Debauve & Gallais in Paris
What's old becomes new again at this legendary chocolate shop
“The way the French fuss over chocolates, you might think they had invented them. They didn't, but as in so many matters gastronomic, they have refined them, carefully coaxing and coddling their bonbons into existence, working until they've produced some of the smoothest, strongest, most intoxicating candies in the world,” wrote the great and prolific Patricia Wells in one of her columns for the New York Times in 1982.
Little has changed — the French still do chocolates best (sorry, I’m not team Switzerland or Belgium on this one) and I’d go so far as to say the most masterful can be found right here in Paris. I have my favourites, which you know from reading this newsletter—Jacques Genin, Alain Ducasse, Plaq, to name a few— but there are others that make divine gifts and have a rich backstory.
One particularly iconic but seldom mentioned chocolatier is Debauve & Gallais. With its signature forest green facade and gilded lettering that reads, Chocolats fins et hygiéniques (fine, hygienic chocolates) and, beneath it, Utile dulci (useful and pleasurable), the shop has been a Saint-Germain fixture since it first opened in 1800.
It’s a fascinating and so very French tale— the 225-year-old Parisian chocolatier was founded by the pharmacist-turned-chocolate maker Sulpice Debauve. As Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s pharmacist and later the official chocolate supplier to the Kings of France, he introduced chocolate as a health remedy to the royal court. As the lore goes, he was treating Marie-Antoinette for headaches and attempting to get her to take medicine which she found unpleasant. He mixed the remedy with cocoa, adding almond milk to soften the taste. These chocolate concoctions were in the shape of thin little coins that could be bitten into instead of consumed as a drink as was most common in the 17th and 18th centuries. If we’re to believe the brand’s story, Debauve effectively invented the era’s first chocolat à croquer (but I think their legal team might want a word with Cadbury which claims the same).
That crunchy or chewy remedy for one’s health found support in the seminal gastronomic text of the 19th century, La Physiologie du Goût, in which Brillat Savarin (a culinary journalist before his name was given to the triple-cream cheese) writes, “following the lights of a holy doctrine, Sulpice Debauve has also sought to offer his many customers pleasant medicines against some sickly tendencies. Thus, for people who are overweight, he offers analeptic chocolate with Salep; for those with delicate nerves, antispasmodic chocolate with orange blossom; for temperaments prone to irritation, chocolate with sweet almond milk, to which he will no doubt add 'the chocolate of the afflicted', amber-colored and dosed secundum artem”.
In our day, you might say chocolate is pure pleasure that may have the benefit of soothing the effects of late stage capitalism and looming apocalypse. Whatever the malady, the stuff has enduring appeal.
I hadn’t thought about the shop until I read that it was taken over by an investment firm (one of many: Louis Fouquet is another, hence the major glow up the brand has experienced in the last year. Influx of cash!) and then learned it was about to revive an old tradition I found fascinating— les Chromos. I reported a little dispatch for T Magazine this week about the latter (and I don’t really mind the former so long as the chocolate remains stellar) but I wanted to share photos of some of the archival versions the brand’s president showed me when we sat down together in December.
