Du Pain et des Idées

Where: Paris, France · 34 Rue Yves Toudic, 75010 Paris, France

Category: sweet · Price: $$$ · Rating: 4.3/5 (4218 reviews)

About Du Pain et des Idées

The smell hits you before you even cross the threshold — butter in various stages of caramelization, warm dough exhaling from somewhere behind a counter older than your grandparents. The painted ceilings from 1875 still arch overhead like someone forgot to tell this place the 21st century happened, and frankly it's better for it. The pain des amis has a crust that shatters into a thousand flaky casualties across your jacket, revealing a soft, almost custardy interior that makes supermarket bread feel like an insult. Then there's the escargot pistache — a coiled, sticky, pistachio-laced pastry that manages to be both delicate and dangerously rich, the kind of thing you eat standing on the sidewalk with your eyes half-closed. Their croissants belong in whatever conversation you're having about the best in Paris, full stop. Bourdain came here and loved it, which tells you something, but the line of locals queued up on a Tuesday morning tells you more. This is a bakery that has no interest in reinvention because the original idea was already so damned good. Closed Saturday and Sunday — go on a weekday morning, get there by 8:30, and don't bother pretending you'll only buy one thing.

Traditional French pastries & signature "pain des amis" bread in an 1875 shop with painted ceilings.

Tags: takeout, splurge, bourdain-approved

Website: http://dupainetdesidees.com/

Map: Open in Google Maps

Back to FavSpot — a hand-curated atlas of restaurants, bars and hotels by Rudy Abitbol.