Bringing Home the Baguette

In France, the act of buying a baguette is highly ritualized, and over 9 months in Paris we had many opportunities to both observe and participate in the experience. Before leaving, we documented our understanding of the process of purchasing bread, and we humbly submit our performance of this important phenomena for your consumption and critique.

Step 1: Be patient.

Step 1 Commentary: With a different boulangerie to be found every 736 ft. (unscientific estimate) on the rue de Belleville, at first we had trouble understanding why anyone would bother waiting in line. We ultimately came to two conclusions: 1) Some boulangeries are better than others, attracting larger crowds. 2) Even at inferior boulangeries, lines form because people don't stagger their visits throughout the day. Which isn't to say that lines only form early in the morning and in the afternoon after work lets out - you'll also find lines at lunchtime, around snacktime, and at pretty much every other time of the day. Come to think of it, despite the large numbers of boulangeries in Paris, maybe the city is just too dense; maybe there are simply too many people per boulangerie to avoid lines. It really makes you respect people who live/d under Communism.

Step 2: Choose wisely

Step 2 Commentary: Economists and psychologists have determined that too much choice can seriously handicap your ability to choose wisely. Boulangeries are perfect examples of this dilemma. If you don't know what you want by the time you get to the register, you risk looking stupid, or worse, not getting anything at all. Remember the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld? Many of those who work at the best-regarded boulangeries seem to share his mania for prompt, polite, and plainly pronounced orders. If you have your choice in mind well in advance, you'll leave the boulangerie a happier person. Of course, this doesn't change the fact that you have to know what things are called in order to choose them. Learning all the names of all the products in the boulangerie requires months and months (at the very least) of embarrassment and faulty orders. Call it a character building exercise, we're pretty sure that's how the boulangères see it.

Step 3: Order. Very carefully.

Step 3 Commentary: So you've waited in line and chosen carefully, but all of your patience and planning could be for naught if you botch the order. Maggie has opted for a tradition nature (tradi nature in street lingo), which is a shorter, skinnier, denser version of the baguette. As she arrives at the moment of truth, she hesitates briefly as she considers the consequences of failure - but then she nails the landing, correctly assigning the feminine gender, smoothly and clearly pronouncing a few difficult "r" syllables, and otherwise exuding confidence so that the boulangère doesn't sense her fear and pounce. Congratulations, Maggie! You did it!

Step 4: Enjoy immediately.

Step 4 Commentary: Normally, you'd think that the boulangerie buying experience ends when you walk out the door, but not so. Approximately 87.34% of boulangerie patrons who buy bread (rather than a pastry) execute one final ritual between the boulangerie and their residence: they consume the end of the baguette or baguette-substitute (such as a tradi nature). We would need to conduct more research to determine whether the majority of people rip off the end with their fingers before eating it, or bite directly, as Louis has chosen to do. Furthermore, the exact logic of this ritual remains unclear. Must the boulangerie patron taste the baguette as a connoisseur tastes wine - to confirm its quality before sharing it with friends and family? Or is it merely a question of the freshness and possible warmth of the baguette presenting an irresistible temptation to the purchaser? One final possibility: having just undergone a stressful experience, the customer translates pent-up fear into aggression, taking out the angst of the boulangerie experience on the unsuspecting baguette. We're happy to entertain other hypotheses as well.

There you have it: a bread-buying boulangerie experience from tepid start to violent finish. Next week on "Paris: The Urban Jungle is a Terrifying Place," we'll bring our award-winning, cutting-edge investigative journalism to bear on one of the greatest dangers of the city: French attempts at American-style fast food. Don't miss it!

Putting Local Boulangeries to the Test

We've been debating for months. Can we actually taste the differences in the bread that comes from the four boulangeries we regularly patronize? Or are we just biased in favor of some based on appearance, location, or service? Finally, we decided to put our opinions to a test. A blind taste test.

First, we need to introduce the contenders. There's the "yellow boulangerie," aka "Le Moulin de Pierre," which is the boulangerie closest to Métro Belleville on the rue de Belleville.

A clear frontrunner, this boulangerie always has a huge line snaking out the door, and looking at the splendid breads, pastries, and tarts they make, it's no wonder.


