Weekend in Paris #3

A tribute to my mom, apéro with friends, and the home of this city's #1 baguette.

Weekend in Paris is a bonus series for paid subscribers—it’s one part recap of my off-duty fun as a baking school student, one part dishing about (temporary) expat life. This post is now unlocked for all readers to enjoy. Bienvenue!

Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône

The weekend started on an unpromising note.

From the moment I moved in, my shower had been slow to drain. A few days earlier, I’d mentioned this to my (blessedly kind and responsive) landlord, which prompted her to show up at my doorstep with a bottle of European Drano and a smile.

Unfortunately, that attempted solution only served to back things up further, which I discovered during my next shower when water began pouring out of the stall, onto the bathroom floor, and down the adjacent hallway.

Thus began my three-day relationship with François, my sixty-something, chain-smoking French plumber.

Because we communicated solely through Google Translate, I was never quite sure what he was doing, only that he was supremely dedicated to fixing the problem, which involved demolition work on part of the bathroom wall (and the better part of twenty work hours).

By the time Saturday rolled around, after days of zero-to-limited running water and too much quality time with François, I was ready to call the weekend a failure before it began.

But I scraped myself out of bed—and I’m so glad I did.

When I returned from the day’s adventures, François was finishing up, and through various explanatory hand motions he conveyed that things were back on track.

In today’s letter, you’ll read about how I salvaged my weekend:

• 🎨 The special way I honored the second anniversary of my mom’s passing,

• 🥂 My first apéro with classmates (with its surprise Emily in Paris tie-in), and

• 🥖 My bakery haul from the winner of 2024’s “best baguette in Paris” award.

Last Valentine’s Day, back in Washington state, I attended the Imagine Monet exhibit on its opening day. It was the perfect way to reflect on the beauty and transience of my mom’s too-short life, which ended on February 14, 2023.

When Valentine’s Day rolled around this year, I decided that seeing the French impressionist’s paintings in person would be a fitting continuation of the tradition I began on the first anniversary of my mom’s passing.

But first: breakfast.

I walked under stunning blue skies (and past the jaw-dropping Hotel des Invalides) on my way to Tapisserie, a perfect little pastry shop run by a team of impressive restauranteurs. After making flan parisien in baking school this week, I wanted to try their much-lauded version.

I sat down to eat this delicate custard tart bursting with vanilla bean, but I couldn’t help but order a madeleine—my namesake cakelet—for the road.

Frankly, I ordered this add-on without much thought or expectation; I’d already had a madeleine in Paris, and it was lovely but not life-changing.

Still, though I can’t write this next clause without sounding like a Proustian cliché, it remains true: as I tasted Tapisserie’s madeleine, with its deeply caramelized exterior and whisper-soft crumb, I felt tears gathering behind my eyes.

I was nibbling on this little cake in a freezing headwind as I walked toward the Musée d’Orsay, but maybe because I was about to spend a morning “with” my mom, I suddenly remembered baking madeleines together as a kid.

With that thought, I was back in elementary school again, hunched over the kitchen counter, carefully spooning batter into each pocket of the madeleine pan, focusing on my mom’s encouraging instructions, then eating the finished products together (straight from the oven, of course).

When I returned home later that day, I read Proust’s words about his madeleine. This sentence gave me chills:

But, when nothing of an ancient past remains, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, only, more fragile but more lively, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and the taste remain for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruin of all the rest, to bear without flinching, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

I arrived at the museum with numb hands buried in my pockets, was greeted by the scent of roasting chestnuts from a street vendor’s grill, and made my way inside.

The d’Orsay began its life as a train station, which feels apparent as soon as you walk into its cavernous main sculpture hall. The conversion to a museum happened in 1986, the year I was born—the year I met my mother. I spent two hours wandering through the delicious Impressionist hall, where I learned how the railway had facilitated the countryside travels and plein air work of Monet and his cohort.

On my way out, I spied a book called A La Table de Proust in the gift shop. Bien sûr!

This weekend, one of my wonderful classmates invited the whole group over for the convivial pre-dinner gathering called apéro. I knew I couldn’t arrive empty-handed, so I went out in search of a fitting treat.

I got hungry along the way, so I joined the queue at Chez Marianne on rue des Rosiers for a falafel pita stuffed with roasted eggplant, tahini, and marinated red cabbage.

Our class had sampled pastries at The French Bastards during our first week, but I wanted to go back for their appropriately bastardized version of the macaron, with various flavors of ganache sandwiched between tiny cookies.

That evening, after ascending more stairs than I care to remember, my classmates and I were greeted by a delicious spread and free-flowing wine from our generous host.

Hours later, when we left to brave the midnight metro ride home, I discovered that the neighboring building was Chef Gabriel’s restaurant from Emily in Paris—which, in real life as in the show, is just a stone’s throw from Emily’s apartment complex!

Finally, for this weekend’s big bakery adventure, I picked Boulangerie Utopie, whose head baker Xavier Netry was awarded the title of Paris’s best baguette de tradition last year. In a city full of incredible bread, that’s a serious honor.

But Utopie is also known for their baked goods made with activated charcoal, which was just the kind of exciting, outside-of-my-comfort-zone offering I wanted to taste.

Utopie offers unique bread and viennoiserie specials each weekend. For Valentine’s Day, they were making pain chocolat riz soufflé—a cocoa-infused bread dough adorned with puffed rice—braided into the shape of a heart.

I also snagged a roulé sesame, whose wildly flavorful laminated dough was made with activated charcoal, to serve as my breakfast (plus a handful of mini sesame madeleines to round things out). Dessert was a hazelnut sablé pressé biscuit topped with jasmine green tea crème bavaroise and yuzu crémeux.

My only worry is that I may have set the bakery bar too high, too soon…and that’s what we call a first-world problem!

With that, it’s back to the (fabulous) grind. I’ll be back with another baking school recap on Friday.

Warmly,
Maddie

Breakfast Club is a newsletter about pastries with a side of personal growth, from an ex-financial planner turned baker. If you savored this edition, click the ❤️ (or share with a friend!) to help new readers discover it—and subscribe to get each letter fresh from the oven.