Paris, My Sweet Read online

  It was more than the physical stuff, though. I felt as if I had a lot to prove on this trip. Having them here made me hyperaware of my attachment to Paris. I felt this weird ownership, as though I was personally responsible for everything from the dour weather to the magic of the Seine at sunset. A cocktail of pride and angst mixed inside of me: I felt giddy and protective. I yearned to share everything with these two virgin travelers but also felt the compulsion to claim it as my own. This beautiful place was a mystery to them, but it was my whole world now.

  I wanted to show them, especially my mom, that I belonged in Paris. Despite her chin-up Yankee resignation that her only daughter had moved overseas at an age when she should have been bearing grandchildren, I knew it pained her. She would never say anything to make me feel guilty. In fact, Mom never uttered a word that wasn’t supportive of me and my choices. She was my biggest cheerleader. Still, I knew she loved my brother’s kids, my adorable niece and nephew, to pieces and wanted more grandchildren. She wanted me to have kids so I could have that whole pregnancy and parenthood experience and know what being a mother felt like. And I, in turn, needed her to understand how I felt in Paris. Why I kept coming back to this city. Why it was in my blood and bones. Paris never let me forget the beauty, magic, and wonder I experienced when I first went as a college student, sixteen years earlier. Now it was time to justify my love.

  “Wow.” We were hauling ourselves up the six flights to my tree house. I didn’t know if Mom’s utterance was the full extent of her shock at my steep and winding staircase, or if she was just too winded to say anything else. Six flights was no joke, and I felt a little bad, dragging them up, up, up. But I also had a special, masochistic love for my daily climb; along with the Vélib’s, I attributed it to keeping my butt relatively the same size since arriving, despite my regular pastry binges.

  Meanwhile, Bob, lugging the suitcases, had to stop on every other landing to huff and puff and laugh at the inanity. This was certainly a lot more rigorous than using the garage door opener and parking within inches of their front door. By the time we all made it upstairs and threw down the luggage, none of us relished the idea of turning right around. But there was a city outside—an entire beautiful, romantic, wonderfully delicious city out there—waiting to be explored. So I quickly showed them the views of the Centre Pompidou and Sacré-Coeur, which prompted more “wows”; they gave Milo a little American love, which elicited some happy purring; and then we set out together to embrace Paris.

  “Oh my god, it’s gorgeous.” My mom was already reaching for her camera.

  “Oh, geez, Mom, that’s bona fide Paris skank.” We were strolling from rue Montorgueil toward the Seine, and she was taking a photo of Les Halles. Decades ago, it would have been worthy of a picture, for sure. It had once been the city’s central market, where, beneath glass and iron structures, fishmongers, butchers, and farmers from the country convened to sell their goods. Now it was a loathsome hub of neon chain stores, where loud and aggressive teens descended en masse from les banlieues, the suburbs, by way of the RER station buried below. “I know you want pictures, but save your memory space, trust me,” I told her. And then, ten minutes later, “See what I mean? That’s your money shot.”

  We had reached the Seine, and I pointed across the city to where the iron latticework of the Eiffel Tower shot up eighty-one stories over the Parisian rooftops. It was cheesy, but seeing that pointy silhouette never failed to make my heart flutter. I was happy to see it had the same effect on Mom and Bob.

  After a flurry of photos, we continued our tour. We went to the marché aux fleurs on the Île de la Cité, the geographical center of the city, and ogled the lavender plants, bouquets of ranunculus, and petite olive trees in terra-cotta planters. We passed the green bookstalls along the Seine’s banks and the rows of souvenir boutiques pawning identical magnets, aprons, T-shirts, and shot glasses. Outside Notre Dame, we craned our necks to see the famed gargoyles and admire the sculpted Gothic portals while the deeply moving bells clanged at noon. We strolled along rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île on the Île Saint-Louis, peeping in the shop windows where everything from ash-dusted, pyramid-shaped goat cheese to folded silk scarves were displayed as expertly as curated art exhibitions. It was a thrill to lead them around the city, watching them rendered speechless by so much beauty. And after all the time I had been devoting to becoming a proper local, it was fun for me to play tourist.

