Gratitude Monday: Paris by way of Seoul

There’s a bakery/café in Santa Clara, a couple of miles from my place. It’s called Paris Baguette, but it’s actually a Korean-owned chain with outlets on both coasts. Since Santa Clara is the Northern California equivalent of Koreatown in LA, it makes sense that you’d find this where it is.

  

There are other PB stores in Palo Alto and Cupertino; both of them are more upscale and attitudinal than the one in Santa Clara, which is in a somewhat downmarket shopping center that also has a cheesy furniture store, a Korean market, a shoe repair shop, a hair salon and the like. The shoe guy is how I happened on the center in the first place.

The café part is a little run-down looking, but they’ve got good wi-fi, and power outlets to plug your laptop into. And their croissant-based pastries are lovely—flakey and tasty; you can’t eat them without making a complete mess with all the little crumbs.

Plus—they make the best latte of any place in the Silicon Valley. It’s my treat for the days I hit the gym; it’s silky, luscious and it sometimes comes with latte art:

The pastry offerings fascinate me. I tried the “Strewed Pea” twist a couple of times. For the life of me I cannot discern what “Strewed Pea” might be, but it’s kind of good. I’ve not tried the Tuna Pastry, but it seems pretty popular with the other customers.

(It’s interesting that they put it out next to the cream cheese pastry. You’d think the latter would pick up some of the taste of the former. But maybe not.)

Recently they’ve added a Tiramisu pastry, just at the weekend—a kind of croissant rolled around mascarpone filling & dowsed in cocoa powder. It’s completely decadent. I have to tap off a couple of tablespoonsful of cocoa and powdered sugar before I can eat it. Even so, I’m sure I walk around with cocoa smears on my face for half the day.

I enjoy spending a couple of hours at PB of a morning, writing, checking target companies and so on. I could do that at a couple hundred cafés in the valley; but the added attraction of PB is that I’m often the only Meeguk saram there. I love watching the Korean housewives who get together there for a nibble and some gossip. It reminds me of my time living in Seoul, although I never experienced anything like this when I was there.

(I can’t pick up much of the discussions any more, which is what comes of learning a language in a “conversation” class, not a proper language class. But there you are.)

It may be partly because I’m decidedly not Korean, and therefore stand out, but I’ve achieved “regular” status by virtue of me being there once a week. If counter people are free, the moment they clock me walking through the door someone starts making a latte. I was there a couple of weeks ago—the last time I had to take my car in to get the antenna replaced—and mentioned it to the blonde at the counter. This past Saturday she inquired after the car. I’ve definitely arrived.

So for Gratitude Monday today, I’m grateful that I have Paris Baguette, where I can savor a latte, get croissant flakes all over me and my keyboard, sit with a friend for a couple of hours talking, and people-watch to my heart’s content. I hope you’re lucky enough to have a similar place to get away from it all.