Named for a famed bicycle race between Paris and Brest, the ring of pâte à choix is meant to resemble a bike wheel and its interior gets filled with rich hazelnut-praline cream. I dug into one of these a few months back and had to stop eating for just a moment to let it sink in how good it was. I’m going to go out on a limb here – albeit a pretty solid one – and say it’s the best dessert in Paris, and just looking at the picture makes me want to stop writing at this moment and race on over there by bicycle myself.
Not quite as rich, I am also crazy for Poilâne’s apple tartlets and I insist that people who have never tried one do so, no matter how unassuming they might look. You can’t take it home because the minute it hits the paper bag it gets folded up in, the flaky crust starts leaving its buttery mark and will get over anything it touches. So just go outside and eat it right away. (You won’t get scolded for eating on the street in Paris, because everyone understands.) It looks deceptively simple and is pretty compelling evidence of how just a few ingredients – puff pastry, slices of apples, and dark cane sugar – can create a spectacular pastry without all the fuss.
Nearly all the women who work in the shop have been there since I’ve been coming to Paris, and when I went to their newest location in the Marais, I recognized a saleswomen who’d been at Poilâne for twenty-six years, from their Left Bank shop where I used to bring them brownies, for some reason. (Which might seem odd considering that they were surrounded by some of the best baked goods on earth. But on the other hand, they remember me well.)
Adjacent to the dépôt de pain (bread counter) is the Marais branch of Cuisine de Bar. And just like their Left Bank address, a lone woman is stationed behind the counter and forms a one-woman assembly line, a vision of efficient organization, feeding an entire restaurant of people without breaking a sweat.
When people criticize French service (which can be hit or miss), seeing how one person can feed an entire restaurant, or when two servers take care of a packed dining room, I laugh when I think about the layers of servers elsewhere in the world – busboys, hosts, waiters, and runners, all scrambling around, jumping over each other, to get the food to the tables. Patricia, who was making the sandwiches when I went to Cuisine de Bar, calmly smeared bread with mayonnaise, then draped it with moist chicken breast slices, a few salt capers and curls of anchovies, then cut it into bites, slid it onto the plate, and off it went. Basta.
