The chapter begins with kings taking cooks and ends with brands taking cooks. Louis XIV tasted the bread at the Prince de Condé’s table in 1682 and took Charles Dalloyau; Gucci took Massimo Bottura from Modena in 2018. Same transaction, three centuries apart, and only the holder of the court has changed.
Four of these houses invented something structural. Stohrer, 1730, put pastry, wafers, gingerbread and sugar work under one roof and invented the pâtisserie itself. Debauve & Gallais, 1800, pressed a queen’s medicine into discs and made the first solid chocolate — the drink became a thing you bite. Dalloyau opened the first Parisian tea room in 1820, and Ladurée later made it the room a woman could sit in alone. Fauchon, 1886, invented the shop that exports a nation’s idea of itself.
Two of the maisons here were bought thirteen months apart in a bidding war between the two largest luxury groups in the world: LVMH took Cova in 2013 and Prada answered with Marchesi in 2014. These are the assets a group buys when it wants to own a city’s daily ritual rather than its wardrobe. Against them, the Dolfi family — confectioners who were suppliers before they were owners — hold both the oldest pâtisserie and the oldest chocolate house in Paris.
The chapter also contains a school nobody has drawn: Lenôtre trained Hermé, Fauchon’s laboratory trained Hermé and Grolet, and four rows here are stations of one career.