Category: paris restaurants
Clarence Gets Down and Dirty with the Kimchi: Hang-A-Li
Let’s talk about Korean food in Paris, shall we?
Many moons ago I recommended one Han Lim as a possible venue for getting some “spare but functional” Korean food in Paris. It was kind of a throwaway entry – stock photo of some kimchi, a few offhand remarks about how sick of French food I was, and some rather lukewarm praise of the place. Would you believe that this is one of my highest ranked entries? I literally can’t tell you how many people arrive at this site from googling “Korean food in Paris” or “kimchi.” If Han Lim has seen any kind of spike in their Anglophone business in the past six months, it’s entirely my doing. I can be thanked in soju.
Worse yet, I believe the picture of kimchi that accompanies that totally lackluster few paragraphs is now one of the top Google images that comes back from searching “kimchi.” I stole it from some poor (now-anonymous) bloke’s Flickr or something and never even thought of giving credit where credit is due. I’m a jerk, you unnamed-yet-brilliant photographer of spicy fermented cabbage! Contact me and I’ll send you a special Keeping the Bear Garden in the Background thank you gift!
As an aside, I keep telling readers to contact me for their special Keeping the Bear Garden in the Background prizes and they never do. And it’s a shame, because all of these amazing champagne stoppers and lenticular postcards are just gathering dust, when they could be keeping your leftover Prosecco bubbly and your children amused.
All of this is to say that I’ve since found much better Korean food in Paris since I started frequenting the Asian district of the first arrondissement. I’m still nuts for Higuma, but have started branching out to other restaurants off of rue Sainte Anne since their kimchi ramen left me a little bit cold (I’m still a rabid loyalist to their yakatori, however). Anyway, a recent stroll led B and I to discover the nearby Hang-A-Li (7 rue Louvois, 75002 Paris, Métro Quatre-Septembre), a warm and friendly Korean restaurant that is doing some serious and scrumptious cooking.
First of all, their banchan is much closer to what I’m used to from eating Korean food in Southern California. While it’s varied from night to night, you can expect to see baechu kimchi, dongchimi (cabbage in a white brine), oijangajji muchim (pickled cucumbers), sigeumchi namul (blanched spinach dressed with soysauce, sesame oil, and garlic), kongnamul (bean sprouts with sesame oil), and musaengchae (julienned white radishes in a sweet vinegar sauce). A rather thick, but lovely pajeon (savory pancakes with spring onions) can be ordered as an entrée.
Our first visit, we launched headfirst in the barbeque and weren’t disappointed. We shared the bulgogi, which was everything that you want it to be and satisfyingly so, and a spicy, peanutty pork dish that uses samgyeopsal (unsalted strips of pork belly). I’d never eaten anything like it in the States, and oh man, was it delicious. It was all of my favorite things in one dish: salty, spicy, nutty, and fatty. For about 14€ a dish, with soup, banchan, and a lovely little dish of lychee-heavy fruit salad included in this price, Hang-A-Li is a good bargain, especially compared to Han Lim (which is much more expensive and not nearly as tasty).
Last night we returned to Hang-A-Li with M. It was a chilly night and we were all still dressed for late summer. By the time we were arrived, nothing sounded better than a cold Hite beer and a kimchi jjigae (kimchi-based hot pot with pork and tofu). This is one of my comfort foods par excellence, and Hang-A-Li’s version lived up to my high expectations. M, who also ordered one, kept quietly murmuring “I love this soup. I love this soup.” She has much less bombastic, and far better taste than I do, so I’ll leave you with that as the best review imaginable. B ordered his spicy pork samgyeopsal and spent the rest of the evening with what I’ll call the “blissed-out pork belly face.” We’ll definitely we spending a lot of time at Hang-A-Li as the weather gets colder, and so should you.
Details: Disregard everything I’ve said about Korean food in Paris until now and scoot over to Hang-A-Li for dinner.
Hungerdome: Will “la vraie gastronomie mexicaine à Paris” please stand up? (part one)
I bet you thought I forgot all about you.
