Postings from Paris are full of personality
David Lebovitz, an expatriate author and former pastry chef, blogs about cooking and eating in Paris. His posts are both high brow and low brow, funny and weird, and sometimes almost embarrassingly revealing. "Most bloggers are just like their blogs," says Lebovitz, on the phone from his home in the City of Light, where he has been living for four years. "I wanted to make mine personable."
He's more professional than most bloggers. He's writing his fourth book. The most recent one is "The Perfect Scoop." Lebovitz updates the blog every couple of days with photographs, recipes, and rants, but it's not the typical boring and self-indulgent food diary. He shoots all the photographs himself with a digital camera, and acts as his own food stylist; the food looks ridiculously good.
Though sweets are how he made his reputation, his recipes are both savory and sweet: panzanella, the stale bread salad; his aunt Millie's kugel; buckwheat crepes; dulce de leche brownies; candied cherries; banana chocolate-chip upside down cake; Roquefort honey ice cream. He also offers plenty of kitchen tips. For tapenade, he advises rinsing the capers, mixing it with good olives, and using it as a sauce or a rub, not just as a spread. To make espresso, he says, you need "good beans, good water, and good grinding."
Lebovitz's lists of his favorite things are amusing and actually useful. Five travel items include a Tempur-Pedic eye mask, Excedrin PM, and noise canceling headsets. The cheapest Cuisinart ice cream maker is just as good as those that cost thousands, and if you ever wanted to know, he thinks that horse milk is pretty delicious. He describes is as "slightly watery with a light hazelnut taste."
The blogger dishes out advice on how to eat rich food all the time but stay thin -- describing himself. He walks everywhere and does yoga and pilates (he also has a black belt in karate and a second degree black belt in aikido).
A West Hartford, Conn. native, Lebovitz spent 12 years at Chez Panisse in Berkeley working with celebrated pastry chef Lindsey Shere. "As a cook it's the kind of place that you never really want to leave," he says. He published two cookbooks, "Room for Dessert" and "Ripe for Dessert" in California. Four and a half years ago Lebovitz moved from San Francisco to Paris. "It was for the croissants," he says. He lives in a rooftop apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower. "I had a job that I could take with me," he says. "I was just sitting at home in San Francisco writing and writing so I picked up and left. It was my life-long dream to live in Paris."
Lebovitz continues to write, usually in his pajamas, he says, and leads quirky bakery and pastry tours around his adopted city and week-long chocolate tours with stops in France, Belgium, and Spain. "The Great Book of Chocolate" came out in 2004.
Cookbooks pay the bills but Lebovitz prefers blogging. "It's very enjoyable," he says. "So unlike writing for newspapers and magazines, which is such a pain. By the time I've pitched a story and written it, it's old news. On the blog I have 7,000 readers a day. It's very gratifying."
He's obviously having fun in France, but he says that it's not all Edith Piaf and good butter. "Even Paris gets old, and I love going back to America," he says.
"The first thing I do is call customer service. Everything is so easy in America." 