Choc and Awe at the Salon du Chocolat

For a round up of events, including the tittilating deconstruction of a chocolate dress on a runway model...

check out The Rambling Epicure. Jonell Galloway gives all the delicious details and provides plenty of photos, too.

Walk with us on the Ile Saint Louis and Ile de la Cite'

Exciting new addition to our ParisParisTours website: the first of a series of videos showing our favorite spots and favorite walks in Paris.

Falling for Paris in the Fall: Part Two, Food

Chocolate has become synonymous with autumn in Paris because of the Salon du Chocolat. That’s recent.

Think nuts. Horse-chestnuts are the centuries-old symbol of springtime in Paris but, better still, roasting real chestnuts, the delicious, edible variety, usher in the fall and have done so since the days of Caesar. Wherever the Romans marched and conquered they carried with them garlic, olive trees and chestnuts trees, not to mention emmer and all the other heirloom grains that went into the ancestor of today’s polenta.

But we’re straying from Paris and chestnuts.

Edible chestnuts do not grow in the City of Light, though some people seem to think they do, and are unpleasantly surprised when they try to eat the marrons dropping from the horse chestnut trees in the Luxembourg Gardens.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t find real chestnuts everywhere making your mouth water as you prowl the streets with hunger in your heart. That inimitable scent of burning wood and charcoal, and the toasted shells of chestnuts, wafts up from stands on a hundred street corners.





Fall is still the best season for food and wine in Paris: pâtés, terrines, sausages and hams, foie gras, duck confit and other deliciously fattening delights.



The weekly or twice-weekly street and farmer’s markets found in every arrondissement artfully display a kaleidoscope of harvest colors. From the humble Place d’Aligre and Boulevard Richard Lenoir markets, via the bobo hipster stalls of the Infants Rouge market in the Marais, to the hoity-toity 7th and 16th arrondissements Paris becomes not just a moveable feast but a painterly one to boot.



Until the end of October you can buy regal produce at the Chateau de Versailles’s Potager du Roi—the “King’s Kitchen Garden.” Yes, it still exists, the forces of nature having outlived the Divine Right kinds. Louis XIV heirloom produce—including about 150 varieties of pear and 200 of apple—are offered for a price to the gathered masses.






Cheese? The unmistakable, earthy perfume of Paris’ cheese-mongers’ grottoes dances with the scent of chestnuts, the smell of roasting chickens and meat, to make a shopping trawl on Rue Cler, Rue Mouffetard or Rue Saint-Antoine a dizzying delight. This morning I was at Androuet on Rue Mouffetard poking the Brillat-Savarin and jawing with Patrick the maître fromager—the famous shop’s cheese meister—about wine and cheese pairings. (On our "Paris in April" tour we do a spectacular wine-cheese tasting each April and we’re going to feature it in a Paris in the Fall tour soon).

Though Brillat-Savarin is wildly good my favorite is still the oozing, luscious, unctuous, eat-with-a-spoon Vacherin (alias Mont d’Or, when made in France).







The obesity pandemic continues to rage here as elsewhere, especially among the young, yet most adult Parisians—the ones who scarf the cheese and chocolate and foie gras and drink the wine—remain as slim as ever. Why’s that? Teenagers alternately swill soda pop and sweet alcoholic beverages, they eat junk food and snack just like their American counterparts. McDonald’s second-largest market is France: it has over 1,000 franchises here.

The only thing that saves French youngsters from untenable fatness is the fact that they smoke like fiends: 40 percent of adolescents are nicotine additions (the percentage is even higher for teenage girls).

Meanwhile, toothpick-thin Parisian adults benefit from the abundant fresh food; they at least try to enjoy themselves when eating. They also do a lot of walking, philandering, talking and arguing in that typical, feisty Parisian way. And they too smoke like chimneys.

To end on a positive note… Carla Bruni Sarkozy, as of yesterday the mother of a (politically premature but otherwise healthy) suckling girl, has been widely reported as saying she’s eager to get out of the hospital and back to normal life. She misses her smokes and wine, which is a polite way to say cigs and booze. What a fine role model for France’s youth! Bravo!

