Some French Bread and Some Cuban Ideas

There is not much that I can say about Du Pain et Des Idées that has not already been said. Look up the best bakeries in Paris and they will surely be amongst the list. Scroll social media for long enough and you will find a food blogger or “foodie” as they call themselves holding one of the glistening baked goods up in the morning light. Read a guide to 48 hours in the City of Love and a stop at this small corner near Republique will be listed as essential. The name offers some bread and some ideas, a little promise to those who arrive. The awning welcomes with the words “Fabrication Traditonelle,” the mark of a bakery that does not fool around when it comes to bread.

When my plane arrives, often quite early, into Charles de Gaulle Airport, my first move is to head to Du Pain et Des Idées, my luggage along for the ride. I wait in line, there will always be a line, and enter to the grandiose space. The boulangerie is reminiscent of Paris in the 1920s, massive golden framed mirrors and ornate frescos dress the structure, the ceiling a particularly ornate piece of restored tile painted like a glimpse at the blue sky. Glass cases wrap around showing off the day’s selection of airy breads and laminated pastries. Not that it matters to me. For while everything is delightful, I come for one thing, the pistachio and chocolate escargot, a pinwheel of laminated pastry dough wrapped around a Kermit the Frog green paste of pistachio and speckled with chips of rich dark chocolate.

Eating the pistachio escargot is a delight that all should experience once, layers of dough as thin as filo that shatter as they are pulled from the coil, revealing a tender and soft inside laced with the fruitiness of pistachio nuts. The chocolate is a benefit but a side player here, little bitter nuggets of occasional pleasance. The quality of the butter is evident, leaving behind none of the glossy residue on the lips of cheaper product. Every bite is light and floral, the escargot fracturing to the touch in a way that only something baked with care could do, and a testament in freshness to the constant turnover of product as the long line shuffles through the shop.

Du Pain et Des Idées is baking for pleasure, not survival, it is hedonistic rather that instinctual and necessary. They are a testament to what can be done with the equation of flour plus water plus time. Many around the world, or even around France, are not so fortunate to have any of the three variables in the equation on a consistent basis.

I faced the antithesis in Cuba.

On my first morning in Havana I woke up early, eager to walk and explore. I landed the night before, darkness already shrouding the country, road lights sparse, the countryside drive from airport to city dense with a moonless night sky. I left the casa particular (a type of home stay) where I was sleeping and headed out with no destination and no plan. Although it was early in the morning when I departed, the streets and city were very much awake and alive with energy and noise.

Repaired 1950’s cars shudder loudly down pockmarked streets, screeching and hissing. Buildings seem to hum from the onslaught of buses and shared taxis on the streets below. Business is done face to face between security grates, as old women shout to each other through a garden fence, and kids cheer as they play baseball in the street. Domino tiles hit wooden tabletops in a series of constant taps as old men smoke cigars and chatter. Barkers try to attract for restaurants or shadier pleasures. Waves crash up against the colonial port. The ocean breeze clogs the ears like fog. Out of every worn out wooden front door comes the muddled noise of television or reggaeton beats. Rooftop bars have full bands tapping on bongos, shaking maracas, vibrating all night for the crowds of salsa dancers. Restaurants have wandering nomadic smaller band affairs, or a saxophonist who also croons. Bars have pianists creating magic out of an antique piano where half the hammers are either missing or bent. Paladaires have hip-hop on assorted screens. And for the end of Jazz week the clubs are flowing with experimental and improvisational hymns. Dogs are always barking. Always. And the horns are always honking. An old man shouts to a friend across the street. The friend shouts back.

The political plaza, Revolutionary Square, is eerily quiet minus the throngs of tourists, and it’s the silence that’s the first thing I notice, rather than the 100-ton steel statue of Che Guevara.

Walls are built thin so a neighbor’s secrets are your secrets. You hear them making dinner, taking a shower, shouting at their cat.

Havana is loud. And they’re proud of it.

After the noise, the most noticeable aspect of Havana life was the prevalence of scarcity. Walk through vast markets and find each stall with the same four or five options: tomato, onions, garlic, and eggplants. The first thing I learned to do when entering a restaurant, be it fancy or a corner shop, was to ask what on the menu they actually had? The server would point out fifty percent of the menu that they did not have available. No chicken at the market that morning, or perhaps no beans. A local journalist informed me that every Cuban citizen gets a food ration of rice, beans, salt, garlic, sugar, oil, and vinegar, without which many would have a hard time to survive.

The innate Cuban cultural condition is about the hustle. After a cigar factory tour the guide offered pilfered cigars outside the gift shop. A ride to the airport on the day of my departure ended when my driver dropped me off on the side of the highway a mile from the airport lest the police see him receiving money from a tourist. My casa particular host operated a six-bed home stay, was going to school for musicology, and ran nightly tour experiences around the Cuban nightlife scene, and she was only twenty-one years old. I met a doctor who told me that her monthly salary was $24 working full time at a hospital. She had a part time job at a coffee shop to support herself.

The only constantly available product was bread. Not elegant and artistically refined bread, but survival bread; fluffy white loaves with uniform scores on top, baked in massive ovens and made with flavorless wheat and artificial leavening agents. Bakeries had lines out the door as people tried to get a daily allotment. I must have walked by five different bakeries that first morning, each with identical loaves of bread.

“Make no mistake”, my host told me during a late-night discussion the day of my arrival, “Cuba is third world.”

I spent a lot of time in Havana mentally comparing it to Paris. Both have gorgeous grandiose architecture. Both have proud people full of rich cultural traditions. Both are cities I find particularly loud, Paris is also full of barkers, throngs of tourists, and cafes and restaurants that spill past their patios and onto the sidewalk. There is luxury to be found in both as well. In Havana it only takes a stop at the Hotel National to suddenly feel like I’ve entered a different city, with servers clad in fine suits and a grandiose view atop the Ocean for sunset, mojito cradled in hand. Both cities have an emphasis on arts as well, Paris with its world famous museums, Havana with the iconic Fabrique de Artes gallery center and the ever present cultural arts of dancing and singing. Both have a stubborn people, set in certain traditions, which behind their calloused veil are hospitable and courteous.

And both have bread. One loaf comes from a culture of years of oppression and exclusion, from an embargo that is beyond the control of the people, where daily living is about survival through hardship. The other bread comes from a place of content, where luxuries of elegance have the time and affordability to be pursued, and their success rewarded with long lines and waiting by choice, not necessity.

Admittedly, comparing Paris to Havana is a stretch. My last meal in Havana was fried rice, piled high with bits of salt pork and carrot, the only option available that day from the restaurant’s large menu. My last meal in Paris was at a three-course steak frite restaurant starting with a walnut salad and finishing with warm chocolate sauce drenched profiteroles. The cities could not be more different in a literal sense. And yet there was a feeling, electricity, a vibe that ran through both, that I could not shake off. Sitting in the grand lobby of the Hotel National in Havana, with my eyes closed I could have been at the Paris Ritz, pampered and happy, my feet in the grass, the sun on my face, cigar in my hand, sipping away the day.

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