Paris Pastry Goes Live!

After months of researching and updating and – oh boy – tasting the many chocolate, pastry, and ice cream shops in Paris, the iPhone application is finished.  David and Heather’s mastermind project, Paris Pastry, is now available on iTunes.

The app is a handy little tool to find what are arguably (but really not arguably) the best pastry places in town among a modest list of 300 shops, with descriptions written by pastry chef and blogger David Lebovitz.  After visiting most of them, I must say the experience has made me more of a sweets aficionado than I ever thought I’d be.

During the photographing process, I joined David and Heather on a whirlwind tour of the city meeting all sorts of sweet-obsessed Parisians and sampling a trove of diabetes-inducing products.  I popped Lactaid pills like crazy as a gauntlet of gelato, cream-stuffed éclairs, and milky hot chocolate filled our days.  David had his camera, Heather had her notebook and the fast cash for emergency pastries.

And where did Bryan fit in?  Well if you’ve ever been to Ladurée, you know how hard it is take a photo of even the simplest macaron.  So my job was to charm the vendors and bakers into letting us take photos of their goods without always buying one – unless I was hungry, of course.  After a few jokes and explanations of what were doing, I usually gave David the green light to snap a few photos – if he hadn’t sneakily done so already as I distracted the vendors.  It was good teamwork.

Forgetting how small Paris is, I ran into some of these sweet faces recently.  While at the Salon du Chocolat in October, a woman at one of the stalls looked remarkably familiar, and so I asked if we knew each other.  Sure enough she had given me samples at the Bon Marché from her shop Comptoir du Cacao.  Since, clearly, we were best friends, she asked if my friends and I wanted to sample something that no one else had tasted yet.

What a silly question.

"Private" tasting at the Salon du Chocolat

The tasting that followed – salted caramel spread, homemade chocolate hazelnut paste, and a curry-covered chocolate bar – were just another prize for all of the spreadsheet madness that ensued over the past months.  Good thing we included her store in the app.

I think we’ll need to do an update soon to Paris Pastry and make sure that all of the pastries are still as good as they were this summer when we tasted them…

Check out the Paris Pastry app on iTunes