Up a block and just across the street, you'll find the "orange boulangerie" (maybe next we'll test for color-blindness, because in this picture it looks pink), aka "Au Moulin de Belleville." (In case you're wondering, moulin means mill. Like in Moulin Rouge.) This one ranked towards the bottom going into the test.

Staying on the rue de Belleville, you'll find the "green boulangerie" (it has no alias as far as we can tell), whose owner we profiled for our "Portraits of Belleville" series. Between the storefront and the unmatched service, we assumed this one would rank higher than the orange boulangerie.

Finally, on our way to and from the park every day, we pass the Banette-affiliated "red boulangerie" which also doesn't appear to have an official name. (Banette is a consortium of boulangeries, wheat producers and other parties interested in producing and selling bread. Banette-affiliated boulangeries seem to tread a line between a franchise and a baker's union.) Given its location in a swankier neighborhood than our own, the lines of waiting customers we almost always see, and our own experiences there, we anticipated a close competition between red and yellow boulangeries for the crown.

Maggie did the buying, while Dimi and I did the tasting. We were very scientific about it, as you can see.

In addition to taste, we judged a croissant and a baguette from each boulangerie on the basis of overall appearance and texture. You can see real differences in the exteriors and cross-sections of each item, and we took careful notes on every relevant aspect of our tasting experience.

In the end, the results were roughly what we expected: the yellow boulangerie (#3 above) took the prize for best croissant, while the red boulangerie (#1 above) won best baguette. The green and orange boulangeries just didn't compare.

Still, we'll continue to buy from all of our contestants, in part because the two winners are both closed on Wednesday, in part because sometimes we don't feel like standing in line, but mostly because all of these boulangeries are great by American standards. We will sorely miss them when we return.

Supermarchés de la rue de Belleville

To celebrate the end of our time here, we'd like to ask a favor of our readers: take a minute to read back through your favorite posts, and send your "top 3" list to panda.a.paris [at] gmail.com. We'll be collecting your submissions throughout the week, and next week (our last in Paris!) we'll post the results. Thanks in advance, and happy browsing!

Paris is best known as a city of light, of romance, of history and culture and beauty. It is not generally thought of as a big, dense, dirty place where 98% of daily existence is completely - and at times oppressively - mundane. But because Paris is, in fact, all of these things, it's important to be able to take the mundane and turn it into something more interesting. A trip to the supermarket, for instance. There are at least nine supermarkets within a five-block radius from where we live, which turns normally mundane food shopping into an exercise in self-image, fiscal discipline, and logistical savvy. In case you ever live where we do, here's a tour of your supermarket options.

The first supermarché you walk by on your way up the rue de Belleville from Métro Belleville is Ed.

Ed is a chain that clearly prides itself on being a cheap place to shop for a limited selection of food and household products. It also appears to be the supermarket that devotes the smallest percentage of its budget to appearance (there's an equally ugly - if slightly larger - Ed at Métro Pyrénées).

Next, you'll notice Chinese supermarkets on both sides of the street.

Given that you're walking through the heart of Belleville's Chinatown, it should come as no surprise that these stores are your one-stop-shop for all kinds of East Asian delicacies (and "delicacies"). Though poorly organized, the prices are rock-bottom, the service is efficient, and the produce is much fresher than at any of the chain supermarkets. We probably hit up "Les Halles de l'Asie" two or three times a week (it's just so convenient when walking from the métro to our apartment), which has made it easy for us to consume fewer processed foods and more fresh veggies and fresh-frozen seafood. Thanks, Chinese supermarkets!

Passing our apartment, the next supermarket is Belleville en Bio, which we've reviewed before. Considering we're East Coast Liberal hippies, we should probably shop at this all-organic store more often. But we're frugal East Coast Liberal hippies, and the "Bio" label in France (much like the "organic" label in the states) doubles prices without ensuring environement- and health-friendly products. Bummer.

Our go-to chain supermarché is Franprix, located at the corner of rue de Belleville and rue des Pyrénées (and again on rue de Belleville just above Métro Jourdain).

They just redid this store entirely, and it's too bad we weren't prepared for a before-and-after comparison, because the change is mind-boggling. In any case, Franprix sits in the middle of the supermarché hierarchy, above Ed and below Monoprix (see below) in terms of price, selection, and quality. We reguarly buy yoghurt, cereal, butter, cheese, condiments, household goods, and cheap wine here. Whereas Ed and the Chinese supermarkets are downhill from our apartment, Franprix is about a block uphill, giving it a logistical advantage (on the way home, it's easier to carry a heavy bag downhill).

