Paris Highlights: Food

French food. Mmmmmmmm. This was the best experience I've had with food in Paris. We really got it right. It's worth it to research ahead and pick out places that sound really good.

Our first dinner we picked up from the traiteur /patisserie Stohrer. We picked up a spinach and fresh salmon quiche, a salmon gelée, gratin dauphinois (scalloped potatoes), a salad, and pastries. Stohrer was founded in 1730. It's the oldest pastry shop in Paris. The man who founded Stohrer (Stohrer himself) was the pastry chef at Versailles.

It was very good. That quiche was one of the best of the trip for me. And the éclair and mille feuille may have been my favorites (well, I did have some other excellent éclairs).

mille feuille, réligieuse, éclair au chocolat

For lunch the next day, we paid a visit to Rue Rambuteau, one of our favorite streets in Paris. We went to Pain de Sucre, which has a pastry shop and a savory shop.

Patries from Pain de Sucre

The highlight for me is the chocolate tart in the foreground. Chocolate tarts are usually just ganache in a crust. But of course a good French tart crust is like a cookie-like. And this tart also had a praline layer at the bottom with caramelized bits of hazelnut. Delicious.

Mille feuille from Pain de sucre

That day we also stopped by a chocolaterie that I stumbled upon 10 years ago while studying abroad: Jadis et Gourmande. This place isn't high end, but it's still good. They have chocolate covered nuts, and my favorite: the Eurostar, which is crepes dentelles (a kind of thin, crunch, buttery, caramely cookie) crushed up and covered in chocolate. Mm mm.

That night we ate at a restaurant known both as Chez Denise and La Tour Montlhéry. They serve very traditional, rustic food. It felt very authentic. There were no paper menus, only a chalkboard filled with typical curly French cursive. My dad had a curry. My mom had choux farcis (ground seasoned meat mixture wrapped in cabbage), which was familiar to us only after watching Haute Cuisine, Leigh and I got haricots de mouton (white beans with mutton). It was quite good, but I think must have mistaken us for giants because the portions were ENORMOUS.

Just look at the amount of rice they gave my dad!

The next day we got sandwiches and salads at our local boulangerie, Julien (which won a spot on the list of best baguettes in Paris a few years back).

sandwich tradition jambom comté from Boulangerie Julien

The next day, after visiting Marche du Président Wilson, which was filled with delectable looking food itself, we went to Christian Constant's Les Cocottes. Christian Constant is a celebrity chef in Paris. In fact we'd just seen him the night before on a French game show. It was definitely a surprise when we saw the man we had seen on TV the night before walk in and have a long chat with the couple at the next table--and then go to the kitchen and grab a couple of handfuls of fries from the bin.

Unfortunately I have no photos of this truly delicious meal. So I'll link to other people's photos of what I ate. I started with a seafood bisque, accompanied by the most golden buttery croutons. Then I had one of his cocottes (a cocotte is a casserole), braised beef in a wine sauce with pan-fried potatoes. I'm pretty sure every single thing on that menu would have been divine. That was the most I ate on the trip, too. I overdid it, but it was worth it.

We decided to do the traiteur thing again that night, but this time we went to Dalloyau (dal-why-yo, we asked). In 1682, Louis XIV took notice of Charles Dalloyau and his breads. The Dalloyau family served the court until the revolution, after which they founded the first "maison de gastronomie" in 1802. We got roasted potatoes and haricots verts and quiches and salad. For dessert, we got a couple of the strangest looking fondants I've ever seen (still delicious), a flan for my dad, and something called a carré magique (magic square). I don't know I've ever heard a name both so silly-sounding and so appropriate.

You can see in this photo all the layers of the carré magique--chocolate shortbread with nuts, dark chocolate mousse, then a different chocolate cookie, chocolate ganache-like cream, and, of course the chocolate glaze on top. My word. Best dessert of the trip.

One of the things I wanted to do this trip was try lots of stuff. There are some classic pastries I never try because I'd always rather have something chocolate. So we would get our pastries, take them home, cut them up (often destroying them), and share them. That is how I finally tasted a Paris-Brest and a St Honoré.

From left to right: Paris-Brest, chocolate eclair, St Honoré

We got these from Pâtisserie des Rêves. You can see the little plastic pins they used to keep the pastries in place, as well as the little wooden spoons. They also gave us cloth napkins. The Paris-Brest is choux pastry with a sort of crust on top, and hazelnut cream in the middle. The St Honore is a puff pastry base, with caramel-topped, pastry cream-filled choux, and then whipped cream. I quite liked the St Honore--the two kinds of cream and two kinds of pastry. Their eclair was in a shimmery chocolate cylinder. Surprisingly, I didn't love that cylinder. But the pastry cream inside was good--not very sweet at all; the sweetness came from the exterior. Oh, and we also got a couple of their giant madeleines--one chocolate, one plain. Yummy.

