Pas Les Baskets

An adventures at the Parisian luxury hotel, the Plaza Athenée

 

Anyone who has made my acquaintance, even for just a short time, will know that I love pastries and other baked goods.   It’s one of the reasons that I love Paris.   Fortunately, my wife Carol loves Paris (and pastries) too, and we visit there as often as possible.   With daily nonstop air service between the Salt Lake International and Charles DeGaulle airports, Carol and I like to say that Paris is “only an Ambien away.”

 

I can’t exactly blame my mother for my obsession with baked goods, although she did know how to combine butter, sugar, flour, and love in just the right proportions.   She drew on a childhood spent in Germany and France to bake top-notch plum cakes (zwetschgenkuchen), buttercream cake, and fruit tarts.  My father shares some of the responsibility for my fixation with pastries, too.  When I was young, it wasn’t unusual for him to come home with a pink bakery box full of Danish pastries and polish them off by himself one by one along with a pot of coffee.   (I, naively preferred Hostess Cupcakes to viennoiserie at that point.)

 

In the fall of 1985, Carol and I, along with our two-year-old son Koshlan, were lucky enough to spend seven months living in Paris while I was on sabbatical from my job at the University of Utah.   In an early episode of The Simpsons, Homer imagines himself skipping through “The Land of Chocolate” where everything is made of chocolate: houses, lampposts, paths, rivers–even rabbits and dogs.   Chocolate literally falls in drops from the sky.  Well, I felt like Homer that year in Paris.   A boulangerie or pâtisserie seemed to be on every block, sometimes two per block.  To communicate my discoveries to my friends back in the United States, I drew a map showing every bakery within a quarter-mile radius of our apartment.  To my delight, there must have been at least twenty.

 

I prepared for subsequent Paris visits turning my academically honed research skills to finding the most famous bakeries in the city as well as new ones that might not yet have achieved such prominence.   I was helped by the fact that the French value their bakeries as much as I do and make their top bakers and pastry chefs into celebrities.

 

There are numerous awards in the world of baking that allow bread bakers (boulangers) and pastry chefs (pâtissiers) to achieve widespread recognition.  The most venerable of these awards is the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Worker of France, or MOF).   First designated in 1924, medals are presented in seventeen broad categories, two of which are food-related.  Certified by France’s Department of Labor, the award goes to everyday workers such as, in the case of food, restaurant waiters, sommeliers, butchers, cheese makers, fishmongers, as well as pâtissiers and boulangers.

 

Two other honors highlight two cherished French bakery items – la baguette and le croissant.  Each year, the ultimate examples of each are selected by the Union of Bakers of Greater Paris.   First-place finishers tout their success in gold letters on their shop windows, but the competition is so fierce and prestigious that even “losers” crow.  I recall one bakery window that expressed pride in finishing ninth in the competition for best traditional baguette in Paris.

 

In the world of pastry, the highest honor for an individual pâtissier is to be selected “the world’s best pastry chef.”  The award has been given annually since 2014 and, not surprisingly, has gone predominantly to pastry chefs born in and/or working in France.

 

In the process of enjoying the bakeries of Paris over the years, Carol and I never lose sight of the simple pleasure of discovering an excellent but unheralded neighborhood boulangerie or pâtisserie.   After ordering at the counter, we often ask if we can thank the head baker personally.   Often, these magicians of butter, flour, and sugar are willing to leave the back of the shop to meet their American admirers.

 

Despite our appreciation for the anonymous baker toiling by the heat of his oven, over time, Carol and I have refined our pastry palette.  Some of the most celebrated pastry chefs worked at the most exclusive­­–and expensive–hotels in Paris.   While in Paris in the summer of 2014, we set our sights on Christophe Michalak, who had been part of France’s 2005 winning team in the World Cup of Pastry (yes, there is such a thing) and the 2013 recipient of “best pastry chef of the year” award.    Michalak headed all things sweet at the Plaza Athénée where room prices started at $1000 a night but where afternoon tea had to be within our means, right?

 

Carol and I knew that the Plaza Athénée had been closed for almost a year for an extensive renovation, but it was just our luck that it was reopening on August 1, one day before our scheduled flight home.   I called the hotel on the morning of the opening to make sure that everything was in order and confirmed that tea service commenced at 2pm.   We wore our best clothes.   Carol had on a pretty dress and stylish shoes, and I wore a sport coat.   Yes, I was wearing sneakers, but they were, I thought, an inconspicuous dark blue and gray.

 

Wanting to be sure of getting a good table, Carol and I arrived at the hotel promptly at 2pm.  The scene at the entrance to the hotel made us question momentarily whether we belonged there.   In front of the hotel was a line of the most expensive cars we had ever seen in one place.   The guests shuttling between the cars and the Art Deco front door were stylishly dressed, and the hotel staff assisting them wore fancy uniforms reminiscent of Buckingham Palace.   We took courage, however, and walked through the ornate front doors, which, of course, two doormen unhesitatingly held open for us.

