Sharing bread with Macron

-


There is something almost embarrassingly predictable about loving Paris. Everyone does.

Tourists swarm it, Instagram has colonized every corner, and here we are again - Rita and I - walking the Paris streets in early April with the giddiness of people who really ought to know better.

We have long since lost count of our visits. At some point the city stopped being a destination and turned into something more like a habit. A good one. Not a growth journey, not an opportunity to discover who we really are at depth - just a place where we reliably feel more like ourselves than we do most other places.
 

This spring we have rented an apartment in the 14th and early today we went by one of our local boulangeries, Fournil Didot, where a baker named Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan - who came to France from Sri Lanka, spent years making macarons, and somehow ended up making the best french bread.

In 2026 he has demonstrated his abilities by winning the Grand Prix de la Baguette, which  is a yearly competition where bakers all over the city battle to be the one, who for the coming year will deliver bread to the French president and his guests 

As the winning bakery, the Fournil Didot now delivers thirty loaves to the Elysee Palace every single morning. 
 
This is Macron's bread, and now it is ours too! 
 

Rita and I eat it standing on the pavement, pulling it apart with our hands. No butter, no ceremony. Just bread, crust still faintly crackling, the mild sour tang of a proper overnight ferment.

Frankly ridiculous how good it is.

The presidential connection is of course entirely beside the point. The baguette would taste the same without it. But there is something quietly satisfying about the arithmetic: for €1.30, you eat what the president eats. 

A man who grew up in Sri Lanka, who had never once thought about bread before arriving in France, now bakes for the Elysee.

Worth noting. No grand lesson attached.
 
 

 



 
 

Comments

  1. AliceApril 8, 2026 at 9:59 AM

    Stop you’re making me hungry!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousApril 8, 2026 at 4:07 PM

      When I resided at n the 16th, the Boulanger at the corner had previously been voted best in Paris. Getting two baguettes each morning was my ritual. I was my reason to get out of the house. ~george krassas

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What No Moving Box Can Hold: Saying Goodbye to Our French Mountain Home

-
Image
Selling a house should be regarded as just a transaction.  That, at least, is what one of our more unsentimental friends told us. Yet, as we packed up our now-sold townhouse in the mountain village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in Southern France, we found that the cardboard boxes stacked in our living room represented more than mere containers for transporting objects. They were, in fact, inadequate vessels for what we were truly attempting to pack: Almost twenty years of lived experience. The real estate listing described our house as a "charming two-bedroom property with traditional features," but it failed to capture what this place actually represents.  This has not just been our vacation house. During the last many years it became truly our home away from home as the seasonal rhythms of our visits created a peculiar form of belonging.  Though we were never full-time residents, the village baker would greet us warmly upon our arrival each year, and the neighbors woul...
Read more

Lisbon: Crumbling Warehouses and Crispy Sardines

-
Image
Yesterday, our journey along Lisbon's shores took us from decay to delight.  We began the day by walking along the crumbling warehouses and abandoned factories at the Cais do Ginjal, and we ended with golden sardines and moist monkfish at the Ponto Finale restaurant, experiencing some of the cur.ious contrasts this city has to offer.  Cais do Ginjal - the waterfront across the river from the city proper - were once thrumming with activity, but  now they stand empty as a relic from Portugal's industrial past while slowly succumbing to rust and decay.   Wandering past the locked warehouses with their peeling paint and cracked windows, one could almost hear the ghosts of ships being loaded years ago.  Wildflowers sprouted from brickwork worn by salt air and time. Graffiti swirled vibrantly across deteriorating walls in attempts to reclaim these forgotten structures. In one warehouse, an entire wall had collapsed, exposing rusty pipes and machinery ...
Read more

Lisbon: Crawling Through Time: Reflections from secret Roman Galleries

-
Image
Yesterday, I crawled through muddy, dark Roman-era tunnels below Lisbon, which are normally filled with groundwater and only accessible to a few visitors each year. The tunnels were carved during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and for centuries, they directed underground rainwater while the empires above rose and fell. Eventually, they were completely sealed off and forgotten,  only to be rediscovered by chance during the rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake, which had turned most of Lisbon into rubble. Today, the crypts are pumped dry on a couple of days each year, and the only entry to the below is through a narrow shaft in the middle of the busy Rua da Conceição, right between the rails of the 28 tram line. The stairs  leading down are steep and risky, and when you finally reach the galleries, a few lights illuminate the void that had stood in complete darkness for more than a Millenium  Some of the tunnels are so low and narrow that you have to climb through t...
Read more