At least Carla is slim and glamorous (some commentators even find her pretty). The really great news is that her husband, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, does not drink or smoke and he’s slim and fit and feisty as they come. Nicolas also eats industrial quantities of chocolate. So there’s hope that, even if the French one day smoke less or grow up and quit entirely, as a national block, they still won’t get fat, and they may even enjoy their food and wine even more. Qui sait?

Come back soon and read part three... and in the meantime, you'll always have Paris, Paris...





Take a tour of Paris, Paris with us

Book a hotel in Paris

David Downie

Choc Around the Clock in Paris at the Salon du Chocolat

Choc Around the Clock in Paris





The annual chocolate feast, fete and orgy known here in Paris as the Salon du Chocolat takes over the city this year from October 20 to 24. If you’re not in Paris already, get here fast. There might not be any chocolate left if you arrive on the last day.

It has been remarked (by yours truly) that if you toss out a euro these days it will probably land on a Paris chocolate shop or pâtisserie with a celebrated chef bent on titillating his customers’ taste buds while dazzling their eyes and lightening their wallets.

No other city, not even Brussels, has as much fine chocolate as Paris. Paris is the chocolate capital of the world.



While the Swiss and Belgians weren't looking, Paris stole their milk cows and became the swaggering global capital of chic chocolate.

All challengers to this claim please take one of our chocolate tours and then decide whether to proceed with the duel.

Take note, Hershey, honest French chocolatiers (and other honest chocolate makers the world round) just don’t use trans-fats and soy lechethin and whatever else it is that industrial chocolate makers everywhere now use to save money, increase margins, and render their chocolate so mediocre, so cheap and so utterly undesirable.

Health concerns apart the expensive, handcrafted excellent chocolates of Paris are actually good for you, when eaten in moderation. That’s the rub…

Ready, set… I’m expecting lots of nasty comments from the usual thugs and brutes who pretend to be non-professional slam-artists of the Internet, and who blast anyone who tries to decry the lousiness of industrial chocolate. Go for it, guys. You certainly gave me a run for my money last time I wrote about chocolate!

Now for the good stuff on Paris beyond the Salon du Chocolat…

“The fine arts number five,” wrote Marie-Antoine Carême in the late 18th century, “painting, sculpture, poetry, music and architecture, the principal branch of which is pastry.”

Were he alive today, Carême would’ve melded “chocolate” into the art of pastry. The two cannot be dissociated.

Ephemeral, edible pastry-and-chocolate architecture has been part of the French repertoire for centuries. Like many edible arts the foundations of early French pastry-making are Italian: the word “pastry” (pâtisserie) comes from the Latin “pasta”. The ancient Romans filled giant pastry shells with live birds and much else, anything for a lark in the days of imperial decadence. No, they didn’t have chocolate. If they’d had it, the history of the world would be utterly different. Nero might’ve been a nice guy, for one thing. He would’ve gobbled a chocolate bar instead of burning Rome. And he would’ve smiled.

Everyone knows Theobroma cacao – in particular the unadulterated dark variety with at least 60 percent cocoa – is great for the health, libido, mind, morale and much else. It makes people happy, fills them with energy, lifts them out of depression, and cures everything from rabies and rashes to the common cold, without weight gain. There’s plenty of impressive if unproven scientific “evidence” of the above, and more.

The most extravagant expressions of the pastry art may go back to the pyramidal pyramous pastries described by Callimachus over 2,000 years ago. Ladurée continues the tradition today with pyramids of macaroons…

Admittedly in Paris I haven’t seen many chef-pâtissiers or chocolatiers building fifteen-foot chocolate-pastry sculptures or pyramids, not even for the Salon du Chocolat, though several of the city’s top practitioners do consider themselves artistes. They sculpt and mold and mount and pour chocolate the way Rodin worked with wax, plaster and bronze.

