I had done my homework for Paris. As a dedicated gourmand, I had read up on all the food blogs to find out what was hot in Paris, and it was mostly chocolate. And yet when the moment of truth came, my spirit failed me.
You see, until I spent a wintry week there in early March, I hadn’t realised quite how seriously the French take their chocolate. Those in the industry claim the best is from Belgium, and that you simply have to have dark chocolate.
Asking for milk chocolate, the way most South Africans do, is a cop-out, a tell-tale sign of childish tastes and a lifetime spent in sunshine. Milk chocolate is like the blandly pretty, boringly wholesome girl-next-door in all the Tommy Hilfiger ads, most of the Levi’s ads, and is adulated by college-rock bands throughout California.
Dark chocolate is like her naughty older sister, the one who pins up her hair and wears lacy lingerie and long leather coats. You’re never quite sure where you are with her, because she’s mysterious and exciting and the epitome of unrespectability all at once.
But even if Paris isn’t Belgium, it’s evidently close enough to have soaked up some of its neighbour’s tastes. The cheap stuff is Lindt and Côte d’Or, but it’s pointless buying these as a South African because they’re so readily available back home. But anything else is a lot more expensive — and the cheap stuff is hardly cheap.
An artisan chocolaterie — not the grandest of the lot, no big names — near my hotel in Montparnasse, not the fanciest address in Paris, sold chocolate fondue, enough for six people, at â,¬12 (R152). All their chocolate was at least 70% cocoa solids, they told me proudly. Seventy percent is the very minimum any self-respecting gourmet chocolate freak demands.
An epicerie I visited in the trendy Bastille quarter sold Valrhona single-cru bars. Now if you must reveal your plebeian origins and buy mass-produced chocolate slabs, Valrhona is the name to go for. It is reputedly the best chocolate brand in the world. And single-cru bars are where it’s at — like fine whisky, coffee or wine, cocoa beans from different plantations differ from each other in subtle, but tasty, ways. I had been craving Valrhona chocolate ever since my sole Jo’burg source dried up, but I looked at these tiny, single-cru bars, hardly bigger than a Kit-Kat, and my heart quailed at the cost.
Names such as Patrick Roger, Pierre Marcolini and Jeff de Bruges are very, very big in the chocolate world. But the biggest name of all, having achieved near-divine status at the annual Paris Salon du Chocolat, is Pierre Hermé, the man who almost single-handedly invented the patisserie equivalent of haute couture. And by chance, his boutique was just a short stroll down the road from my hotel.
So one cold morning, I finally paid this temple of chocolate a visit. I’d been saving myself for these little titbits, feeling that I might as well taste a small part of the best, rather than wasting precious euros on the rest. Hermé’s shop is a small, sparsely decorated cube of neon pink and icy white. His numerous recipe books, in various languages, line up against one wall, with chocolate slabs on the opposite wall. Glass countertops show off both intricately decorated pastries and minimalist cubes of chocolate.
I stood and looked, first overwhelmed by the selection, and then by the price. I could not pay â,¬10 (R127) for 100g of chocolate. I almost felt physically ill at the idea. And I didn’t really want anything else from the shop. Jam, however good it is, cannot possibly be worth â,¬9,70 (R123), and I’d already eaten plenty of pastries.
Reader, I turned on my heel and left that wonderful place empty-handed.