Quite a while now i've been craving for sachertorte. Then i heard from a friend about this place, just around the corner from the busy Odéon. Pâtisserie Viennoise it is called and it has been there since 1920s selling viennese pastries such as strudels, kifli, linzer cookies... It happens also to be a perfect location for lunch, not far away from my workplace. And an opportunity to eat that long desired piece of cake.
It is a tiny place with an entrance you would most likely fail to notice if it weren't for all the pastries displayed in the window. Yet as everywhere in Paris, no matter how small it is, there will always be a place to sit down and have a bite sur place. The interior of this small eatery is old, with wooden tables and old framed posters on the wall. Rustic and cozy. It is absolutely packed during lunch hour, mostly by locals and students from the nearby universities (Paris Descartes and Sorbonne). Not surprisingly since having lunch there is probably the cheapest option in the neighbourhood.
As in every bakery or eatery of this kind it is popular to take a formule, an offer which includes main meal, drink and dessert for a fixed price. So i opted for a 12 euros formule, choosing a bowl of tagliatelle with zucchini, lemon and basil creme, which came to me literally without a pinch of salt. Luckily, the lemon gave a good cut on the otherwise tasteless bowl of what could have been a good portion of fine homemade tagliatelle (you simply have to put salt in pasta, ask italians). In austrian spirit my juice happened to be Rauch (quite a nice surprise).
Desserts can be chosen from the window display so i went out for a quick look althought already knowing that the sacher was there somewhere lurking to seduce me with its shiny chocolate icing. I took a glance to make sure it was there and ordered a piece. As it came to me on the plate, a suspicious feeling came to me of a worst thing that can happen to a cake - that it is dry. And it was. The good thing about the cake were the balanced flavours of not overly sweet chocolate icing and apricot jam. My already deflated enthusiasm was gone in an instant after having tried the poppy seed kifli. Coming from a country where these kind of pastries are extremely popular i was fairly dissapointed. It was probably a day old.
I've tried better pastries of this type back home so better for me to stick to more local kind of sweets. That shouldn't be difficult. And sachertorte? I'm considering an apricot jam topping on a moelleux au chocolat for my local bakery. That should do the trick.
Pâtisserie Viennoise
8 Rue de l'École de Médicine
75006 Paris
M Odéon