Dotted and daubed across the city are stunning delicacies of pastry and chocolate beckoning from the windows of celebrity maestros or maisons the likes of Jean-Paul Hevin, Pierre Hermé, Christian Constant, Patrick Roger, Michel Chaudun, Guy Mulot, Peltier, Kaiser, Lenôtre, Fauchon, Hédiard, Sucré Cacao, Laurent Duchêne, Lahrer, Pierre Marcolini (a Belgian infiltrator) and a dozen others.

Visual and gustatory artistry meet marketing and promotional mastery in the person of Pierre Hermé. His talent in this is hard to beat. Under the spotlights of his chic boutique on Rue Bonaparte you quickly learn the meaning of dazzle.

Hermé was dubbed the “Picasso of Pastry,” but luckily he hasn’t concentrated on Cubist pralines and pâtisseries—not yet anyway. Whether you see him at the Salon or not, his shop is a must, Cacao Mecca in Paris.

Among the artistes several stand out: Patrick Roger and Michel Chaudun ought to display their wares at Paris’ Museum of Contemporary Art.

Or maybe they should be in the Fashion Museum? As I’ve noted elsewhere, the nexus of food and fashion may well be driving Paris’ booming chocolate craze. Haute couture and chocolate meet and make love – metaphorically – on fashion runways, where artiste-chocolatiers daub super-models with gooey chocolate. Boutiques now sell chocolate lingerie.

Who knows what surprises this year’s Salon du Chocolat hold for acolytes? Delicious suspense...




Take a chocolate tour of Paris, Paris with us

Book a hotel in Paris

Falling for Paris in the Fall: Part One

Yes, I love springtime in Paris. But I might just prefer fall. The colors of autumn leaves, the sudden crispness in the air, the food, the promise of uninterrupted sleep—something impossible these days in summertime Paris. All these things and many more make me a huge fan of l’automne à Paris.


Those who gripe that the “thrill” of autumn rhymes with “chill” don’t realize that it’s the chill that adds atmosphere to the city, and cloaks it in seductive silence. Climate change or global warming or whatever it is generally provides SoCal weather in Paris now from mid-April to mid-October. Enough already with the heat, the parched soil, the crowds, dust and round-midnight diners chortling under our windows!

As everyone knows fall isn’t merely l’automne in Paris anyway, it’s mainly la rentrée. That’s the re-entry, as I’ve pointed out in many an article and even a book or three.










This year’s “political re-entry” has been heat-wave hot, with the Socialists gunning for the presidential elections of May 2012, and holding their own ground-breaking primaries. The incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and his men are gnashing their teeth in frustration and anger. The left has stolen the show.

This means the pols have had no time to notice the change in season, and the sunset beauty of the city in autumn.

The horse chestnut trees everywhere in town are nearly barren by now, and their plump, inedible fruit, marrons d’Inde (horse chestnuts) are all over the ground. They’re under the feet of the second-hand booksellers along Seine-side sidewalks, in the Bois de Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne, and, most evocatively, they fill the Luxembourg Gardens and the most gorgeous cemetery in the world, Pere-Lachaise.







Some chestnut-lovers clearly think of Proust in this season, and make offerings of marrons on his tomb at Pere-Lachaise (that’s what this strange still-life is all about).

As I walk the October streets of Paris, Paris – my double-headed, double-edged city of light and city of night – I can’t help being seduced all over again, every day, as I was when I first moved here over a quarter of a century ago. Yes, I moved into my maid’s room in April of 1986, but I came up and rented it in October, 1985, and spent a magical time in this place that would soon be my home.

From the aesthetic standpoint, each year Paris becomes not only more desirable but more intelligible in fall. When the lindens and sycamores and those horse chestnuts denude themselves the perspectives, the layout of the city, seem to change. Paris has been photo-shopped into something wonderfully stripped down. The light changes. Color is more saturated. Brick leaps into life. And a wealth of architectural details pops out. Look up at the keystones, garlands, composite and Corinthian capitals, the masks and gargoyles, or the ironwork on a million balconies.