  We crossed to the Left Bank, past the Sorbonne and the giant bookstores and camping outlets. We stopped at a little café and ordered a lunch of salads, omelets, and roast chicken from the chalkboard menu. And, after slowly strolling through Saint-Germain’s pedestrian-packed streets, admiring the chic Frenchies who were, in turn, admiring the vitrines of Yves Saint Laurent, Sonia Rykiel, and L’Artisan Parfumeur, we arrived at the Jardin du Luxembourg, where the magnolia, dogwood, and lilac trees were in full bloom. The sprawling lawns glowed green, their spring debut especially vivid. Impossibly cute kids rode donkeys, and serious old men tossed metal balls—pétanque, I explained to Mom and Bob—a sort of lawn bowling favored by old-timers.

  By then, it was getting late. We had logged several miles with nary a peep of achy knees or blistered feet from either Mom or Bob. Did they want to Métro back, I asked preemptively. Mais non! They wanted to see more. I was beginning to see that they were falling in love with Paris.

  So we dawdled at another picture-perfect café with trois crèmes, the closest thing to giant American coffees with milk, normally reserved for breakfast only, but we needed to reinforce ourselves for the return home, and I wasn’t going to let French protocol slow us down now, not on that glorious day. Fortified, we crossed back over the Seine, taking the pedestrian bridge, Le Pont des Arts, for its charm and views. There’s the Eiffel Tower again, I showed them. And that massive building there? That’s the Louvre! Mom and Bob spun themselves around, taking it all in with starry eyes. And look, right there, that’s the tip of Île de la Cité, where we were earlier today. And just look at that perfect singular weeping willow at the tip of the island. I joined their reveries. That lone tree always slayed me.

  In just seven hours, Mom and Bob had seen many of Paris’s classic landmarks. I knew it had been a great day. But still, it wasn’t until dinner that I knew how deeply they were affected.

  We were all pretty tired when we got back to the tree house and decided to make sandwiches for dinner rather than go to a restaurant. So Mom and I left Bob in care of Milo and wended our way back down those six flights of stairs to pick up goods for dinner.

  I loved shopping on rue Montorgueil so much that I often carted home more food—slices of spinach and goat cheese tourtes; jars of lavender honey and cherry jam, tiny, wild handpicked strawberries; fraises aux bois—than one person alone could possibly eat. Now at least I had an excuse to fill up my canvas shopping bag.

  “Doesn’t it smell amazing?” I gushed once we had crossed the threshold of my favorite boulangerie. Mom, standing inside the doorway clutching her purse, just nodded as she filled her lungs with the warm, yeasty air, her eyes alight with a brightness I didn’t remember from home. With a fresh-from-the-oven baguette in hand, we went to the Italian épicerie, where from the long display of red peppers glistening in olive oil, fresh raviolis dusted in flour, and piles and piles of salumi, soppressata, and saucisson, we chose some thinly sliced jambon blanc and a mound of creamy mozzarella. At the artisanal bakery, Eric Kayser, we took our time selecting three different cakes from the rows of lemon tarts, chocolate éclairs, and what I was beginning to recognize as the French classics: dazzling gâteaux with names like the Saint-Honoré, Paris-Brest, and Opéra. Voilà, just like that, we had dinner and dessert. We headed back to the tree house—those pesky six flights were still there—and prepared for our modest dinner chez-moi.

  Mom set the table with the chipped white dinner plates and pressed linen napkins. I set out the condiments—Maille Dijon mustard, tart and grainy with multicolored seeds; organi
c mayo from my local “bio” market; and Nicolas Alziari olive oil in a beautiful blue and yellow tin—and watched them get to it. They sliced open the baguette, the intersection of crisp and chewy, and dressed it with slivers of ham and dollops of mustard. I made a fresh mozzarella sandwich, drizzling it with olive oil and dusting it with salt and pepper. Moments later, we sat down and bit in.

  “Oh my God!” Bob exclaimed. There was a pause while we waited for him to finish chewing. “Why can’t Americans make bread like this? Those things they call ‘French baguettes’ at home?” He examined his sandwich in disbelief. “Those aren’t baguettes! They’re nothing like this!” He took another bite. My own sandwich was crusty and crunchy on the outside, pinchably soft on the inside. “My god, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like this. This is incredible.” Mom nodded in agreement, but in barely two minutes, she had stealthily put away half her sandwich. The more we ate, the slower Mom and Bob went, as if prolonging the taste of simple perfection.