I won’t bore you with a tedious account of what I’ve been up to, other than to say, man, writing a dissertation is really hard. Once I’ve stared at the blinking Word cursor for hours doing that, it’s really tough to get motivated to write a blog entry that isn’t just like “whine, whine, whine, woe is me, I’m the pitiful scholar.”And is there anything more grating than listening to a graduate student bitch about their “work”? It’s annoying whenever anyone complains about their deadlines and their stress level, but there is something uniquely agitating about it when that person is a graduate student. I slept until eleven today, people. I don’t get to complain about my life, like, ever. So I won’t, and anyway, I’m sorry to be such a deserter.
ON TO BRIGHTER THINGS:
We’ve been eagerly awaiting the French release of Carlos Cuarón’s Rudo y Cursi, starring the überdreamy Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. A quick gander at IMDb suggests that everyone in the entire world who has wanted to see this movie has probably already seen it, as the French release date was the very last one in the list of international premieres. That said, if you haven’t seen it, you really should. It’s fantastic. We’ve been giddily anticipating it, being big fans of everything Gael García Bernal does, from his acting right down to his face sweat. Seriously, I love that man like a sickness. Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control left me with months of sweaty Mexican cowboy dreams. Recently, I rather uneasily discovered that B’s enthusiasm for Gael rivals my own, and couldn’t help but wonder who both of us imagined we were making out with after the movie last night.
At any rate, we decided that Rudo y Cursi demanded a fully Mexican-themed evening, so we made reservations at Hacienda del Sol (157 bd du Monparnasse, 75006 Paris, Métro Vavin), one of two Mexican restaurants in Paris that receives a fair amount of gastronomical acclaim. I had first read about it on the New York Times’ In Transit blog, where it was lauded by someone who was supposedly originally from California (had it been a New Yorker, I would have ignored it entirely). It’s kind of a trek from our place in the Marais down to Montparnasse, but this is the way that Gael would want it, we reasoned.
I’ll cut immediately to the chase: the food is pretty good! If you are a European, you’ll probably totally dig it. If you are an American in Paris, or god forbid, a Mexican, I’d give yourself about a year in Paris until you start checking out restaurants that advertise themselves as “la vraie gastronomie mexicaine.” By then, you’ll be so psyched to see Bohemia and Negro Modelo on the menu that you won’t even blink at the fact that they cost as much as a few six packs in the States.
I guess that part of my problem stems from the fact that Mexican food seems like it shouldn’t ever be fussy, and Paris isn’t particularly good at doing anything that isn’t fussy. There are a few (wildly popular) exceptions to this rule, including the abysmal Ave Maria (1 rue Jacquard, 75011 Paris, Métro: who cares, the food is terrible), where huge sloppy platters of the equivalent epicurian value as “world music” are eagerly gobbled up by the “sophisticated” palates of the French hipster public. Hacienda del Sol is marketing itself as a refined take on Sonoran food, and I suppose that is how you’d have to market yourself if you wanted to make a living in this town. But for an American accustomed to big bottomless baskets of hot chips and sloppy bowls of spicy salsa, the tiny dish of cold chips and the miniature spoon that accompanied our little puddle of hot sauce felt, well, heartless. As did our kindly server’s warning that our salsa was “dangerously spicy,” which I suppose it is, if you’re French.
For our entrées, we shared a serving of (rather bland) guacamole and some beef chimichangas. The presentation cracked me up, because, really, chimichangas? This is a food item that I associate most clearly with the microwave at a gas station. They were pretty good, I guess.
I’m terribly homesick.
For our main course, I got the pollo en salsa de mole poblano and B got the tamale plate. My chicken in mole was quite good, even if the mole wasn’t quite as spicy as I’m used to it being. The flavor was nuanced with that medley of sweet and smoky that I love, and the corn tortillas were fresh and homemade. Yes, those are bananas, not plantains. Sigh.
Even better were B’s tamales, one filled with tomatoes, cheese, and roasted chiles in a banana leaf, and one filled with red chile cooked beef in a corn husk. I was immediately overcome with jealousy when they served our plates, and wished that we had both ordered tamales and been done with it. They were tender, flavorful, and moist, and I wished that the two bites B generously doled out could have been bigger. In an ideal world, I could have smothered them in Chimayo red chile sauce and made a glorious feast, but we’re in Paris, and they got the job done admirably.
For dessert, we shared a dish of ice cream, which our server proudly noted is made in-house. We selected scoops of tamarind, hibiscus, and lime, and the combination was perfectly sour and refreshing.