Ah, you exclaim, the maddening symmetry finally makes sense, a universe of stone dreamed up 150 years ago by Baron Haussmann at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III!

The newfound chill in the air doesn’t discourage the intrepid. It revitalizes some of us. Out into the world we go, come rain or whatever—you provide the shine.

Even the most insensitive visitor can’t help being impressed by the sheer number of café and restaurant terraces that sprout on every flat surface in town, spilling chairs temptingly into the path of pedestrians year round. Yes, the terraces do stay open even in inclement weather.

Looming on the near horizon is Halloween—no longer just a silly thing Americans celebrate. And that perennial favorite of guzzlers: the bibulous annual swilling of Beaujolais Nouveau. As everyone knows the Parisians are unlikely to uncork Château Margaux and Romanée Conti in July and August, so fall is awaited with taste-buds on high alert: time for real food, and real wine.

Come back soon and read part two… in the meantime, you'll always have Paris, Paris...




Take a tour of Paris, Paris with us

Book a hotel in Paris

All photos copyright David Downie 2011

Paris, Paris and the Nostalgia Business

Yesterday was a perfect “Paris, Paris” day. We spent a cozy Tuesday afternoon with Adrian Leeds’ informal group of chummy Paris-lovers at the friendly corner café-restaurant La Pierre du Marais, talking about many things but especially Paris and what I call “the nostalgia business.”

How many of you miss Paris when you’re not here? What do you miss about it? How many of you miss the Pompidou Center, or the Cité de la Musique or the Montparnasse Tower? The hyper-contemporary fashion shows, the public art created yesterday?

When I asked a similarly phrased, playfully provocative question no hands went up. Because what people miss when they’re not in Paris is the “atmosphere”, the “mystique”, the “culture”, the “art and architecture”, the “beauty” of the city and its “ancient history” (this last one may be over-reaching, because there isn’t a whole lot of ancient anything left in Paris)...

People miss the many things that make Paris, Paris – those quintessential elements of the cityscape, its history, culture and yes, even its people, they pine for Paris, they dream of the food, the wine, the chocolate, the romantic walks in parks like the Luxembourg or along the banks of the Seine. Paris induces instant nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a big business: Paris thrives on many things – France is one of the richest, most dynamic countries in the world and that’s not news to anyone. One of those things is the past, the cultural heritage, the townhouses, monuments, churches and more that date back centuries. Most people I know enjoy baguettes especially those made à l’ancienne—in the old-fashioned way, whatever that means (since baguettes are from the 1920s).




People love turn-of-the-century restaurants with brass railings and plasterwork putti. Some people go wild for the merry-go-rounds, the accordions, the street furniture from the 1800s—or they prefer the wilder days of the 1920s, the philosophical days of the 1950s… and then what? Pompidou? Do you pine for Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand, Chirac, or Sarkozy and their recent-to-contemporary world?

My informal talk and reading from Paris, Paris covered much of the above, and more. Because, as I ask in my essay “The Janus City, or, Why the Year 1900 Lives On”:
Why were locals and visitors obsessed with 1900 and the Belle Époque? The answer was easy: because many Parisians are still living in the period.

Now I want you to know that I don’t listen to Radio Nostalgie (yes, it exists and is extremely popular).



I don’t go wild for old-fashioned baguettes, and most of the things that stimulate the nostalgia gene in other people leave me quizzical. I’m just not a nostalgic person. But here’s something for me to be nostalgic for: a time when I had a full head of hair and good vision!

Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris... reprinted again!

The little book that could: just heard that Paris, Paris has been reprinted again... Perfect timing: some of my favorite places in Paris are best explored in the fall. Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, for instance, or the Luxembourg Garden. Gorgeous now, with leaves turning, spinning, inviting wanderers to wonder about the passing of time and the important things in life.

Fall is a great time to be here for other reasons: the food! When is chocolate better than in the fall? (The answer: it's wonderful all year and best in fall and winter, if you ask me).