Michel Chaudun, Chocolatier

While Parisian chocolate shops range in style from chic modernism to temples of nostalgia, one shop remains a timeless world of wonders. On a quiet corner of the rue de l’Université, Michel Chaudun has for years produced some of the city’s most exquisite chocolates. Chaudun is an artist—you can see some of the lovely drawings and watercolors he created as a child in a charming shop window that includes his report cards and school pictures. Besides traditionally shaped chocolates, the shop is filled from floor to ceiling with trompe l’oeil délices including a gargoyle, a Black and Decker drill, an Hermès Kelly bag and a remarkable glossy chocolate chestnut bursting out of its hand-painted prickly marzipan hull. Two of his finest creations have been widely copied: dark chocolate pastilles filled with éclats de fève (crunchy bits of cocoa bean), and pavés, luscious little cubes of cocoa-dusted ganache. Let one of Chaudun’s pavés melt on your tongue, and you’d swear that Linnaeus tasted one before he named chocolate Theobroma cacao, or “food of the gods.”

149 rue de l’Université, 7th. Métro: La Tour-Maubourg. 01.47.53.74.40