Finally, Monoprix is the chain supermarché with the greatest selection, highest prices (even for the same exact products you get at Franprix and Ed for cheaper), and largest quantity of somewhat high-quality products. All Monoprix's have internal boulangeries, boûcheries, and (I think) poisonneries, each of which normally charge less for their wares than the individual food boutiques operating outside of Monoprix. The store also offers a (comparatively) large selection of clothing, kitchenware, and toiletries, putting it somewhere between a Shaw's/Publix/Giant/Acme and a Walmart/Kmart/Target.

We tend to shop at Monoprix when we want to get absolutely everything in one place - and even that's usually impossible. French stores, we've discovered, are aggressively territorial. We love this when we encounter it in a boulangerie, fromagerie, boucherie, cave à vins, or other "speciality shop," but as Americans we demand that our supermarkets constitute a one-stop-shop for all of our needs. The supermarchés we've been to here, however, don't aspire to that standard (and we're not the first to notice).

Supermarchés at which we haven't shopped regularly (or at all): Carrefour, Casino, Huit-à-Huit, Naturalia (another bio place), Shopi, or Leader Price. Basically, if you ever forget how big and ordinary a city Paris is, just think of all the supermarket options. That's what we do.

The Historical Writings on the Walls

To celebrate the end of our time here, we'd like to ask a favor of our readers: take a minute to read back through your favorite posts, and send your "top 3" list to panda.a.paris [at] gmail.com. We'll be collecting your submissions throughout the week, and next week (our last in Paris!) we'll post the results. Thanks in advance, and happy browsing!

History is everywhere, if only you know where to look for it. Paris makes it easy by throwing plaques up on at least one wall of every building of even minor consequence. In a city that's been around 2,000+ years, that comes out to a lot of plaques. Maggie probably hates them, because I'm always stopping to read, which makes walking anywhere an e x t r e m e l y  s  l  o  w   p   r  o   c    e    s     s.

Among the most common (and most recent) plaques are those you see on schools. They always look the same and say almost exactly the same thing.

"In memory of the students of this school, deported between 1942 and 1944 because they were born Jewish, innocent victims of Nazi barbarity and of the complicity of the Vichy government. They were murdered in the death camps. 390 children lived in the 19th arrondissement. Let us never forget them."

I'm surprised it took until 2003 to get these plaques up, but I guess it goes to show that, unlike in Germany, France hasn't been as comfortable confronting the crimes perpetrated by the French under the Occupation. On the other hand, there was never any hesitation when it came to plaques honoring heroes of the Resistance.

It's worth noting that the school-memoriam plaques are made of the same material as expensive grave markers, which I'm sure is also intentional. Older plaques are made of a different - and much less eye-catching - stone, which ironically makes them much easier to read. This is helpful when your mind gets so used to seeing plaques, it automatically filters out all but the most interesting names.


As you can tell, I love the accessibility of music history in Paris. Who needs a library when, on your way to the store, you're constantly running into composers' and performers' old haunts? Franz Liszt (never thought of him as a "François" before) stayed with the Erard family at their 2nd-arrondissement compound, Edith Piaf was born on the steps of an extremely modest building just up the street from us on the Rue de Belleville, Thomas Paine (who "crooned" Revolution in the ears of colonial Americans?) lived in the 6th arrondissement while participating in the French Revolution and helping to write their "Bill of Rights", and Iannis Xenakis (composer/architect) lived in a beautiful building in the 9th arrondissement.

One more type of "plaque" remains, and this is one you've already seen in another post.

From left to right, we have a marker at the spot of the former "Porte de St. Honoré," (an old gate in the city walls), a marker at the house of the man who inspired the use of the term "fiacre" (after the Saint) to describe a carriage-for-hire, and a marker at the home of Nicolas Flamel, the reputed alchemist and Harry Potter character.

There are thousands of these markers around the city, treating every conceivable subject. But apparently no one's thought to put up a marker explaining the history of these markers, and I can't find anything online. Can anyone help me out?