The only thing that soured the meal a bit for me was the check. Look, I get it. Many of these ingredients have to be imported from across an ocean. The 29€ menu of entrée + plat + dessert is indeed the magic number in this town. But 76€ for a meal that involves chimichangas and Mexican beer? That’s $96.32 as of today’s conversion rate. When I pointed out to B that were spending about a hundred bucks on this dinner, he turned slightly pale. Sometimes it’s best if you can dwell in the stupidity of the unconverted tab.
Anyway, why am I calling this a Hungerdome? Well, because now we are on a quest, and date night next week will be at Anahuacalli, the other Mexican restaurant that everybody can’t say enough good things about. We even had a Real Live Californian say that their enchiladas verdes were the best he’d ever had, immediately rousing my suspicions about him as a human being. But at any rate, it’s on, and while two Parisian Mexican restaurants may enter this battle, only one leaves.
Finally, I’d like to give a Cinéclub shout-out to Le Nouveau Latina (20 Rue du Temple, 75004 Paris, Métro Hôtel de Ville) where we saw Rudo y Cursi last night. I’ve kind of abandoned the Cinéclub theatre review section of this blog, probably because there are only so many things you can really saw about a movie theatre (There are seats! And a screen! Sometimes they play movies you might want to see!). But in addition to the fact that it is literally next door to my apartment building, Le Nouveau Latina is really one of the more charming Cinéma d’Art et d’Essai in Paris. Specializing in Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American, and Italian films (though they also show a healthy dose of other classic and contemporary independent films from France and the US), Le Nouveau Latina reliably has a lot of great stuff showing on any day of the week on their two well-maintained screens. It’s also a darling place to hang out, with a large café and a well-edited selection of books and DVDs for sale. I’ve even heard that they sometimes give salsa lessons upstairs. I have a personal soft spot for this theatre, as it was the site of both my first date with M (we saw Antichrist together!), as well as a midnight screening of Alien that was one of my first “ah-ha” moments about B. He held my hand during the scary parts and seemed only mildly amused by my histrionics. As I’m widely acknowledged as the most annoying person in the world to see movies with, B’s seeming cool made me suspect that he might be a good person to keep going to movies with for a long time.
Dearest reader, I’ve missed you. I hope your autumn is shaping up splendidly.
I don’t do drugs, I am drugs: Montmartre and l’Espace Dalí
My only obligation as of late—and this is a testament to how low-key my life has been recently—is to make sure that my dear M’s plants don’t die while she is gallivanting around the United States like a regular jetsetter. I normally don’t take such obligations very seriously (“They were alive the last time I was here!”), but she was such an attentive nursemaid to my little window box herb garden when I was island-hopping on the Mediterranean that I feel kind of guilty. So I’ve been making regular trips up to Montmartre, where she lives on the more residential side of Butte Montmartre. You know, the mountain with Sacre Coeur at the top? Perhaps you remember this little gem from a much earlier entry:
Anyway, I don’t love the hoards of tourists that frequent Montmartre, recreating scenes from Amélie and taking in overpriced burlesque shows at the Moulin Rouge. But the views of Paris from up high can’t be beat. I also really enjoy a stroll around the neighborhood that surrounds the Abbesses métro, especially if it involves ducking into the Librairie des Abbesses (30 rue Yvonne Le Tac, 75018 Paris), a smart and well-stocked bookshop with a drool-worthy selection of novels and poetry from small presses, books on psychoanalysis, and cookbooks. I know that list isn’t everybody’s bag, but man that bookshop gives me butterflies whenever I step out of the métro at Abbesses.
Frequent trips to Montmartre also increase the likelihood that I’ll be making an ill-advised stop at A.P.C. Surplus (20 rue Andre del Sarte, 75018 Paris), the outlet store of the iconic French brand with markedly lower prices than the main stores (and an accordingly odd selection of sizes). Barring such retail indulgence, a trip to M’s will usually involve a stop by Au Relais (48 rue Lamarck, 75018 Paris), a 106-year old café and restaurant that serves solid takes on classic French bistro food. The food isn’t particularly remarkable, but the staff is always friendly, and Au Relais’s location on the corner of rue Lamarck and the San Francisco-evoking Mont Cenis is a lovely break from the tourist circuit just a few blocks up the hill. Their cheeseburger is delish and their crisp yet pillowy fries can’t be beat.
