Quel dommage....buche de noel without a sparkler!

Buche de Noel

One year in the 1980s, we went to Paris for Christmas. We had thought at first of going to Portugal, just for a few days, for something different. Our travel agent--remember travel agents? what magic they were!--knew us and said, "No, you will just be bored. Go to Paris. That's where you really want to go." He was right. The worst part was the flight out of Miami, as we lived in Fort Lauderdale at the time; ten long hours across the Atlantic at night. But the best parts, and there were so many, far outweighed the misery of the flight.

When we landed on Christmas Eve day, it was snowing lightly. Magic already! We got a mid-day meal of some sort at a really horrid cafe near our hotel, the Hotel de Varenne, modest but nice and in the 7th arrondissement, to my mind the most lovely section of Paris. Then I bought a hair dryer as hotels did not regularly offer them in those days. I had memorized the phrases needed while being bored in flight. Then we took a nap, finally giving in to the jet lag. When we awakened at about six pm, we went out to seek dinner.

We found, on the Champs Elysees in the nearby 8th arrondissement, a restaurant called La Maison de L'Alsace. It is a panelling-heavy old-world restaurant serving huge trays of fresh shellfish, Alsatian specialties, and lovely wines.

It is impossible to get a table in a good and reasonably priced restaurant on Christmas Eve in Paris. But, for reasons known only to the gods of cultural appreciation, the maitre d' found us a table for two in a raised section of the restaurant next to a table for four--packed in, really--at which he shortly seated a couple, their ten-ish daughter, and a grandmama.

I had the Coquille St. Jacques. Sublime. What my husband ordered I cannot recall, but it probably had fish in it some way or other. We were enjoying the experience completely, not least because the service is perfect there and the French family, though we could not understand much of their conversation, was so engaging.

Finally, it was time to order dessert. I had never had, and had always wanted to have, a slice of buche de noel. Aha! There it was on the menu. Expensive, mon dieu! It was the equivalent of about ten bucks American at the time, VERY dear for the 1980s. What the heck? We were already spending three times what we had planned when the original cheap-date-Portugal-four-days trip had turned into ten in Paris. At Christmas. And New Year's.

My dessert arrived,  borne to me on a platter, adorned with a sparkler flinging points of sizzling light everywhere. I was charmed.

And so was the little girl at the next table. Her eyes went wide, her lips turned up into a wheedling smile, and we knew her Papa was about to spring for a ten buck dessert for his charming little girl.

I don't think I have ever, before or since, loved a dessert as I loved that piece of pure Paris in chocolate ganache on a silver platter.