I’m familiar with Pierre Hermé from Paris, as he has several shops around the city including one in Galeries Lafayette. I’ve never really been drawn to the atmosphere in the stores – it seems a bit stuffy, pretentious, and overly meticulous. There are a lot of colors mostly due to the macrons, but it still lacks character and charm. It just looks too rich and fancy to eat. Nonetheless, we were in the area and decided to finally give it a try.
They have several plain dark chocolates, including a dark chocolate house truffle, but when asked what the employee recommend, she immediately chose a specific one that wasn’t the house truffle. I do like employees with opinions. We purchased it. It was a small square of dark chocolate with a chewy filling on the inside and ended up underwhelming. It just had an odd, non-chocolately taste – almost as if it had praline or something else that wasn’t chocolate inside. We both registered the flavor right away, but have no idea what it actually was.
I wouldn’t try the chocolate again, but I would try a macaron if I were in the area. I suspect the macarons are better than the chocolates, but can’t speak definitively on the matter.
There are more macaron choices than there are chocolate choices, but we were told one of the most popular flavors (for both) is the rose. Not a fan of rose, but I do know many people are. For the macarons specifically, she said the sea-salt caramel (this seems to always be the case) and the pistachio raspberry were also quite popular.