B and I have been on a quest to visit some of the smaller museums in Paris, and decided that watering day would be a good excuse to visit l’Espace Dalí (11 rue Poulbot, 75018 Paris, Métro Abbesses or Anvers), a small museum just a stone’s throw from Sacre Coeur that houses a permanent collection devoted entirely to Dalí’s work. Here we arrive at another installment of “another museum you might not be visiting on your trip to Paris.”
First of all, this is not St. Petersburg, Florida, and l’Espace Dalí houses mostly minor works in bronze and glass as well as a handsome collection of lithographs, engravings, and other original works on paper. The visitor is quickly made aware of what a hustler Dalí was in his lifetime, often producing or commissioning large numbered editions of each individual work, some of which seem rather rushed or glib. The space itself is rather funky and could use a serious paint job. I’d been wondering who buys all those stick-on mirrors at Ikea, but now I know. The kitsch factor is high. The museum includes a gallery with works for sale (mostly poorly-executed limited edition prints of Dalí major paintings), a gift shop with an assortment of Dalí perfumes and knick-knacks, a plaster trompe l’oeil reproduction of the medieval church that used to be on the site, and a delightful Dalí photobooth that allows you to insert your head into works from the museum or mustachioed portraits of the master himself. There is also a small collection of Dalí’s furniture and home furnishing designs, including the iconic couch modeled on Mae West’s voluptuous lips and a swoon-inducing set of exquisite silverware.
Okay, so it’s funky and filled with minor works. Why bother? Well, if you’re a literature buff, you’re going to love looking at the many works on paper that Dalí produced in response to or to accompany classic texts, including the Old and New Testament, The Quest for the Grail, Alice in Wonderland, Tristan and Isolde, Ovid’s Art of Love, Romeo and Juliet, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.
There is also a terrific selection of original photomontages that Dalí created for his tarot series (real enthusiasts can purchase a working Dalí tarot set in the giftshop for 79€). I particularly enjoyed the 1971 gouache series entitled “Memories of Surrealism,” a wonderful mishmash of textbook art history images and the surrealist imagery that Dalí made the stuff of many college dorm rooms.
I’ve been reluctant to like Dalí in recent years, probably because his work has become the stuff of pop culture cliché. But his deep interest in allegorical texts and his nuanced reading of Freud were news to me, and I found the many works on paper at l’Espace Dalí to be serious and fascinating.
It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and if you’re after the popular oil paintings that everyone knows and loves, your time and money would be best spent on plane fare to Florida. But if you’re in Paris and looking for a different angle on the artist (and have a high threshold for kitsch), l’Espace Dalí might be worth a visit.
Oh, and the photobooth is lots of fun, especially if you’ve always had mustache-envy like yours truly.
Clarence Trolls J-Date: Getting Your Deli Fix in Paris
B has been working hard on learning Hebrew the past few weeks with the eventual goal of reading the Old Testament. I’ve been working less hard, spending my time buying books that relate to my dissertation and putting them in stacks, working on my origami, and marveling at B’s capacity for filling notebooks with lists of words and conjugations for hours on end. I spent the last few lazy afternoons reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which my mother loved when it first came out in the 60s and I’ve been meaning to read for ages. It was pretty great, though it made me thank my lucky stars that I wasn’t born in a different generation. As I have a penchant for loving jerks in literature, my favorite character was Norine Schmittlapp, the nemesis of “the group” and the closest thing to a real radical that McCarthy’s 1930s New York has to offer us. Even so, her portrait is terribly bleak, if surprisingly funny. After her first marriage fails, she marries a wealthy Jewish banker whose family has changed their name from Rosenberg to Rogers, a fact that she shares with “a particular kind of relish” with her aghast acquaintance Priss.
