Paris, My Sweet

by Amy Thomas

  It was a no-brainer to stay in Paris. When my initial six-month contrat à durée déterminée, the kind of work contract issued for a finite amount of time, was up at the end of summer, I eagerly re-signed, this time for nine months. Nine more months of working on Louis Vuitton, nine more months of living in my tree house, nine more months of European travels and sweet explorations. Nine more months of…Paris. I was mad for the place—I wasn’t going to nip my love affair in the bud. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t also excited to be going home to New York for a two-week visit. In fact, with my trip on the horizon, I smiled, remembering my old lover’s charms: things like pizza and chocolate chip cookies, fashion magazines and reality TV, gyms and taxis on every corner, my friends.

  New York, here I come!

  Almost immediately upon touching down at the chaotic JFK, the duality of my life hit me. It seemed, for the first time since moving to and falling for Manhattan, things were going to be different. With the lovely, soft pain aux raisins from Stohrer still in my belly from breakfast in Paris that morning, I was assaulted by the smells of foot-long hot dogs and ten-ounce Cinnabons inside the airport terminal. Outside, the shrill shriek of car horns made me yearn for the relatively soothing clang of church bells in Paris. And everywhere I looked: big bottoms! Ginormous bellies! When did everyone get so fat?

  On the subway ride into the city, I wrinkled my nose at the trashy tabloid magazines, at everyone shouting into their cell phones and snapping their gum, at the filth and graffiti covering the seats. Then I caught a glimpse of my puss reflected in the window, the city skyline visible in the distance, and I told myself to stop being such a snob. I was a New Yorker after all. This was my home; Paris was only temporary. Who was I to suddenly look down my nose at everything I had always regarded with such adoration?

  The first few days of the visit didn’t get much better. It was taking me awhile to come out of my shell shock and fall back into a New York groove. It didn’t help that AJ, my rock, was on a business trip in Dubai and I still hadn’t seen her, or met this guy, Mitchell, with whom she had quickly become serious. I was keen to get to know who had stolen my best friend’s heart but had to wait a couple more days for her return. In the meantime, what I needed was some good old American bonding. I rallied the troops at one of my favorite old haunts, Sweet & Vicious.

  Everyone had been complaining about what a washout the New York summer had been, but after a perfect season in Paris I was now lucking out with a heat wave. It was a warm and still evening. The first to arrive, I settled on a picnic table bench on the bar’s back patio with a fresh vodka tonic, admiring the brick tenement buildings looming over me with their rickety fire escapes—so New York! I was wearing a sleeveless grey silk blouse I had bought in one of the Marais’s chic boutiques and sandals to show off my pedicure—the first one I’d had in six months, as they cost twice as much in Paris, and I stubbornly refused to spend 30 on having my toes polished when that money would be better spent on wine, cheese, and chocolate. Waiting on the patio, I had butterflies in my stomach as if an old flame was about to show up. It was the most excited I had been since arriving in New York.

  “Amy, darlin’!” My six-foot-five-inch giant of a friend, Jonathan, ducked through the door and enveloped me in a bear hug. “Oh, my girl. I’m so happy to see you.” He looked down at me with his sideways smile and shook his head. This is what I needed, I told myself, melting into his mass, familiar and warm.

  “You too, love! How are you?” I asked, buried in his armpit, which was both disgusting and wonderful. But I didn’t give him time to answer. “Tell me what’s going on at work,” I commanded, reluctantly pulling away to look at his face. As a project manager, he was forever plotting to take over the production department of his ad agency. I knew that he had six months of intrigue and cattiness to unload and that other friends would soon arrive and interrupt us. He rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to share the latest drama when—too late—the girls arrived.

  “Ammmmyyyy!” Melanie, Mary, Krista, and Carrie sprang through the back door, looking fabulous in their heels, handbags, and jewelry—New York to the nines. After sipping sidecars and sharing secrets for so many years, we were now like teenage girls reunited after the long summer vacation. Our chorus of squeals and hugs provoked a couple curious looks but everyone on the patio quickly turned back to their cocktails and conversation. A flood of happiness washed over me. It wasn’t just seeing my friends again. But for the first time in months, I was at a normal bar where you stood around and socialized, instead of clustering yourselves in private groups around café tables. You could actually mingle and act rowdy—absolutely unacceptable behavior in Paris. Tonight, there was none of that impossibly hip and aloof French attitude. None of the cliquish there’s-no-way-in-hell-you’re-breaking-in-here protectionism. I was on familiar territory, in the arms of old friends. I had forgotten what the home court advantage felt like.

