Creme de la Creme a Paris

I participated on a wonderful food tour throughout Paris, and let me tell you, spending the money to experience a true French delicacy is worth it. We started our walking tour with a stop at the wonderful Eric Kayser Artisan Boulanger bakery which is celebrating 15 years of business. Eric Kayser is a master French baker, world renowned for quality and innovation in the field of baking. With over 80 stores worldwide, his products are a household name. As a fourth generation master baker, Eric Kayser was born into the field. His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were all traditional French bakers. He quickly realized his calling for baking at a young age, and decided to pursue his passion. At the age of 18, he became a companion of the prestigious Tour de France of baking. In 1994, together with fellow companion Patrick Castagna, Kayser invented the Fermento Levain. This piece of equipment allows for the continuous use of liquid levain, a breakthrough in the field. Eric Kayser also worked simultaneously to train young bakers with the INBP, the French National Institute of Baking and Patisserie. On September 13, 1996, Kayser opened his first bakery at 8 rue Monge in Paris. It was an instant success, garnering much critical acclaim. The opening of many more bakeries in Paris and in various countries abroad followed very quickly. Eric Kayser is widely regarded to be one of the world’s best bakers. He is commonly referred to as the “ambassador of French bread to the world”. Today, there are over 80 Maison Kayser locations worldwide. With 18 in Paris alone, more locations have opened throughout Greece, Russia, Japan, Ukraine, Morocco, Senegal, South Korea, Lebanon, and the UAE. The products and services in the bakeries vary from country to country, each adapting to the local tastes and flavors. This dynamic touch has helped the growth of Maison Kayser throughout the world. Each Maison Kayser location produces its products on-site daily. After purchasing some bread, we needed someing to go along with the bread. What goes perfect with bread? Cheese! Our next stop was Fromager, which had a very large selections of cheeses ranging from 3€ to 150€, and cheeses that were as young as last week, or as old as my grandmother. We selected Three cheeses, one was a nutty gouda style from 2007, a salty cheese that had a perfect contrast with the sweet dates in the middle, and some funny looking cheese that looked like someone sneezed on it. I passed on that one. We found a quaint park next to one of the many ancient romen bathhouses here in Paris while we enjoyed the atmosphere, perfect weather, breads and cheeses, and a large amount of birds and pigeons attempting to steal our food. Afterwards, we ventured to a chocolatier, called Patrick Roger. In the “magic laboratory” where Patrick Roger fashions his life-size cocoa creations, everything is handmade, right down to the fork-sculpted decorations. And for the artisan chocolatier, it’s a source of pride — not shame — that it takes him about a year to produce what large companies like Mars or Hershey's might produce in one day. In 2000, Roger was named "Best French Chocolatier" for creating "Harold," a life-sized cocoa farmer wearing a wide-brimmed hat and seen squatting on tiptoe while handling a cocoa bean between his fingers. The chocolate statue, later sculpted into bronze, is based on a real farmer he met in Colombia in 1999. He offered beer chocolate for St. Patrick’s Day and chocolate sardine cans for April Fool’s Day (The holiday is known in France as poisson d’avril — April’s fish — and calls for attaching a paper fish to the back of an unwitting victim). Inspired by a recent trip to the Galapagos Islands where he dove with seals, Roger created proportional representations of the mammals in chocolate to display with the sardines. Seals eat fish. But the form is only one appeal of Roger's chocolates. He offers truffles or chocolate bars made with cocoa from prime locations such as Sao Tome or Papua New Guinea, and he mixes them with such eclectic flavors as citrus fruit, ginger root, jasmine and beer. For Christmas, Roger's shop windows displayed giant chocolate polar bears to call attention to the public. Speaking of large animals in his window...when I arrived there was a giant gorilla hand sculpted out of chocolate. For those of you who fallow my blog, you will understand the irony of seeing this. (for details, read my post, "Monkeys at the Eiffel Tower?!") Dying and going to heaven over and over again as I savored over 5 different chocolates, we took a stroll down the street to Un Dimanche A Paris: L'Art Gourmand Chocolat. Even though it wasn’t Sunday, I decided to go to Un Dimanche à Paris anyway. This sleek showcase of chocolate is located in an under-utilized arcade on the Left Bank, near where the saleswoman told me has become “The quartier of chocolate.” The owner of the shop is Pierre Cluizel of the famed French chocolate family, but he’s striking out on his own. Un Dimanche à Paris features a large chocolate shop, and exhibition kitchen, a tea salon, and a full-scale restaurant. And that’s just on the first floor. Climb the stairs and you’ll find a state-of-the-art teaching kitchen and enormous tasting area, with comfy sofas and a cocktail lounge manned by a barman (with the world’s slimmest waistline), mixing up elixirs and potions designed to help you appreciate and understand chocolate to its fullest. And if that’s what it takes to cut a silhouette like his, I’m sold! settled into the salon du thé for some chocolat chaud and a pot of tea, along with a little selection of pastries. The hot chocolate, served in a pitcher with a wooden stirrer anchored inside, was rich and a bit on the sweet side (the chef confessed to adding a pour of heavy cream and a pinch of cinnamon), and the Korean green tea was presented with a timer so you would be sure not to over infuse it. The line up of little pastries were lovely. A small, gooey chocolate disk topped with a moist puddle of ganache, a petit éclair filled with chocolate, a pistachio macaron (made by someone a little too enthusiastic with the food coloring), and a perfect, tangy little lemon tartlet topped with a kiss of crunchy meringue. Like the name says, the shop is open even on Sundays and there’s a full roster of cooking classes and a swank lunch and dinner menu, which I’m looking forward to trying. Because I had a generous slab of brownies waiting for me at home, I passed on the boxes of truffles, the various chocolate spreads, les orangettes, and the sleek tablets of chocolate with crushed hazelnuts and cocoa nibs rubbed into them. But it’s good to know that I can always go back, any day of the week, including Sunday.