What You See is What You Eat.

After college, we traipsed around Europe. The first, and last, place in our too-many-places-visited-for-the-time-we-spent-we-should-have-planned-it-better-and-included-germany, dammit-tour was Paris. When we started in Paris, we were trying to save all of our monies in anticipation of the rest of the trip. When we ended in Paris, we had no monies as result of the rest of our trip, especially London, those expensive English bastards.

The one thing we could afford were croissants. Every place we went, we had croissants. Not only were they super cheap, they also were one of our Top 5 Best Things We Ate during that trip (the Top 1 Worst Thing We Ate being 2 quarter-sized samosas in Interlaken for $10). So flaky, so buttery, so soft like a pillow stuffed with clouds, the chocolate so genuinely not pumped through a hole in the bottom, but actually layered in there like the croissant was born with this swirl in its middle. We packed chocolate croissants on our bus trip to a field in the middle of nowhere to catch a Ryanair flight to Rome. Those chocolate croissants were so good that we both forced ourselves to keep it down while the plane landed – no small feat given that the pilot landed the plane the way I would land a plane, which is, with absolutely no experience.

Until Amandine, I hadn’t found a place that comes even close to the croissants in Paris. Oh, Amandine.