by Amy Thomas
It was all too much. I became so worn down and defeated by my ineptness that I started putting off every little action. The most mundane errand, like buying shampoo at the grocery store, was like a brainteaser, and I needed epic courage and concentration to call and make a dinner reservation. Everything required Herculean effort. As a result, I did nothing. There were bills to pay, appointments to schedule, and an avalanche of emails to catch up on. Then there was stuff like, you know, trying to figure out who to call at the Vélib’ office to find out what the mysterious $57 charge on my credit card was all about. But I just couldn’t be bothered. There was no time. It took too much energy. There were episodes of Mad Men to be downloaded and Jean-Paul Hévin mendiants—little chocolate disks adorned with nuts and dried fruit—to be annihilated. I knew this self-defeating behavior was only hurting me, but after all those months struggling as an outsider and feeling branded as a foreigner, I was also tired of being a tough cookie. Thank goodness I finally had a few friends to lean on.
“So, it’s going really well, huh?” I was talking to Jo about her blossoming romance, but it might as well have been Melissa since I’d had this same exact conversation with her just the day before. How was it that my two single girlfriends in Paris, my only girlfriends in Paris, had both recently started dating Frenchies? And both relationships, in true Gallic style, had quickly evolved into serious territory. There’s no such thing as casual dating in France; you’re either together or not. “You’re really into him?” I asked with a smile that I hoped masked my anxiety.
As an Aussie, Jo relished the idea of scrambled eggs and strong coffee as much as I did, so we were also official brunch buddies. And lucky for us, Parisians were having a full-blown love affair with le brunch. But while most cafés and bistros offered overpriced prix-fixe menus of viennoiserie, tartines, eggs, bacon, fruit salad, green salad, coffee, and juice, in portions that incited locals to show shocking and unusual displays of gluttony, Jo and I sought out more modest places where we could indulge in à la carte Anglo dishes. Granola paired with tart Greek yogurt and fluffy blueberry pancakes were recent triumphs. Today, we had discovered Eggs & Co., a two-story sliver of a restaurant with crooked floors and low ceilings in one of Saint-Germain’s hidden alleys that was all eggs, all the time. Jo had ordered une cocotte, a small dish of baked eggs, with ratatouille. I had scrambled eggs with smoked salmon coming my way. I didn’t know why we called smoked salmon “lox” back in New York, what the difference was, or why I had never really eaten it before. But smoked salmon had become one of my favorite things in Paris.
“You know, it’s going surprisingly well,” Jo said with a blush. “I mean, I just didn’t see this coming. And it’s so easy. This is the first guy I’ve dated here who I really feel like I can be myself around. And he’s really into me!” Then she laughed, surprised by her own proclamation. Ever the modest one, she quickly added, “Well, you know what I mean—he seems like he’s into me.”
“I’m sure he is! It certainly seems like he is. I mean, you guys spend so much time together. The chemistry’s good, you have fun, you can communicate despite the language and cultural barriers…I mean, those are no small things!” Never the kind of girl to be jealous of my friends’ relationships, I wanted Jo to understand that I was happy for her. In the past few weeks, I had already gone through the awkward and nervous early stages of a relationship with her: wondering if he’d call after they had met, debating the protocol of going Dutch in Paris, anticipating how the sex with a Frenchman would be. I was with her 100 percent. But I was also, maybe, overenthusing just a little bit to conceal my own vulnerability.
Oh hell, who was I kidding? I was secretly annoyed. Seriously! I had finally made a couple good girlfriends in Paris—cool, single girls—and they both had to go and meet men the very same week. Now they were both smitten, locked in time-consuming relationships. And while I did love eating eggs with Jo, I couldn’t help lamenting the fact that, with her in a relationship, we would no longer be trolling bars for men together.
It was another reminder that I needed to land my own man. Even my promising American with a penchant for baking had flamed out after he got simultaneously too clingy and too ranty, going off about the evils of advertising even though he knew it was what I did for a living. It was more righteousness, and a few too many lectures, than I could stomach so I called it quits.
