G. Detou

My happy place in Paris...now even happier.

G. Detou is my happy place in Paris. When I first wrote about it, I said I couldn’t live in Paris if it wasn’t here. And while that’s still true, the shop has evolved since then, offering an even wider array of products than before, and it now offers a more spacious (and more efficient) shopping experience.

G. Detou was a jewel that needed to be preserved, but polished. The previous owner, who I featured in my book The Sweet Life in Paris, did an admirable job of keeping the place alive, especially as online shops eclipsed retail shopping and the cookware stores in the area struggled to adapt to a new retail environment. Visitors from other countries are now able to get the same things at home but without the schlepping. And some shops resisted the changes even further by not shifting to being more customer friendly. Fortunately, that’s changed.

French whole-grain mustard, in a variety of flavors.

But new owner Benoît Bourloton, who’s worked extensively in the field of vanilla, has gently remodeled G. Detou so it’s an easier place to shop in. He spent most of his career traveling the world, visiting chefs, pastry shops, and people who make ice cream, teaching them how to use vanilla beans, extracts, and pastes.

He knew the previous owner, Monsieur Thomas, who shared his passion for sourcing excellent ingredients and assembling the best of France (and select products from elsewhere) all in one shop. But he was ready to retire and wanted to hand the business to someone who would continue the legacy of G. Detou, so Benoît stepped in to buy it.

He’s kept most of the favorite items, such as tinned pâtés, Trablit coffee extract, flavorful nut oils, an array of French mustards, jars of delicious French honey, and added lots of new products, filling out their other shop next door with fresh and some slightly exotic products as well. If you like things that explode with flavor, do not miss the salted green peppercorns from Cambodia.

Highly prized pistachios from Iran.

In addition, new help has been brought in that’s—well…helpful. The store layout is easier to maneuver around in than the old-fashioned former one, although when it’s busy, elbow room remains at a premium. But you no longer have to stack your items on the counter, stand in line at the cashier window, pay, get a receipt to prove that you paid, then head back to the clerk with proof of payment to get your stuff.

French nut and seed oils.

The shelves and shelves of chocolate are still there, in all their various guises, shapes, and origins: bars, pistoles, chips, nibs, powdered, liquid, and even bonbons from the most esteemed chocolate manufacturers in France. I am sure I’ve bought enough chocolate here to have paid several months of their rent.

Bags of chocolate sold in “pistoles,” round disks or wafers, for easier measuring and melting.

G. Detou is the only place I know of in Paris that sells chocolate in professional quantities, which for bakers like me who use chocolate frequently makes more sense (and are better quality) than the Nestlé dessert bars that people buy at the supermarché. (Although the recipes inside the wrapper are pretty foolproof, and a lot of home cooks in France find them reliable.)

They also sell Valrhona cocoa powder and cocoa nibs in quantity, which I don’t know if anyone appreciates more than me. Valrhona cocoa powder is one of the few products that I mention the brand name in some of my recipes because it really does make a big difference in flavor, and it’s not cheap, so buying in bulk is the way to go.

An example of G. Detou becoming more “user” friendly: Previously, the cocoa powder was available only in boxes of three 1kg (2.2 pound) bags, and 6 1/2 pounds of cocoa powder is a lot of cocoa powder…even for me. Now they sell it by single kilo bags, so you don’t need to buy all three bags.

[If kept in a cool, dark place, I’ve found cocoa powder will keep for a number of years without a noticeable change in flavor.]

An especially unique product just turned up there, Wholefruit Chocolate from Cacao Barry, unsweetened chocolate made from 100% of the fruit of the cocoa pod, including the pulp and peel, which I’m curious to try.

100% pure pistachio paste

You can also pick up things like brilliant-green Iranian pistachios (shown farther above), hazelnut flour, a myriad of candied fruit, jugs of sirop d’érable (maple syrup), tart candied Amarena cherries, and lots, lots more.

I’ve had my head buried in remodeling this past year, doing most of my shopping in hardware stores rather than grocery stores. And I had to débarrasser (clear out) a lot of stuff during the move, including a dozen kitchen cabinets full of everything from jars of smoked cherries and smoked sugar to sorghum syrups and butterscotch-flavored chips, things that I’d collected over the years, which I’ve yet to use.

Now that I’ve caught my breath after a year of reassessing what to stock in my kitchen, I was happy to go back to G. Detou to rekindle and restock.

G. Detou was originally established in 1951 as a professional supply shop due to its proximity to the old Les Halles market, which was torn down in the ‘70s. For a while, it was more of a place where the domestiques (housekeepers) shopped for the households they worked for. Professionals still shopped there, but when you’re a pastry chef, you don’t really have time to go shopping for a few blocks of chocolate and a couple of kilos of nuts every few days. You order from a distributor, who delivers.

So G. Detou is now a place where anyone can shop, but it has a special appeal to home cooks and bakers who are looking for items that are hard to find for home cooks, such as cocoa butter, glucose syrup, praline nut paste, non-stick spray (hard to find in France!), candied fruits, artisan vinegars, and frozen fruit purees, which the chefs used when I went to pastry school in France, mostly for ease and consistency. I don’t have a lot of use for those except the passion fruit one, since passion fruits are harder to find and pricey, and the pulp doesn’t lose any zing when frozen.

G. Detou was practicing “curated” before it became a trendy term. Every item on the shelf is carefully chosen and there for a reason. It’s nice to see old-fashioned French treats, like Crème de Salidou (salted butter caramel) and prune-stuffed prunes, which I introduced to a well-known Hollywood director who I met in Paris a few years ago, who swooned so much over them when I took her to the shop that I feel obligated to send her a tin every now and then.

Not to brag about my brush with fame, but people who don’t know about France’s famed pruneaux d’Agen often turn their noses up at them, and they shouldn’t. If she likes them, the least you can do is give them a try. When I was looking up “pruneaux d’Agen” online to provide a link, I came across an article I wrote for the LA Times about them in 2008, titled, “Prunes: Better than the chocolates in Paris,” and I still stand by that.

But if I had to pick the star of the show here, while I’m a huge fan of the selection and varieties of chocolates on the shelves, many come to G. Detou to stock up on vanilla beans. Benoît took me into the room where they unpack the beans, which were wrapped in neat bundles, exuding the unmistakable aroma of sweet, oily, fragrant vanilla beans.

Packed in tight rows, the vanilla was powerfully fresh, and the smell almost knocked me over. I wanted to dive into the box. The smell of those vanilla beans was heavenly, and Benoît just nodded in agreement when he pulled out a few bunches of beans and stuck them under my nose and saw me savoring and enjoying a “moment”—just between me and the beans.

No one is happier than me to see that G. Detou is thriving under new ownership, and every time I go, I see new products there from France and around the world. I’m glad it’s still here in Paris…so there’s no reason to leave.

G.Detou
58 rue Tiquetonne (2nd)
Paris
Tél: 01 42 36 54 67

Opening hours: Monday through Saturday, 8:30am to 7pm

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