  Within the hour, Mike and Corey showed up. Then Ben and Merrill. And Kurt and Christy. It had been a long time since everyone had been together and there was lots of catching up to do. As I looked around at my friends, I realized that while I had been settling into Paris, everyone here had been settling into domesticated bliss. Aside from my band of girlfriends from work, all my New York friends were paired up. It gave me a strange flashback to when I was six years old and would watch my parents’ hippie friends with their cigarettes and joints, whiskey and rosé, mingling and laughing at casual parties on our big front porch. They had seemed so artsy and fabulous—so adult. I now found myself looking at my friends with the same wide-eyed wonder, and even a little bit of that little-girl envy. It was a strange pool of emotions that I suppressed by ordering another drink.

  Hours later, the powder blue twilight had turned to night and I had downgraded from vodka tonics to beer. All the couples had returned to their apartments to walk their dogs—clearly in training for the next step: babies. It was just the tribe of us single girls now. And as much as I loved my girls, I hated that New York was overrun by a million little groups just like us. It was inescapable: there were too many single ladies in this city.

  The talk naturally turned to advertising since we had all met at the same agency years ago and bonded over office politics (and those incredible Pâtisserie Claude croissants). Stories started flying about who was working where and which senior VPs were acting naughty. The salaciousness of the business and dishing about it had always been a guilty pleasure of mine. But as Krista let loose on her old boss who had had not one, but two, interoffice affairs, as well as a second child with his wife in the past year, I couldn’t rouse the proper disgust or delight. I dug for it, but—nothing. “The guy clearly has to go to sex addicts anonymous. It’s like he’s David Duchovny or something.” Everyone else laughed at the reference to the Hollywood star’s rehab stint for sex addiction, but I had started going numb.

  I didn’t know if it was the flood of emotions from seeing so many friends at once or if it was something else, but I suddenly didn’t feel like myself. I was nodding my head at all the right points in the conversation, but inside I was floating away. I couldn’t get close to anyone. These were friends who knew me inside and out. But they didn’t feel the same. The bar and city didn’t feel the same. I didn’t feel the same.

  “Have you been to the Standard Grill yet?” Mary asked. She must have seen my eyes going vacant and was trying to steer the conversation into firm Amy territory. When I had lived in New York—had it really been only six months ago?—I wrote restaurant reviews and roundups for the local pubs, and religiously read every magazine and blog about food, restaurants, and the local dining scene. The girls always turned to me for the best first date, brunch, neighborhood gem, old-school New York, cheap Mexican, cool design, best bathroom, of-the-moment restaurant recommendations. “It just opened in the Meatpacking,” Mary continued, trying to reignite my enthusiasm.

  “Oh yeah, I heard that place is cool. The bar has ping-pong tables, right?
” Melanie asked. Six months ago, ping-pong tables would have seemed novel. But ping-pong tables? Big whoop! They were de rigueur across Paris. I wasn’t taking the bait, even when Carrie chimed in that she had gone to the hot spot last weekend and been within spitting distance of Bruce Willis, who was followed two minutes later by Demi and Ashton, plus a pair of lumbering six-foot, three-hundred-pound bodyguards.

  This was the way things were now, I realized. For the past six months, my friends had been the ones scoping out and sizing up the newest, latest, coolest openings in Manhattan. They had been cruising right along without my tips and assessments, living in “my” city while I had been thirty-six hundred miles away. Things change every weekend in New York. Restaurants open and close. Bars go from “It” to “Over It.” Did I really expect that I could be gone for months and have everything remain the same? I was now a stranger in my hometown.

  “Guys, I have to go,” I said, putting my barely touched Stella on the table, debate over the most impossible dinner reservations hanging in the air. Everyone looked at me incredulously.

  “What? You’re leaving? Why? Let’s go to Café Select for dinner!” Mary said. Meanwhile, Carrie’s face was lit up from her BlackBerry. She was already shifting to Plan B.