Because I was spending so much time alone, I got pretty good at solo activities. I passed entire weekends by myself, Vélib’ing to pâtisseries, strolling through the open-air markets, and taking early morning walks along the Seine, especially on Sundays when the main road was closed to cars. I also took a slew of cooking classes, learning to make sole meunière and Provençal sardines, lavender crème brûlée and plum clafoutis, celery root soup and vegetable napoleons. It was all lovely and delicious. But what I really needed now was a girls’ night out.
“So, what are you doing later?” I asked after our plates had been cleared and her relationship dissected. “Do you want to go to Chez Jeanette for some drinks?” I was thinking the allure of this newly discovered hipster bar on the seedy rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis might tempt her.
“Ohhhh…” Jo squirmed a little. “Actually, I’m meeting Cedric’s parents tonight. We’re doing dinner.” As I plied her with questions about this important new phase—meeting mom and dad just weeks into the relationship, sheesh!—I was mentally rifling through my alternatives. Michael was traveling to some exotic Eastern European capital that was known to have hot chicks. Melissa was with her new beau. Again. And, though by now I had a couple other acquaintances, I just couldn’t picture texting them for a Saturday girls’ night out. So I masochistically started going through my New York Rolodex, imagining what all my friends would be doing at about eight o’clock on a Saturday night. AJ and Mitchell would be cozied up over a romantic dinner, planning the rest of their lives together. Jonathan would probably be chatting up some sexpot at a loud, thumping gay bar. And I bet Mary, Melanie, Krista, and Carrie were getting all dolled up, ready to take on New York’s latest hot spot. Oh, how I suddenly wished it were September again, when I was back home. I had wasted so much time pining for Paris when I was in New York. I hadn’t stopped to appreciate all the creature comforts and the camaraderie surrounding me—how natural and easy things were.
But that was then, this was now. Now I was in Paris. City of romance. City of my dreams. And suddenly, a city where I knew no singletons. I almost cajoled Jo into ditching the parents and having some fun avec moi. But I knew that wasn’t fair. She was in that lovely state of infatuation when everything was fresh and anything was possible. She deserved to bask in it. Face it, Aim, I told myself, it looks like another Saturday night, just you and Milo. Out loud, I tried to sound a little less pathetic and a lot more gracious.
“That’s great, Jo. I’m so happy for you.”
When I first arrived in Paris, I was certain I was living some Cinderella story in which fairy godmothers materialized from bubbles to make my dreams come true. And with the highfalutin fashion, glamorous Champs-Élysées offices, and adorable tree house in the middle of the most delicious city in the world, why wouldn’t I believe a little magic was at play? All that was missing was my tarte tatin prince!
After my initial giddiness when strolling through the Louis Vuitton flagship—pawing the silky gowns and spiky stilettos made me wonder why I was the lucky girl who got to live this dream—I was still asking questions as to just why I was there, but now instead of in a starry-eyed, I’m-the-luckiest-girl-in-the-world sort of way, it was a desperate, WTF sort of way. I thought things would get easier the longer I was in Paris. But they just kept getting harder. Not even after my parents’ divorce or breaking up with Max had I felt so alone.
In New York, with my packed social calendar, I had a rock-solid sense of self. Now that I had been on my own in Paris for months, I was increasingly tormented by my age and single status. Everywhere I looked, lovers were cuddling, cooing, and
unabashedly making out. I kept hearing a taunting refrain, echoing louder and louder in my head: Et moi? Et moi? I started waking up in the middle of the night, questioning my decisions: why had I left Max in San Francisco all those years ago? Why did I never truly give Eric a chance? I was now wondering—perhaps a little late—about the repercussions. Why didn’t I have a boyfriend? I couldn’t help but feel negative. Adrift. I was a thirty-six-year-old American woman living in France. What the hell was I doing? What did I want? What was I searching for? If my dream was to live in the City of Light and Dark Chocolate, how come I was beginning to spend more and more time fantasizing about New York?
I stopped at the Eric Kayser on rue Montorgueil for a chocolate chip cookie after brunching with Jo. If I was going to be spending quality time with Mad Men and Milo later that night, I reckoned, I might as well have a sweet to go with the show. It was more self-defeating behavior, going straight to my ass, but I didn’t care. I needed it.