In fact, Priss’s chance encounter with Norine near the end of the novel was one of the best and sharpest parts of the book. Priss meets Norine in the park, where Norine is pushing her infant son Ichabod (“‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll be called ‘Icky’ in school?’ she asked impulsively. ‘He’ll have to learn to fight his battles early,’ philosophized Norine. ‘Ichabod the Inglorious. That’s what it means in Hebrew. No glory.’”) around naked in his expensive stroller. Norine casually pats her son’s penis, a practice that scandalizes Priss, who is terrified of arousing her own toddler son and would almost rather “he be dirty than have him get an Oedipus complex from her handing him.” Norine insists that Priss come over to her lavishly furnished but disheveled home that nevertheless the site of a well-regarded bohemian salon. There, Norine recounts to Priss her affair with another woman’s husband and is brashly matter-of-fact about her sexual proclivities and experiences. When Priss attempts to describe her (or more accurately, her husband’s) behaviorist theories of child-rearing, Norine condescends the poor woman. “‘You still believe in progress,’ she said kindly. ‘I’d forgotten there were people who did. It’s your substitute for religion. Your tribal totem is the yardstick. But we’ve transcended all that. No first-rate mind can accept the concept of progress any more.’” When Priss accuses Norine of having abandoned her political radicalism, Norine declares that she leaves politics to her husband Freddy:
“Being a Jew and upper crust, he’s profoundly torn between interventionism abroad and laissez faire at home. Freddy isn’t an intellectual. But before we were married, we had an understanding that he should read Kafka and Joyce and Toynbee and the cultural anthropologists. Some of the basic books. So that semantically we can have the same referents.”
According to Norine, Freddy tolerates this curriculum requirement because
“Freddy’s philopregentitive; he’s interested in founding a dynasty. So long as I can breed, I’m a sacred cow to him. Bed’s very important to Freddy; he’s a sensualist, like Solomon. Collects erotica. He worships me because I’m a goy. Besides, like so many rich Jews, he’s a snob. He like to have interesting people in the house, and I can give him that.”
In her own self-diagnosis, Norine’s only real problem is “her brains”:
“[I was] formed as an intellectual…Freddy doesn’t mind that I can think rings around him, he likes it. But I’m conscious of the yawning abyss. And he expects me to be a Hausfrau at the same time. A hostess, he calls it. I’ve got to dress well and set a good table. He think it ought to be easy because we have servants. But I can’t handle servants. It’s a relic, I guess, of my political period. Freddy’s taken to hiring them himself, but I demoralize them, he says, as soon as they start in the house. They take a cue from my cerebralism. They start drinking and padding the bills and forgetting to polish the silver. […] I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf, now that we have a new house. I start out with a woman who comes to massage me and give me exercises to relax. But before I know it, I’m discussing the Monophysites or the Athanasian Creed or Maimonides. The weirdest types come to work for me; I seem to magnetize them. The butler we have now is an Anthroposophist. Last night he started doing eurhythmics.”
When Priss asks if Norine really regrets the Vassar education the women shared, Norine declares “ ‘Oh completely…I’ve been crippled for life.’”
Of course it’s obvious to both Priss and the reader that Norine’s real problem is not her cerebralism but her narcissism and anti-Semitism, which become apparent when calls her own husband a “Yip” and asks Priss with more than a touch of anxiety if she thinks that “Ichabod looks Jewish.” Norine is the great satirical monster of the text, a totally unsympathetic character that is an ingenious cipher for the other women’s anxieties, be they about housekeeping, sexual prowess, education, or parenting. But in her own right, she is such a riveting mess, with the neck-rings on her blouses and her dirty polar bear skin rug; her theories about underlying lesbian drives, oral gratification and penis-envy that are coupled with her brassy declaration that “Freud is out of date”; and her ad hoc parenting cues taken from anthropological texts about the Pueblo Indians. She wears little Ichabod in proto-Baby Björn to a funeral and declares that it serves the same function as a papoose, allowing her to give Ichabod the experience of death early, rather like the mumps. She serves enormous wedges of chocolate cake to the children for lunch. I rather loved her.
Anyway, I don’t know if it’s my boyfriend’s newest obsession with acquiring Hebrew or reading about old-school New York and the dangerous shiksa Norine for the past few days, but I’ve been longing for some serious kosher deli food. I usually get my fix in Paris with a quick trip to Florence Kahn (24 rue des Ecouffes at the corner of 19 rue des Rosiers, 75004 Paris, Métro St. Paul), a fabulous Jewish traiteur in the Marais with one of the best tile mosaic storefronts you’ll ever see.