  “You know, I’d love to, but a massive wave of jet lag just washed over me,” I begged. “I think I’d fall asleep in my spaetzle if I stayed out.” It was true that I was still a bit woozy from jet lag. But I knew I’d return to my apartment for another sleepless night, no matter how tired I was. More than anything, I just didn’t want to feel alienated any more. Everything I had once known and loved suddenly felt so foreign and I no longer knew where I belonged. This night that I had been deliciously anticipating had taken it out of me. I needed it to end.

  Walking around the neon-filled avenues and crowded streets in the ensuing days, I found myself having a mini identity crisis. So many of my friends, including AJ—who was back from her business trip and on for dinner that night—were moving in with boyfriends, and moving out to Brooklyn. Out of my entire community of New York friends, only a handful were still in the same place as me: single and living the life of a twentysomething. Cohabitation in Park Slope or Carroll Gardens was apparently the modern fairy tale of my peers, not whooping it up in a foreign country. I kept pondering where all these observations left me: with two homes, or none? Was I a New Yorker or a Parisian? Expat or local? Where exactly did I belong? As I searched for the connection to and love for a city that had always sustained me, I felt sad and alienated.

  I also felt guilty on a more existential level. It was like realizing that you’ve fallen out of love with someone. Each morning, I’d wake up, hoping to feel differently, thinking but, but, but…I used to love this place. I used to look forward to this. This used to be my life. Now I felt bad because I couldn’t get excited about something that I once loved so much. I couldn’t help but see New York as loud and filthy instead of elegant and transporting. The tarted-up Sex and the City wannabes tottering in high heels and shockingly short skirts had none of the grace of French women who walked with a confident, sophisticated gait. The urban grit and tension felt claustrophobic, not inspiring the way Paris’s cobblestone streets and plazas did.

  It didn’t help that as soon as I’d start feeling a New York connection again, I’d be ushered back to Paris. For just as the French were having a love affair with cupcakes, I discovered New Yorkers were falling for the macaron.

  Ah yes, macarons. Those crisp but chewy, light-as-air meringue cookies. Not the big, hulking lumpish Italian confections that are often made with coconut. French macarons are different. They’re delicate yet persnickety. A feat of mixing, folding, stirring, and timing. A delightful combination of powdered sugar, finely ground almonds, and egg whites and not much else, save for the luxuriously creamy ganache or buttercream filling that holds the two cookies together. Firm but tender, shiny yet ridged, with ethereally light shells and heavy middles, they’re miniature studies of contrasts—and deliciousness.

  Making macarons is famously difficult. Everything must be done just so: the ingredients measured to the very gram, egg whites aged and beaten on a rigid timetable, ovens heated to the precise degree—even the outside weather conditions can result in flat or cracked shells, instead of the shiny, perfectly domed specimens that beckon from pâtisserie vitrines and tea house cake stands. “Humidity is the enemy of macarons,” is how the instructor explained it in a macaron-making class I took. (You better believe I took a macaron-making class. I figured with those things being as iconic to the Frenchies as cupcakes were to Americans, the least I could do was see what all the fuss was about. I spent a few hours on a Saturday, learning at La Cuisine Paris.)

  If you don’t stir the batter enough, you get spiky cookies. If you stir too much, they risk becoming flat. And anyone who’s ever admired the lovely little things knows the cookie shells should be nice and smooth with a jolie sheen, while the inner lip, le croute, should be ragged. The innards should be moist, but not wet; the outside crisp, but not tough. The more you know about them, the easier it is to understand why macarons cost a couple bucks each.

  When I arrived in Paris, I was ignorant to all this. My first clue to Parisians’ devotion to the wee delights was when I coasted by Pierre Hermé’s rue Bonaparte boutique on a Vélib’ and saw a line snaking out the door. My curiosity was piqued but I had other, more decadent, sweets to sample. Like Jacques Genin’s bittersweet chocolate éclairs and Boulangerie Julien’s dense and creamy almond croissants. Later, it’s true, I became a devotee of Pierre Hermé’s cakes. But two-bite, pastel-colored cookie sandwiches seemed like child’s play.