Chocolate chip cookies have always held a special place for me. But then again, what honorable American doesn’t have a special softness for these classic baked goods that were the result of an accident? An accident! Imagine if Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, circa 1930, had never knocked the Nestlé chocolate bar into her industrial mixer, as folklore has her doing? Would someone else eventually have had the brilliant idea of adding rich chocolate chunks to smooth and creamy cookie dough? Or would the chocolate chip cookie never have existed? I shudder to think not.
Interestingly, the tarte tatin, which is almost as iconic to the French as chocolate chip cookies are to Americans, was similarly said to be the result of a merry mistake. Caroline and Stéphanie Tatin were two sisters, coincidentally also running a hotel. After forgetting to place a crust along the bottom of a baking pan, Stephanie tried salvaging the dessert by draping a sheet of dough over her caramelized apple filling. Then, by inverting the creation after it had baked in the oven, voilà, the lovely and amazing “upside down” tarte tatin was presented to the world. But that’s another story…
Growing up, it was a rare treat to bake Toll House chocolate chip cookies from scratch. We were a boxed-mix household. I mean, who had something as exotic as vanilla extract in the cupboard? Homemade cookies were a luxury.
When I lived in San Francisco in my twenties, I decided I deserved to be treated every so often. I started the habit of renting two movies every Tuesday night and baking batches of Toll House ready-made dough. By then, I was accustomed to having vanilla extract on hand, but I was also lazier and more inclined to just get to the good stuff. The movies were dinner, the cookies were dessert, and my appreciation for and devotion to chocolate chip cookies—along with Martin Scorsese and Luc Besson—deepened each week.
By the time I moved to New York in 2001, I had moved beyond Toll House and was nothing short of a chocolate chip cookie snob. I knew there were many forms of magic at play in the making of the perfect chocolate chip cookie. It wasn’t just a bowl of flour and sugar and eggs and chocolate chips that, when baked for eight to ten minutes at 350 degrees, created an afternoon snack (or Tuesday night dinner). There was serious technique, arrived at after studious experimentation. Letting the dough rest in the refrigerator anywhere from twelve to thirty-six hours, for example, lets the individual ingredients meld together, resulting in better baking consistency—a hydration tactic relied upon by practically every good baker. The scoop size of the raw dough going into the oven is also important, determining the crisp-to-chewy-to-melty ratio as one nibbles their way from the cookie’s firm edge to its gooey, doughy center. Passion, imagination, quality—they’re all just as important as they get artfully mixed in with the other ingredients.
While there were no cookie wars in New York the way there were for cupcakes, there were plenty of philosophies about the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Should it be soft or crisp? Fat or flat? Big or small? Austere or experimental? Different tastes and opinions propelled a healthy debate—and a delicious excuse to continuously sample all the specimens. And like everything else in New York, I discovered, the options just kept getting bigger, richer, and more outrageous.
My New York chocolate chip explorations began with City Bakery, which was started in 1990 by Maury Rubin as a modest spot peddling savory food from one six-foot-long table and pastries from another six-foot-long table. Within ten years, Maury had not only catapulted to success, upgrading to a cavernous two-level cafeteria-style space in the Flatiron District, but City Bakery had become a city institution. Maury, a Parisian-trained baker himself, initially focused on tarts, viennoiserie, and other French specialties. But soon his American sensibilities muscled their way in. He introduced cookies to the City Bakery menu—lovely, dreamy, crunchy, creamy, soft, and sugary chocolate chip cookies. His saucer-sized beauties have it all: crispy edges, melty middles, and a buttery-gritty texture that’s balanced by giant hunks of smooth dark chocolate. They have just a hint of caramel flavor. They’re real cookie monsters.
Naturally I was smitten with City Bakery’s cookies. But then Julie, who lived on the Upper West Side, introduced me to Levain, a subterranean hole-in-the-wall, and my loyalties were suddenly divided. This sublime little bakery was the result of two ambitious women who were hungry for a big challenge—and an even bigger cookie. Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald were training for the Ironman Triathlon in 1994. As a result of their rigorous swimming, cycling, and running training, the two friends were constantly famished, and the regular-sized cookies they found everywhere just weren’t cutting it. So they baked up their own batches. And, after both successfully completed the triathlon, they opened Levain in 1995.