  Then we moved onto our favorite course, dessert. As I sliced the small gâteaux we had selected at Eric Kayser into thirds, each of us did a little dance of excitement in our seats. The first two square tarts, pistachio-raspberry and pear-grapefruit, were both built upon thick, moist shortbread crusts, the only difference between them being the beautiful marzipan center of the pistachio-raspberry slice. The third cake was a dreamy dark chocolate creation that included layers of praline, mousse, and ganache. Mom took a bite of the pistachio-raspberry cake and put down her fork. It was almost as if she were disgusted, but it was just the opposite.

  “Now that,” she declared, “is delicious.” The tone of her voice exposed barely concealed contempt for all the previous desserts we had ever eaten together in America. All the chocolate cakes, apple pies, and raspberry streusels—at that moment, they were all poor imitations of what dessert was supposed to be like. I started giggling at Mom’s reaction, and Bob followed. Then, in all seriousness, we turned back to dessert. There was more stunned silence, more looks of disbelief. More food heaven. This, I was discovering, was one of my favorite things about Paris.

  For the next several days, Mom and Bob were total troopers. We hauled ourselves from Saint-Germain to the Marais, from the Bastille to Montmartre. We climbed the Eiffel Tower and walked the Champs-Élysées. From the monumental church, La Madeleine, in the eighth arrondissement, we walked east to the quiet charm of the Palais-Royal’s gardens. We sampled morning pastries at Stohrer, afternoon gâteaux at Ladurée, and anything that struck our fancy at the countless neighborhood boulangeries we passed. On the very last day of their visit, we were faced with what every traveler dreads: rain. There was only one thing to do, and that was go to the Louvre.

  What can I say about the Louvre? To date, I had logged about eight months of my life in Paris and made it to the world’s most visited art museum exactly once: on a drunken midnight run with my college friends when we illicitly frolicked in the fountains surrounding I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid. This visit with Mom and Bob was slightly more dignified.

  All three of us were prepared to be impressed, but even so, we underestimated the museum’s magnificence. Its size and scope were incomprehensible, with frescoed ceilings floating about one hundred feet over our heads and never-ending corridors and wings that extended forever before linking to more corridors and wings. And then there was the art: canvases the size of Alabama trailer homes and sculptures of every god and mortal throughout history. There were French Rococo and Italian Renaissance paintings, ancient Greek sculptures and Egyptian decorative art, Dutch Baroque and early Netherlandish, Islamic, Etruscan, Hellenic, Roman, Persian…There was the massive 1563 painting The Wedding at Cana, featuring a feast just a little bit larger and more ravishing than ours had been that week, and, of course, the Mona Lisa, which was swarmed by mobs of tourists aiming their digital cameras at her ambiguous smile.

  But for me, there was nothing more stunning than the Winged Victory of Samothrace. As we approached the goddess Nike, rising step by step up the Daru staircase, her beauty loomed over us. The outstretched wings, the flowing garments, the forward movement—it was both graceful and powerful; there was so much emotion chiseled in that stone-cold marble. I kept turning around and around her, looking at her from the left, and then the right, and then from straight on. My heart was beating in overdrive, and my arms were covered in goose bumps. I’m not normally so moved by art, but that sculpture reduced me to mush. Feeling overwhelmed to the brink of exhaustion, Mom, Bob, and I decided it was time to do what we did best: break for sweets.

  Being that we were in the first arrondissement, given that it was a crappy day, knowing Mom and Bob as I know them, there was only one place for us to go: Angelina. This century-old tea salon, or salon de thé, on rue Rivoli is a classic tourist trap. But it’s not without its charms. The Belle-Époque architect Édouard-Jean Niermans’s interior still evokes elegance of decades past, when the likes of Coco Chanel and Audrey Hepburn—not schleps like us, in our sneakers and rain gear—stopped in for tea. It was founded in 1903 by the Austrian confectioner Antoine Rumpelmayer and named after his daughter-in-law. The whole atmosphere feels opulent, with gilded crown moldings, petite pedestal tables topped in marble, and pastoral landscapes reflected in arched mirrors hanging around the room, all bathed in a warm yellow glow. And then, of course, there is the world-famous chocolat chaud.