  Then Lionel, my partner at work and a sweet freak himself, brought une boîte de macarons into the office. He visited my desk and deftly removed the lid, presenting an array of perfectly formed, vibrantly colored macarons. I was dazzled. The three perfect rows seemed almost too pretty to disturb. But then I realized that was nonsense. Vite! They should be sampled. It was time to lose my macaron virginity.

  My fingers danced above the open box as I tried to anticipate which flavor would be the very best. Lionel, equal parts benevolent and impatient, steered me to a dusty rose-colored one; it was the famous Ispahan flavor. I bit into the shell that, poof, crunched ever so delicately before collapsing in a delightfully chewy and moist mouthful. And then the storm of flavors hit me. Bright raspberry, exotic lychee, and a whiff of rose. There was so much power in that pretty little thing. It was a delicacy packed with skill, imagination, poetry, and, God, give me another one!

  As I drifted away on a little cloud of rose-tinted heaven, Lionel decided to school me in a very important French lesson.

  In Paris, there are two kinds of people: those who think Pierre Hermé makes the best macarons and those who believe Ladurée’s are the best. What many people don’t know, even ardent macaron worshippers, is that Pierre Hermé once worked for Ladurée, the traditional salon de thé with roots back to 1862.

  One hundred and fifty years ago, Ladurée was just a bakery. But as Paris’s dramatic tree-lined boulevards and sweeping gardens were being installed as part of Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century modernization program and café culture was coming full swing, Jeanne Souchard, Louis Ernest Ladurée’s wife, decided that ladies needed a place for social outings. He merged the café concept with the pastry shop, et voilà, one of the first salons de thé was born. Though today it’s a multimillion dollar empire, with locations in far-flung Japan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, Ladurée still retains the class and charm of the early days. The three Parisian tea salons share the same powder-green color scheme, Belle Époque interiors, and attract a mélange of Japanese tourists and ladies who lunch. It’s iconic to some, stuffy to others. I think it’s just lovely.

  After an apprenticeship at Lenôtre and a ten-year stint at Fauchon, two other historic French pâtisseries, Pierre Hermé became consulting pastry chef at Ladurée, opening the magnificent Champs-Élysées location—the on
e, conveniently, right near Ogilvy. But ultimately, he was a little too rock and roll for the traditional outfit. The mix of fruity flavors that is Ispahan is the perfect example of why the pâtissier, Pierre Hermé, and the salon de thé, Ladurée, didn’t mix. The flavor wasn’t considered a success at Ladurée, so he took the recipe with him when he set out on his own in 1998.

  Now Ispahan is his most celebrated flavor combination, but by no means the only one. Over the years he’s created macarons such as chocolate and passion fruit; raspberry and wasabi; peach, apricot, and saffron; white truffle and hazelnut; and olive oil and vanilla. They may sound funky, but trust me, they are all delicious. And while Hermé also does classic, singular flavors—vanilla, pistachio, lemon, and rose, to name a delicious few—many would say that is where Ladurée rules.

  If you ask me, both Pierre Hermé and Ladurée have their merits. Pierre Hermé’s macarons are still made by hand; Ladurée’s are assembled by machine. But Ladurée’s macarons and boxes are also less expensive and the experience is more transcending. Brand and taste, preference and prejudices, the debate rages on: whose macarons are the perfect balance of crisp to chewy to melty? Who has the most sublime flavor combinations? Who has the richest ganache? Whose are the prettiest? Ultimately, it’s a question that’s nearly impossible to answer. Just exactly who has the best macaron: Pierre Hermé or Ladurée?

  With my initiation to the city’s great macaron rivalry under way, I started appreciating the delicacies for what they were: pretty and petite, feminine and elegant, fancy enough for une soirée but also indulged in as an everyday goûter. In other words, they were totally French. What were they doing all over New York?

  Back in Paris, Anglo-American restaurants and bakeries were springing up all over, studiously re-creating cheesecake, carrot cake, and, bien sûr, le cupcake. But when I saw the transatlantic love reciprocated, I just rolled my eyes. Seeing macarons in Manhattan was like going to Vegas and seeing the Eiffel Tower. It just felt so wrong. But I was finally knocked off my high horse when I happened by Kee’s in Soho.