers in the city—were hooked, evaluating what made Claude’s croissants so good. There was the crisp and flaky shell that shattered when you bit into it, leaving that telltale bib of giant crumbs on your front side. And then an inside filled with light, tender layers that were slightly stretchy, but never doughy or overly chewy—the by-product of overworking the dough, I learned later from Christophe. And, of course, there was the beautiful taste of butter. Not grossly greasy, but rich and decadent. As warm as a summer day.

  After sampling our viennoiserie at Du Pain et Des Idées, it was time to leave. It was time to say good-bye to Isa.

  I gave a farewell hug to Alexi at the bakery’s back door, and then Isa and I walked toward the Métro on the chaotic Place de la République, a giant, leafy square that has more hobos and rowdy teenagers than magnificent monuments and fountains like Place de la Concorde on the other side of town. As we strolled, old men on café terraces were agog at Isa’s long legs, which she dared to bare in short shorts in the summer sun. Though she had been my first French friend, her brazenness in a land of conformity reminded me that Isa, too, was une étrangère. She had come to Paris to live her dream. And now she was leaving to embrace a new one.

  We double-kissed good-bye—now a natural gesture to me—and then held each other in a tight hug, which made me ache again for my friends back home and the one I was losing now. I was happy for Isa and her new life chapter, just as I was excited for me to stay in Paris. But it was a bittersweet moment. As I watched her disappear into the Métro, I couldn’t help but wonder: if I continued to follow this trail of flaky croissant crumbs, where would the path take me?

  More Sweet Spots on the Map

  While more and more French boulangeries are relying on premade pastry dough (sacré bleu!), rest assured, they’re still pretty good. In fact, most croissants in Paris are still ten times better than anything you’ll find anywhere else in the world (I chalk it up to the French butter). Even Monoprix, the giant grocery store chain, has decent croissants. But don’t waste your precious viennoiserie moments at Monoprix. Go to Gérard Mulot (in the 3e and 6e) for an über-buttery creation, Sadaharu Aoki (in the 5e, 6e, or 15e) for the exotic matcha flavor, or Eric Kayser (all over town) for a classic croissant
au beurre.

  New York’s croissant options are few and far between. Thank goodness for the French bakeries. Treat yourself to an authentic experience—and your own giant bib of flaky croissant crumbs—with a visit to Ceci-Cela or Balthazar in Soho, Café Deux Margot on the Upper West Side, or take a jaunt over to DUMBO and breakfast at Almondine Bakery.

  In the eight years I had lived in New York, it always thrilled me to return to the city. Whether I was training back from a weekend at my dad’s in Connecticut or landing at JFK after three weeks of hiking and biking in New Zealand, I could never suppress my grin when I saw the jagged skyline, the halo of light emanating from the city, the sea of yellow taxis, or the mishmash of cultures and clothing swimming together in one crazy orgy. New York was under my skin. For years, it had been my true love. And then Paris came along.

  After spending my junior semester abroad in Paris, the city had blossomed into this little fantasy of mine. Paris was the romantic counterpart to my gritty reality in New York. But I never thought it would happen to me. In my mind, Paris was the guy who’s super good looking and nice and interesting and romantic and fun. You mean, that guy actually exists? And he’s interested in me? Oh please, I don’t buy it, not for a New York minute.

  But after nearly six months in Paris, I knew it was a fact: Fantasies do come true. Despite my moments of uncertainty and pangs of loneliness, I was loving life in Paris. I was so smitten with the Gallic city’s grand, plane-tree-lined boulevards and ever-so-slightly crooked side streets, its countless café terraces and the ritual of lingering on them with a single café crème or coupe de champagne. Every time I biked by a boulangerie in the morning and got a whiff of the butter baking into the folds of pastry dough and baguettes being pulled fresh from the oven, I was seduced all over again.