Stohrer

Nicolas Stohrer was pastry chef to Stanislas Leszczyński, then followed his daughter Marie to Versailles when she married Louis XV. He opened on rue Montorgueil in 1730, and the shop has not moved since. He invented the baba au rhum here. The interior, painted ceilings by a student of Paul Baudry (the Opéra Garnier decorator), gilded mirrors, the original counter, is listed as a Historic Monument. The repertoire is the canonical eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century French pastry stack: baba au rhum, puits d'amour, religieuse, vol-au-vent, savoury pâtés en croûte. Two minutes from Les Halles, on the pedestrian Montorgueil market street that is itself a Saturday-morning ritual.