Every frequent traveler to Paris has a favorite shop, a unique place defining the best in art or antiques, shirts or socks, books or baguettes. The pleasure in these stores is not necessarily in the buying but in just being there, knowing that you are at the center of a small and very fine universe.
For serious cooks, the mecca is a dark, tatty and jumbled corner store called E. Dehillerin, just down the street from where the venerable Les Halles produce market used to be.
Dehillerin sells cooking utensils, but to compare it to the usual American cookware shop is like comparing the Grand Canyon to a hole in the ground. Generations of smitten shoppers have stumbled over themselves trying to describe it, like one writer for the Sunday Times of London who called it “the greatest, most civilized hardware store in the world . . . utensil Valhalla . . . as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the stockroom of the Louvre.”
He has a point. E. Dehillerin has been selling knives, pots and other utensils since the first E. (for Eugene) set up shop in 1820, to service the butchers, bakers, restaurateurs and other food purveyors who orbited the great market at Les Halles. Since 1890 it has been at the corner of rue Coquilliere and rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Chicago chef Jean Joho remembers it fondly from his youth. “Even when I was a student, whenever I was going to Paris, I would always go to Dehillerin. It’s a wonderful place, when you see all the tools they have. But it’s not just the tools, it’s the charm, the sensibility of an old family-owned store.”
When he goes to Paris now, he makes it a point to stop in. “It’s a real institution,” he says.
All in the family
Five generations of Dehillerin, all with first names beginning with E, have run the place. Today, Eric Dehillerin, the founder’s great-grandson, says that about half his customers still are professionals, who come in the early morning for the best cookware Paris has to offer. The other half are amateur cooks, not only French but from all over the world, especially the United States.
This is the point to Dehillerin. It is a store for professional French cooks, but home cooks can buy the same gear that the pros buy, at the same price. It is definitely not your typical cookware store: no lifestyle doodads or refrigerator magnets, no home coffee makers or toasters, no pretty jars for holding cooking spoons. If it’s not something that a true chef would want, Dehillerin doesn’t have it.
In this, of course, it’s not unique. Many restaurant stores, including some in Chicago, also sell to the public. What is unique is the sheer, overwhelming, stupendous range and variety stacked on Dehillerin’s wooden shelves, hanging from the ceiling, jammed into the basement.
Culinary menagerie
Dehillerin and his salesmen think there are 4,000 to 5,000 different kinds of knives, pots, spoons, pans, strainers, molds and other utensils in the place. But there are so many they’re not quite sure.
Whatever, a quick survey on a recent afternoon uncovered 26 kinds of whisks, 11 sizes of ladles, a forest of beech and boxwood spatulas, stockpots so huge–up to 25 gallons–that you could wash your dog in them, literally hundreds of different kinds and sizes of molds, a pastry chef’s dream.
There are 13 sizes of chopping blocks, spatulas more than six feet long (one customer uses them to make jam), huge perforated presses for making regimental batches of French fries, a copper-bottomed fish poacher costing $700, and the most expensive item in the place, a nickel-plated duck press, with webbed feet and a spout to catch the blood, a steal at $1,750.
There are, naturally, snail forks, lemon reamers, crimpers, scissors, brushes, brioche tins, measuring cups and enough corkscrews to pop anyone’s cork. Giant sieves hang from the ceiling, along with wire fish poachers and baskets for frying frites.
And the knives!
Twenty feet of knives, about 123 different kinds of knives, at a rough count. There are knives for mincing, for slicing meat, for slicing fish, for slicing salmon, for carving, for carving ham, for bread and for vegetables, for fileting sole, for peeling potatoes, for boning fish, a special knife with a V-shaped blade for cutting lemons into decorative halves. There’s even an eight-bladed knife for fanning cornichons. No kitchen should be without one.
But the thing that everyone notices first at Dehillerin is the blaze of copper, mostly because a table by the front door holds stacks of copper saute pans, saucepans, gratin dishes, casseroles and other pans, lined in tin, nickel or silver, all of a very satisfying heft. Not much here is lightweight.
Each item carries a number but no price. Somewhere at the end of the aisle hangs a loose-leaf, plastic-wrapped notebook matching each number to a price, both before and after tax. Most items bought by foreign tourists to be taken home escape the French value-added tax.
All these riches are displayed in premises that can only be described as shabby. The copper is polished once a year and most items are dust-free, but the place obviously hasn’t been painted in years. The linoleum runners on the old wooden floors are cracked and chipped, and the stairs to the basement are grooved and worn.
The last re-decoration?
“I wasn’t even born yet,” says Eric Dehillerin, whose “office” is a cluttered desk behind the counter. He is 47 now.
Changing scene
Les Halles itself, the old “belly of Paris,” was a raucous and chaotic place, where Dehillerin’s salesmen would often stray with customers for a few drinks, right up to the sad day in 1969 when Les Halles moved to the suburbs. Even after that, many of the other food shops stayed in the neighborhood. But the old butchers and bakers are dying out now, their shops are being turned into clothing boutiques, and the old atmosphere just isn’t what it used to be.
Increasingly, tourists are taking up the slack from the Les Halles-based professionals. Celebrities such as Catherine Deneuve and Francis Ford Coppola are regulars. Julia Child is a favorite: She helped popularize Dehillerin in the U.S. and her picture hangs on the wall above the counter.
“She used to like coming in here,” one salesman recalled, “and we’d all go and have a few drinks.”
“We’re not fashionable,” Dehillerin says. “We only started carrying electric goods in the 1970s–mostly meat slicers and the like for professionals.”
Any Cuisinarts? “No, that’s mostly for amateurs.”
“We’re traditional,” Dehillerin added. “Some people say we are the Barnum of the kitchen.”
Clearly, the family intends to keep doing what’s it’s been doing for nearly 200 years. Dehillerin said he has three sons and all their names begin with an E.