Inside, you’ll find an amazing selection of fresh bread and pastries, pickled herring and other smoked fishes, blinis, pickles, goulash, latkes, and pierogis, as well as house-cured and smoked pastrami, corned beef, and tongue. My go-to choice:
The Big Pletzel Sandwich. That’s really what it’s called, meaning ordering it always feels kind of silly: “Je voudrais un Big Pletzel Sandwich, si’l vous plaît.” For about seven euros, you get an enormous fresh bun filled with layers of homemade pastrami, pickles, roasted red peppers, fresh tomatoes, and some kind of unidentified special sauce. You can get it warmed up and take it to go, or you can sit in their lovely outdoor seating and watch the rue de Rosier hoards line up at L’As du Falafel. Florence Kahn is a great alternative to falafel if the lines at L’As are daunting or if you want a real carnivore fix. It’s also a lovely place to buy the fixings for a picnic or an easy dinner, like this one I made earlier this week:
I bought the blinis and the glorious lox at Florence Kahn. I gave the blinis a quick shake in some melted butter in a pan, and added some crème fraîche, capers, and red onion that I had in my fridge. Much fancier and more delicious than it had any right to be, especially given how easy it was to prepare.
The one thing I hesitate to buy and reheat, however, are latkes. Somehow preprepared or frozen ones are never quite right, even if you fry them in oil. Ever since I saw a soggy tray of them at Florence Kahn, I’ve had proper latkes on the brain. Today I pushed up my sleeves and got to work. I’d never made them before, so I got some ideas from Epicurious and the food section of the New York Times online. I settled on this compromise recipe (based on what I had on hand):
9 all-purpose white potatoes, peeled, grated, and drained
½ of a white onion, grated
1 shallot, grated
3 eggs, beaten
¾ cup of baguette breadcrumbs (you’re supposed to use matzo meal, but all the kosher stores are on vacation, just like the rest of Paris in August)
Salt and pepper
Canola oil for frying (I used extra virgin olive oil, because my kitchen is too small for ingredients I rarely use)
Applesauce and sour cream for serving (crème fraîche if you’re on this side of the pond)
After peeling and grating for what seems like forever, incorporate your potatoes, onion, shallot, and eggs together. Then, add breadcrumbs (or matzo meal) gradually to soak up the excess liquid. Salt and pepper to taste.
Heat up about two tablespoons of oil in a deep frying skillet. When crackly, add a heaping tablespoon of the batter to the oil, patting it down with the back of your spoon to form a thick pancake. Fry each side 2-3 minutes or until golden brown and lacy at the edges. I was able to fit three latkes in each batch, and each batch took approximately one Róisín Murphy jam to cook. I incurred only two minor splatter burns in the whole process (the cost of doing business if you ask me). I may or may not have been pretending to be Polly, the most sympathetic member of The Group, who cooked grandiose meals every night for her publisher lover (scandalous!) on her tiny hotplate.
Drain on papertowels.
Keep the earlier batches warm, either in a low oven (aren’t you a fancypants!) or in a covered pan.
Serve with sour cream and applesauce, preferably to a bewildered student of Hebrew, who will likely seem very impressed at your labor-intensive weekday lunch.
Hungerdome! The Macaron Battle
The idea: Two men enter, one man leaves. Need a refresher course?
You remember now. Man, I miss Mel Gibson circa 1985.
Today in the Hungerdome, three Parisian macaron stalwarts go head to head in a pseudo-scientific tasting battle.
The contenders:
Ladurée (16 rue Royale, 75008 Paris, Métro Madeleine). Ostensibly the inventor of the double-decker macaron that we know and love, the Ladurée bakery first opened its doors in 1862 and is undoubtedly considered the purveyor of classic French macaron. With the largest selection of our competitors, Ladurée sprinkles in seasonal offerings (lily of the valley, Granny Smith apple, grapefruit rose) with the classic macaron battery of flavors (lemon, chocolate, vanilla, coffee, pistachio, and rose). Long lines cue outside of the various pastel-signed Ladurée locations for cookies, chocolates, and massively overpriced brunches. Most guidebooks would call Ladurée a must-do Parisian experience. The décor is totally over-the-top, with baroque brocades and gilded everything. The kinds of women I don’t particularly like make a point of eating here. Not for the claustrophobic or sociophobic. Definitely not for the overweight tourist phobic.
We chose: lemon citronella, pistachio, salted caramel, mimosa, cassis violet, and rose.