 

Carol and I entered the foyer of the hotel and were greeted by a gauntlet of uniformed staff members—women lined up on one side, men on the other.  Remember those scenes in Downton Abbey when someone would arrive by car at the castle and the staff would be lined up stiffly in front?   It was a bit like that, only there were more “servants” at the Plaza Athénée.  A long red carpet ran down the middle of the tiled floor to greet us.  In the center of the room, a huge chandelier cast a gentle light.   Gorgeous arrangements of fresh flowers hung from silver vessels attached to the many marble columns.

 

As Carol and I began slowly working our way down the center of the entry room, I wondered whether we had mistakenly taken the place of some eagerly anticipated celebrity couple.   There was nothing to do, though, but to go with the flow.   We started acting like royalty, nodding to the men and women on each side of us.   I was strongly tempted to raise my hand and gently twist it at the wrist in the manner of Queen Elizabeth, but I resisted the temptation, barely.

 

Reaching the end of the foyer, Carol and I announced that we were there to have tea.   We were escorted to a gallery hall with tables on both sides of a central aisle.  Being among the first patrons there, we had our choice of tables and took the second one on the right.   This afforded us a splendid view of the well-dressed people who steadily arrived after us.

 

A handsome waiter approached our table, and without saying much other than “bonjour,” placed several bowls of nuts and other nibbles on the table, opened a bottle of sparking water, and filled our glasses.   I thought, “Geez, we haven’t even ordered desserts and we are already in the hole for $20 or $30.”   He handed us menus and departed.

 

The menu contained a small list of pastries with unfamiliar names but long descriptions in French.  The name of the pastry chef was at the bottom.   There were no prices listed.

 

As Carol and I perused the menus, the waiter returned with a chilled bottle of champagne and popped the cork.   He explained that the champagne had been specially selected for us by the restaurant’s main chef, the famous Alain DuCasse.  “Oh God, I said to myself, this is going to cost us at least another $100.”   It was too late to back out now, though, so we once again let go of our inhibitions and started in on the champagne.

 

Next, the waiter approached our table, rolling a trolley of pastries.   He described the trolley as his “chariot des goûts.”  Chariot in French simply means cart, but this was no ordinary cart.  It appeared to be made from a precious metal.   Glass covered two shelves of mouth-watering desserts.   We expressed our appreciation to the waiter but told him we had decided on two items from the menu.   Carol’s selection was some kind of castle of caramel, and I ordered something that sounded like it would please a chocoholic like me.

 

We didn’t take photos of our desserts–it would have seemed gauche in that context–but I remember mine well.   It arrived in a long-stemmed glass cup that opened into a deep and broad bowl.   At the bottom of the bowl was a slice of dark and rich-looking chocolate cake.   The top of the bowl was completely covered by a layer of dark chocolate, sealing the cake prisoner below.   I imagined having to take a sharp implement to penetrate the seal, but that was not necessary.   A third type of chocolate was the key that unlocked the two chocolates in and on top of the glass.   Like a Moroccan waiter raising a silver pot and flawlessly pouring tea into a cup far below, the Athénée waiter raised a silver pot of molten chocolate and slowly poured it on top of the chocolate seal, melting the seal and marrying all three varieties of chocolate.   I was enthralled.

 

Carol and I savored our desserts, washing down each bite with a sip of champagne.    I wanted to lick every last bit of chocolate from the inside of my dessert glass but thought better of it.   Carol, though, had no such compunction.   She took her knife and chiseled off the hardened caramel that had been placed as a support at the base of her dessert.  We might not have enough money for anything other than a taxi to the airport the next morning, but we didn’t care.   We were in Pastry Paradise.

 

It was now time for the reckoning: settling our bill.   When I received it, I was shocked.   Rather than some obscene total, Carol and I were only charged for the two desserts.   I asked the waiter if there was some mistake, but he said that as guests at the tea room’s grand opening, the beverages and other items we enjoyed were compliments of Chef DuCasse.   We gladly paid the bill.

 

As Carol and I readied ourselves to leave the tea room, the waiter suggested that we might want to return that evening for the opening of the hotel’s bar.  We imagined all the elegantly dressed Parisians who would likely be there…and the potential freebies.   Recall that Carol was nicely dressed, and I had on a sports jacket and dress shirt.   Our waiter looked us up and down, but when his eyes settled on my sneakers, he admonished, “Pas les baskets” (translation: “not the basketball shoes”).  My first thought was to run out and buy some inexpensive dress shoes, but if “in vino veritas,” in champagne there is good judgment.  We decided not to press our luck and exited the hotel arm-in-arm, feeling like royalty but not waving our hands from the wrist.