An American in Paris—with Brownies

In his bittersweet memoir, David Lebovitz, the former pastry chef at Berkeley's legendary Chez Panisse, moves to Paris and delivers a tale of love and loss, with 50 decadent recipes.

Even restaurants in which the sweet course is treated with as much reverence as the savory, pastry chefs are generally relegated to their own little section of the kitchen where they can wield with persnickety precision their bronze magyfleurs, stainless-steel fondant smoothers, and rubber sugar pumps, far from the macho, knife-and-fire worlds of the garde manger, saucier, and rôtisseur.

Most are delighted to reside in ivory butter-cream towers far from the roiling, boiling, chaotic hoi polloi below. But David Lebovitz, author of The Sweet Life in Paris, isn’t your average pastry chef.

San Francisco and Paris are the antithesis of each other, so it’s unsurprising that Lebovitz’s move from the land of green-tea-swilling Zen masters to the land of wine-guzzling stress cases was rife with lost-in-translation hiccups.

Lebovitz was a pastry chef at the culinary mecca Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, for 13 years before hanging up his pastry bag to write cookbooks ful-time. The author of six other books, including Room for Dessert and The Perfect Scoop, he’s also an avid blogger offering up a Parisian-centric compendium of recipes, travel tips, and Wine-ing (his phrase).

While he couldn’t be accused of a failing to possess the requisite personality profile of a sugar wizard—he seems a touch high-strung, immoderately obsessed with butter—Lebovitz is a man who likes to roll with the peeps (the human ones, though I wouldn’t put a secret affinity for the marshmallow ones past him either). His wide-eyed embrace of adventure is what sent him, middle-aged and self-employed, dashing across the pond to La Ville-Lumière from San Francisco. The impetus was the unexpected death of his longtime partner; he left to pick up the pieces in Paris and start a new life.

The Sweet Life in Paris. By David Lebovitz. 304 pages. Broadway. $24.95 Many a madcap adventure and six years later, he emerged—slightly pudgier, much wiser, his groove most definitively back—with The Sweet Life, a memoir of his attempt to find his place in a city not universally celebrated as a beacon of open-armed hospitality for middle-aged Americans whose French-language skills consisted of the phrase croissant au beurre.

His new book is an insouciant and instructive frolic, written in the same hepcat, casual but intelligent style familiar to readers of his blog. In The Sweet Life, Lebovitz includes 50 sweet and savory recipes (the chocolate-coconut marshmallows and bacon and bleu cheese cake recipes are reason enough to buy the book). He also offers innumerable tips that will help visitors not look as foolish as he on many a wittily documented occasion, and a handy-dandy list of obscure and well-trod gourmet hubs to hit in Paris. His balanced assessment of Paris and its inhabitants will appeal to Francophiles and those who are still eating “freedom” fries. And his accessible focus on food will whet the appetite of gourmands and food novices alike.