Fauchon (24-26 Place de la Madeleine, 75008 Paris, Métro Madeleine, though if you need to take public transportation, you probably can’t afford to shop at Fauchon). Operating in Paris since 1886, Fauchon is perhaps the most rarified of the fancy food markets in Paris, though for my money overpriced and overplayed (I would recommend real foodies go to La Grande Epicerie instead). The smallest selection of flavors of our competitors, Fauchon keeps their macaron selection tight and mostly classic (apricot and lemon mint were the most adventurous flavors available today). Fauchon is worth a gander if you enjoy looking at food that is too beautiful to eat or if you need a gift for that one person you simply can’t figure out a souvenir for.
We chose: lemon mint, coffee, bourbon vanilla, apricot, salted caramel, and raspberry rose.
Pierre Hermé (4 Rue Cambon, 75001 Paris, Métro Concorde). The newest kid on the block, Pierre Hermé (the pastry chef) defected from Fauchon in 1996 to start his own mecca for the sophisticated sweet tooth. A particular favorite of He Who Will Not Be Named and No I Don’t Want to Read His Blog Dammit, Pierre Hermé has wowed critics with his adventurous flavor palate. Much-hyped seasonal flavors in the past have included ketchup, foie gras and dark chocolate with gold leaf, strawberries and balsamic vinegar, strawberries and wasabi, white truffle, jasmine tea, and olive oil vanilla. Pierré Herme stores are clean, minimalist, and much easier on the senses than our other competitors.
We chose: lemon, praline hazelnut, olive oil and vanilla, peach apricot and saffron, chocolate, and rose.
A few caveats:
I’ll ‘fess up. If I saw someone doing this exact same thing on the internet, after I stopped being jealous I would immediately be inclined to tell him or her to get a job. Or a hobby. So let me defend the decadence for a moment. It’s my boyfriend B’s birthday and we decided to do this in lieu of getting a cake. He doesn’t particularly like cake, and this was more suited our love of competition, grid-making, and egg white based cookies. I would never spend this much money on macarons otherwise. No matter how you slice it, these little buggers are expensive (around 1.50€ apiece). And there’s no savoring your booty. Macarons turn stale remarkably quickly – most purists will tell you that macarons must be eaten the day they are made. I made a point of giving horrified looks to all the tourists that were buying dozens of macarons that would be stale in 24 hours. Thinking about the fact that we spent 30€ on cookies in one day is kind of making me nauseous. Or maybe it’s the 15€ worth of macarons that are sitting in my gut.
Moreover, let me make it clear (as I’m anticipating all the heated responses): macarons are a highly subjective affair. Within an hour of my posting on Facebook that I was doing a macaron face-off, a half dozen different opinions from various corners of the globe arrived on my status update. From what I can tell, the real armed camps are between Ladurée and Pierre Hermé (the classicists and the avant-gardes, the oldest story in the book). Nobody really seems to assert Fauchon as their favorite, though the Fauchon store certainly has its fair share of admirers. For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll admit to being a die-hard Ladurée fan in the past. I like buying myself a few Ladurée citron macarons when I’m having a lousy day. Despite excellent word of mouth, I’d never stepped foot in Pierre Hermé until today. On the contrary, B is a big Pierre Hermé fan and avoids Ladurée as waiting in lines makes him want to unzip his skin and run. Neither of us had braved the terrifyingly slick world of Fauchon before today.
Finally, it’s important to note that the freshness and selection of flavors vary from day to day, even in the same stores. Macarons are fragile, temperamental little beasts! Moreover, sometimes these companies make horrible (but hopefully short-lived) mistakes, like MESSING WITH THE CLASSIC CITRON MACARON. I’m looking at you, Ladurée. I think this whole thing could have gone down differently on a different day, or at a different location, or with a different set of flavors.
You might ask then, why do it? Why did man go to the moon? Because it was there. Why sample eighteen different macarons in a single sitting and spend the next few hours tabulating and calculating highly subjective results and contemplating the onset of type two diabetes? Because we can. And because it was my boyfriend’s birthday wish.
As we were both avid science fair competitors in our youth, we tried to introduce some standardization to the proceedings. We sampled the lemon and rose flavors at all three locations (although the aforementioned MUCKING AROUND meant that at Ladurée we sampled the lemon citronella and at Fauchon we sampled the lemon mint and the raspberry rose). Moreover, B and I do differ a bit in our macaron preferences (he would argue I like the stale ones), but our combined scores should counteract slight differences in predilection.
