A new crop of small patisseries featuring one or two specialty products have opened in Paris in the past few years; Madeleines, eclairs, creampuffs are just a few on the list.
Maison Aleph, opened by Myriam Sabet in the Marais near Hotel de Ville, is a hybrid of Middle Eastern and French pastry. Sabet delicately combines the honeyed stickiness of pastries from her homeland of Syria with French-style cream puffs, producing a winning formula of not too sweet treats. She thoughtfully sources the best ingredients from around the globe including hazelnuts from Piedmont, Italy, pistachios from Sicily and Iran, butter from the Poitou-Charentes in France, Valrhona chocolate, lemons from Amalfi and butter from Normandy.
Speaking with Myriam, we discovered that we have the same heritage; she was born and raised in Aleppo, Syria, moving to Paris when she was ten. My grandparents came from Aleppo in the early 1900s, moving to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
Coming from the world of finance and starting anew with inventing pastries, Sabet aptly named her shop Maison Aleph, Aleph being the first letter of the Arabic and Hebrew language.
I grew up with homemade Middle-Eastern pastries baked by my relatives. As much as I liked them, I found the overabundance of honey overpowering, making them too sweet, so the pastries Maison Aleph were newly refreshing for me.
One house specialty is the mini-nests or Nids, based on the traditional shredded Kadaif noodles, updated and filled with flavors such as lemon-cardamom, mango-jasmine, fromage blanc-Damask rose, chocolate-sumac.
Another specialty is 1,001 layers, a new turn on the classic baklawa filo dough now containing flavors of white sesame and halvah, peanut and arak, hazelnut and lemon, walnut and cinnamon, and pistachio and orange blossom.
20 rue de la Verrerie, 75004
Metro: Hotel de Ville
Open Wednesday to Friday 12 PM to 8 PM
Saturday 11 AM to 8 PM, Sunday 11 AM to 7 PM
Dear Subscribers, There was a glitch on my blog server and some door photos from yesterday were repeated and others omitted. Here are the ones that were missing
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