That night we ate at Alain Ducasse's Aux Lyonnais. Not a single native French person was there (on the ground floor, anyway). This was a fun sort of upscale French experience. Just look at it:

 

The service was superb--professional waiters. I had a special kind of French beef raised in the alps. Honestly, it tasted like the alps. Very good.

The next day we headed over to Place de la Madeleine to eat at Ladurée for lunch. Ladurée is yet another place with history. Founded in 1862, and we ate at the original location. They're most famous for their Macarons these days.

I remember coming here in January or February to have hot chocolate when I studied abroad. I remember the contrast between Ladurée and Angelina. Ladurée was filled with upper class French women (the kind of women who wear real fur), whereas Angelina was nothing but tourists. The hot chocolate was similar to Angelina's. 

This time we were surrounded by tourists. At the table next to us, two Asian girls sat and looked at their phones the entire time, not saying one word to each other. 

Anyway, I ordered a croque monsieur--my first ever. Needless to say, I was surprised by the appearance (you see those little pinwheels?). But it was oh-so delicious. 

For dessert my dad and I each got a delicious chocolate pastry which we split. My mom got some passion fruit tart with raspberries that she said was incredible, but whatever...

Laduree's chocolate tart and chocolate eclair.

For dinner we stopped in Fauchon, where we grabbed sandwiches, pea and asparagus risotto, some more gratin dauphinois, and salad for dinner later.

Food from Fauchon

For Leigh's last dinner we ate at Café Beaubourg. It's a cafe on Place Beaubourg, overlooking the Pompidou. I've eaten here every trip to Paris in the past 10 years. It has reliable, good food (especially the steak with pepper sauce, mmmmmm). It didn't hurt that our waiter was the shorter French version of Gary Preston (Miranda).

French Gary / Gary

On Monday, we went to Galeries Lafayette and their epicerie (market). There, I was able to pick up famed Bordier butter. We got beurre de baratte demi sel. It was a golden yellow, and soft even when refrigerated. It was a little salty and very creamy--easily the best butter I've ever tasted. There are also flavored butters. It's not sold in the US at all. :-(

Later that day I finally made the trip to Poilâne. I can't believe in all these years I've never been. I picked up a quarter loaf. It was toward the end of the day and their basket of "punitions" was empty, so I have yet to taste those. It was very flavorful, a little dense, and it lasted really well.

While we were in the neighborhood, we stopped by Pierre Hermé for dessert pastries.

On another day, we happened upon Eclair de Genie, one of the relatively new eclair specialty shops.

Chocolate for me, pistachio orange for my dad

One morning I decided to run to Du Pain et des Idées, a not-fancy boulangerie that's been getting a lot of attention for their unique bread, called pain des amis (bread of friends/friends' bread). This place looked so good in the Yelp photos, I thought it was worth a special trip to this kind of out of the way location by the Canal St Martin. 

Yes, that's a line out the door.

I finally remembered to take a picture of how the French wrap their viennoisserie, but I then forgot to take a picture of them unwrapped.

Everything we had here was tender, flavorful, and distinctive. The highlight was definitely the bread--oh. my. word. Moist on the inside, crusty but not hard on the outside. This may be my favorite bread I've had in Paris. I tried to go back the day before our departure and it was closed!

The second week we ate ate home a lot more. We would get soup and ready-made food at the grocery store and warm it up. We visited a local Italian traiteur, Delitaly, and got gnocchi and ravioli (delicious, and the people who helped us were so nice).

Our last dinner out was at Le 404, a Moroccan restaurant. The interior resembled a ride at Disneyland--I could have been waiting to get on Indiana Jones. This isn't a criticism; it was fun. But the important thing was that the food was top notch. The meat was high quality and the stew was filled with vegetables.

At home we continued to enjoy delicious food from Paris. We got chocolate from three of the top chocolateries in Paris: Pierre Hermé, Patrick Roger & Franck Kestener. Each one is like visiting a jewelry shop for chocolates. It may seem intimidating, but the staff are very professional and helpful. My dad's favorite, bar none, was Pierre Hermé. I wouldn't be able to pick between Patrick Roger and Pierre Hermé. In particular, Patrick Roger's truffles (which we got only to make the minimum to pay with a credit card) were absolutely divine. They had the kind of flavor that made me want to wax pretentious about complexity and notes of this or that.

The things I will miss having access to the most are chocolates and bread. But I've researched (read: tasted) pretty thoroughly the chocolate and bread options in LA, and I can tell you that while there is excellent bread to be found in LA, the chocolate really doesn't come close.