The setup:
Each macaron was scored by each judge in four categories: looks, flavor, mouthfeel, and inspiration. By “looks,” we mean the aesthetics of the cookie, which is as absolutely important as anything else when you are dealing with this überfussy whatsit. “Flavor” encompasses taste, smell, and fidelity to the original concept (meaning a mimosa-flavored macaron should taste like an actual mimosa). “Mouthfeel” is an excellent word that beer connoisseurs use to describe how something feels when it’s in your mouth. Here, we mean the texture of both the cookie and the filling, that is, how tender and pillowy the combination. Finally, by “inspiration” we mean a variety of things, including creativity, originality, execution, and the generally ineffable “wow” factor of the macaron. Each category could receive up to five points from each judge, thus each macaron was scored out of 40 possible points.
After about an hour and a half of careful tasting, discussion, consultation with M over Skype, and rolling around on the couch moaning in agony about how much sugar we had eaten (okay, maybe that we just me), we arrived at this:
The verdict:
B’s scorecard:
My scorecard:
The final tally for each macaron:
Our individual favorites were the cassis violet and salted caramel at Ladurée, the rose, praline hazelnut and peach, apricot and saffron at Pierre Hermé, and the apricot at Fauchon. I spit out the olive oil and vanilla flavor from Pierre Hermé and the lemon citronella (WHY LADUREÉ, WHY?), as I thought they tasted respectively like handcream and mosquito repelling candles. I discovered that my boyfriend will happily eat my regurgitated cookies in lieu of wasting a buck or two. While the Ladurée and Pierre Hermé macarons were both consistently well-textured to our tastes, we really disagreed about the Fauchon texture. I found their slight crunchiness a welcome contrast from all the pillowy gooeyness, but B thought they were stale.
If you were just a simpleton like me, you’d be content to tally the six scores for each contender, add up to 10 bonus points for in-store experience (retail space, macaron packaging, wait time, staff kindness, general claustrophobia induction, etc.), and call it a day. So for all the simpletons out there, that would mean the following:
Ladurée: macaron score 127 + 1 point for in-store experience = 128
Fauchon: macaron score 121 + 3 points for in-store experience = 124
Pierre Hermé: macaron score 133 + 9 points for in-store experience = 142
Taking additionally into account that Pierre Hermé won each of the individual flavor battles (lemon and rose), Pierre Hermé is the clear winner. Can we have a cocktail now?
Unfortunately, my boyfriend is no simpleton.
Long after I had eaten all the crumbs and begun complaining about my bellyache, B was still calculating how exactly he wanted to assess our raw data. After much talk of the importance of each category, in-store experience, and rankings in the individual flavor battles, he eventually settled on this equation:
(Ia(Fa+Ma)2+(La+S/2)+T+B)/P = likelihood of enjoying a random macaron from the store
where a is average, I is inspiration, F is flavor, M is mouthfeel, L is look, S is in-store experience, T is number of macarons in top 10 ranking, B is flavor battle wins, and P is price.
Using this (batshit crazy) rubric, Pierre Hermé receives a 7.6, Ladurée a 6.2, and Fauchon a 3.7. While the ranking is still the same, this illuminates the disparity between Pierre Hermé/Ladurée and Fauchon a bit more clearly (as in, don’t even waste your time with Fauchon for macarons). Finally, B notes that according to his calculations (and this is a man who just spent the better part of his birthday evening creating an ultimate Hungerdome macaron equation), Ladurée has better quality (that is, taste and mouthfeel) on average.
As we’ve now crossed over the 1500 word mark, I’ll leave it up to you what you choose to do with this information. I suspect that the classicists and short-timers will still be going to Ladurée, the avant-garde foodies will hit up Pierre Hermé, and everyone will continue to not bother with Fauchon. Me? Well, despite the close race between my old standby Ladurée and Pierre Hermé, my eyes are now open to the delight that is the latter. I’m on pins and needles in anticipation of the release of their white truffle and foie gras macarons. That is, if I’ve recovered from this stomachache and sugar high by sometime this fall.
LEAVING THE HUNGERDOME: PIERRE HERMÉ!
The Bear-Garden 