Carette

Hot chocolate and a plate of macarons

Start with the hot chocolate under its cap of whipped cream and a plate of macarons: that pairing is the shortest route into what this house does. The tea-time format runs to five mini-macarons on one plate, which is the sensible way to read several flavours at once instead of committing to a single large pastry. Carette has been identified with the macaron for decades, and the chocolate is the drink most first visits are built around. Both belong at a table rather than at a counter, which is the first thing to understand about the place.

The rest of the case is classically French

Beyond the macarons the pastry list stays deliberately traditional. Croissants carry the viennoiserie side and belong in a breakfast or brunch order. For the classic French reading there are éclairs, glossy fruit tarts and a Saint-Honoré built on choux and cream. Handmade chocolates, sorbets and ice cream extend an order past the pastry case, while finger sandwiches and light lunch plates keep the salon from being a sweets-only stop. One sweet and one savoury is the version that makes sense of the salon de thé label rather than the patisserie label, and it is also the version that survives a whole afternoon at the table.

A salon de thé since 1927

Carette opened in 1927 on Place du Trocadéro and has worked as a salon de thé from the start, which explains how it behaves now. The Art Deco rooms, marble tables and terrace seating were built for sitting rather than queueing, and the format spreads across the day: viennoiserie in the morning, light lunch in the middle, tea and pastry through the afternoon. The terrace at the original salon looks straight onto the square, with the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower supplying the scenery, so people-watching has always been part of what you order there.

The house has since added salons elsewhere in Paris. The Marais room arrived in 2010 under the red brick arcades of Place des Vosges, done in a formal Louis XVI style that is quieter and more enclosed than the terrace-led original, while a Montmartre boutique on Place du Tertre deals mainly in pastries and macarons to carry away rather than the full salon. The through line is the same in each: a pastry list that has barely moved in a century, hot chocolate poured with whipped cream, and a room that expects you to stay an hour.