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When
people ask me “Why did you move to Paris?” I’ll usually stop, point to
the nearest cheese shop or bakery, and let them figure it out for
themselves.
There are
a lot of pastry shops in Paris, over a thousand of them. But the first
was Stohrer,
which opened in 1730 by pastry chef Nicolas Stohrer, the pastry chef
for Louis XV of France and his wife, the daughter of the king
of Poland. I can only imagine what the shop looked like back then, but
I’m sure it was quite a different place.
Today the
rue
Montorgueil is a thriving, busy pedestrian street, with the
occasional motor scooter racing down it, beeping its way through the
crowds of shoppers. The street has changed a lot in the last decade or
so, since I first walked down it. During the day, there are open air
shops selling produce, several excellent cheese shops, a crier (a fish market
when the young men in rubber boots call out what fish they are trying
to sell that day), bread bakeries, and cafés whose rickety seats spill
out onto the streets, which are occupied with early risers
getting in their first cup of coffee, to a crowd of hipsters and other
locals, drinking beers until late in the evening.
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