When Julie first took me there, she suggested that we split a cookie. Seriously? Split a cookie? What did she take me for, a weight-conscious waif who was intimidated by creamed butter and sugar? But once I saw the six-ounce whoppers being pulled from the oven and cooling on the racks behind the bakery’s small counter, I understood. If City Bakery had cookie monsters, Levain’s cookies were on steroids.
I consented to go halfsies with Julie, but only if we split two cookies. She might be the one with a ballet dancer’s body, but I had the more logical mind. I told her to surprise me with her two favorites while I ran outside to snag the bakery’s lone bench that was auspiciously being vacated at that moment by a khaki-clad dad and his chocolate-smeared daughter. I wondered which of the four flavors Julie would opt for: chocolate chip with roasted walnuts, dark and decadent chocolate chocolate chip, wholesome oatmeal raisin, or dark chocolate with peanut butter chips. A moment later, Julie came out toting a small but heavy paper bag. I peeked inside, and the revelation couldn’t have made me happier: one chocolate chip walnut cookie and one double chocolate chip cookie. “Well done, mon amie,” I commended, swallowing in anticipation.
I let her drive. Julie withdrew the chocolate chip cookie with walnuts, doing just as you’re supposed to with a cheese platter and starting with the mildest and working your way to the richest flavor. She broke the little mound of cakey, chocolate-studded, slightly undercooked heaven in two and handed me half. “One, two, three!” she commanded. We bit in simultaneously and broke out into big, sexy smiles. Semi-sweet chocolate morsels smeared our teeth. Our eyes rolled in the back of our heads, our feet giddily tapping the sidewalk. “No way!” was all I could say. Julie, eyes closed, couldn’t even respond. We were lost in cookie heaven.
And then it happened again. Perfectly happy to have City Bakery and Levain dueling it out for top chocolate chip cookie honors, I was ambushed in my own backyard in 2008. David Chang, who had become the darling of the New York restaurant world, thanks to his Momofuku noodle and ssäm bars in the East Village, opened his third outpost, Momofuku Milk Bar, just around the corner from my apartment. While everyone in the city was clamoring for the restaurants’ bowls of brisket ramen and platters of pig butt, his pastry chef, Christina Tosi, was cooking up “crack pie,” an insane and outrageously addictive concoction made lar
gely of white sugar, brown sugar, and powdered sugar, with egg yolks, heavy cream, and lots of butter, all baked in an oat cookie crust. People were going nuts for the stuff, and it was time for me to give this crack pie a shot. But as soon as I walked into the industrial-style bakery, I knew crack could have nothing on the cookies.
Blueberry and cream. Double chocolate. Peanut butter. Corn. (Yes, a corn cookie, and it was delicious). There was a giant compost cookie, chock-full of pretzels, chips, coffee grounds, butterscotch, oats, and chocolate chips. But the real knockout was the cornflake, marshmallow, and chocolate chip cookie. It was sticky, chewy, and crunchy at once, sweet and chocolaty, the ever-important bottom side rimmed in caramelized beauty. I love rice crisps in my chocolate, but who would have thought that cornflakes in my cookies could also cause such rapture?
It was clear. New York offered every conceivable kind of chocolate chip cookie, from the rich to the ridiculous. But I had trouble finding a worthy contender in Paris. Until Eric Kayser.
Eric Kayser’s story is a classic French boulanger’s tale. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Alsatian bakers, he knew from the time he was four years old that he too wanted to spend his life mixing batter and operating ovens. As soon as he was old enough, he started apprenticing with some of the country’s best boulangers and then went on to teach at France’s national bakery school, l’Institut National de la Boulangerie Pâtisserie (INBP). After helping a number of other bakers launch their own businesses, it was finally time for him to open shop. In 1996, Eric Kayser debuted on rue Monge in the fifth arrondissement.
Kayser has always been, first and foremost, a bread maker, using carefully selected flours—whole wheat, buckwheat, rye, rough flax—and natural leavens that give his loaves, in all their infinite varieties, tender centers, golden crackly crusts, and beautiful complex flavors. But, as Mom, Bob, and I had discovered all those months ago (and I had confirmed on many subsequent visits to his rue Montorgueil boulangerie), his douceurs are also delicious.
