Une Glace à Paris

Ice cream built like pastry

Une Glace à Paris is a glacier and a pâtissier glacé, which is a narrower and more technical thing than an ice cream shop. Founded in 2015 by Emmanuel Ryon and Olivier Ménard, the house treats frozen desserts with the discipline of French pastry: crèmes glacées and sorbets, but also parfaits, nougatines, vacherins and omelettes norvégiennes, where the ice cream is a component in a constructed dessert rather than a scoop in a cup. Ryon holds the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France Glacier along with a world pastry championship, and the range shows it. Everything is made on site from selected milk, cream, eggs, vanillas, chocolates, coffees, pralinés and fruits, with the flavors moving through the year.

A workshop you can hear

The boutique is a production space as much as a shop. Machines run behind the counter, cream is whipped, nougatine is baked and cacao carries through the room, so the place smells and sounds like what it sells. Ordering is done at the counter, and the format list is long: cones and cups for now, individual portions and larger shareable pieces for a table, and half-liter tubs to take away. There are seats, in the French sense of a salon de thé attached to a sweet shop, meaning somewhere to eat a frozen pastry properly rather than a developed coffee or tea program. The house designs its glaces and patisseries glacees for every season rather than for summer alone, and the compositions are built on flavor harmonies and texture contrasts rather than on a long list of tubs. The pull is year-round; this is not a summer-only house.

Order a frozen pastry, not a scoop

Take a vacherin or an omelette norvégienne if you want to see what separates this house from a scoop shop, since both are pastry constructions that happen to be frozen. Parfaits and nougatines run the same idea at a smaller scale. Sorbets and crèmes glacées are the simplest route, and they are worth choosing by flavor rather than by habit, because the range shifts with the season. One piece shows how far the technique goes: a caramelized feuilletage with ice cream inside, sealed with a little Italian meringue so it can go back into the oven and be served crisp while the ice cream comes to temperature. Hot against cold, pastry against glace. Come expecting that kind of precision rather than an espresso and a bench.