  Can liquid be considered a proper dessert? Oui, in the rare instance that it’s something as exquisite as Angelina’s signature chocolat “l’Africain.” So obscenely thick and outrageously rich, it’s even better than when, as a kid, I’d sip Swiss Miss hot cocoa and savor those mini-marshmallows after sledding on an icy winter day.

  Angelina’s hot chocolate is so smooth and velvety, each sip sensually coats your tongue and teeth. It’s both refined and indulgent; it’s a simple recipe but a sophisticated experience. It arrives on a silver tray and is served perfectly warm—not scalding hot—with a side of whipped cream sculpted into a decorative puff. It’s the perfect way to warm up on a rainy spring day. A decadent way to get your day’s chocolate quota. It’s hot chocolate worth the price of airfare to Paris.

  “This reminds me of the cocoa from Jacques,” my mom said, daintily blowing into her fine white cup.

  Bob’s face, flushed with the rich drink, broke into a grin. “Ohhhh, butt-her!” he cried in a pitch that pained my ears and made a nearby table of Harajuku girls look over at us in alarm. As soon as I made eye contact with them, they turned away and started giggling among themselves. Half the patrons in the airy tearoom were Japanese. The rest were a mix of Americans and Germans, with just a few French grandes dames.

  “You can never have too much butt-heeeer!” He was doing his impression of Julia Child cooking with Jacques Pepin. The two masters had famously fun banter on their PBS series, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, and it never failed to make Mom and Bob roll with laughter when they recalled, and imitated, the pair’s strange and charming dynamics. They loved their cooking shows.

  “Yeah, but I’m talking about the other Jacques,” my mom said, rolling her eyes, despite her amusement.

  “I knnnoooooow,” Bob said, not giving up. A waitress, who still looked bedraggled in her formal black dress and white apron, briskly walked by and shot us a look of disapproval. But even I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. “But I like talking about…the…butt-heeeer!”

  While Bob continued amusing himself with his ridiculous Julia Child impersonations, Mom and I started reminiscing about “the other” Jacques: Jacques Torres.

  We had made the pilgrimage to Jacques Torres’s original boutique in the industrial Brooklyn neighborhood DUMBO years ago. Come to think of it, our adventures that week in Paris weren’t much different than the ones we had shared in New York. We’d basically build an itinerary around a couple sweet spots that were on our radar—either destinations Mom had heard about on the Food Network or new bakeries I wanted to check out for my “Sweet Freak
” column. Past explorations had brought us to Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side for square yeast doughnuts glazed with peanut butter and filled with blackberry jam. We’d gone to Crumbs for those five-hundred-calorie, candy-covered cupcakes. And on the Upper West Side, we’d visited Alice’s Tea Cup for the miraculously moist banana-butterscotch scones. But Mom and Bob were as big of chocoholics as I was, and the journey to Jacques Torres was memorable for more reason than one.

  DUMBO, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, wasn’t the typical neighborhood I took them to. Ordinarily, we stayed within the comfy confines of New York’s well-lit and scrubbed areas: Central Park, Soho, Grand Central. In Soho, the cobblestone streets are filled with moneyed European tourists. In DUMBO, they’re littered with discarded vodka bottles and dog poop. Uptown, the limestone townhouses glow, spick-andspan. Here, a beautiful yet abandoned brick warehouse was splattered with graffiti and vomit. The subway rattled overhead, trains going to and fro on the Manhattan Bridge, and there was nary a soul about. Mom and Bob played it cool, but I think we all breathed a little easier once we entered Jacques’s chocolate den.

  Jacques is French and, at the age of twenty-six, was actually the youngest chef to win the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France award, the highest honor possible in French pastry. He then came over to the United States, where he worked as a pastry chef at the Ritz in Rancho Mirage, California, and Atlanta, Georgia. Then he really made a name for himself as executive pastry chef of the highly acclaimed New York restaurant Le Cirque, which has also helped launch the careers of Daniel Boulud, David Bouley, Bill Telepan, and many others. Somewhere along the way, Jacques picked up the very American nickname Mr. Chocolate, and he finally realized his dream of opening his own chocolate business in 2000—the boutique where we found ourselves on that cold but sunny winter day.