Pâtisserie Noailles in Nîmes

Recently I had the chance to visit Nîmes, a very nice city in the region of Languedoc-Roussillon, in the south of France.

Nîmes is famous for its big Roman arena…

The Roman arena in Nîmes

…but also for the Maison Carrée, apparently the best-conserved Roman temple in the world (or so the audio tour said).

La maison carrée

And just a stone’s throw away from the temple, I found a nice pastry shop called Noailles.

Patisserie Noailles in Nimes

Well, actually I was well-prepared and I had found good reviews for Noailles on the web, so a stop there became mandatory.

When I visit pastry shops, I buy a few totally random products and check if they are good, well-presented and I particularly like when shop assistants know what they are talking about.

At Noailles, I bought a pain au chocolat for breakfast. Honestly, it was quite dry and, dare I say it, almost stale.

Then I visited the city and before leaving for Montpellier, I stopped at Noailles again: unfortunately I was travelling and far from home, so I couldn’t buy any cream-filled cake even though they looked really nice and not so expensive.

Entremets

Individual cakes

More individual cakes

I decided to throw myself on the chocolate shelves: there were different types of chocolate bars and it turns out that Mr Noailles is a chocolatier: this means he actually buys and grinds cocoa beans to make his own chocolate! Not everybody does that! I had to buy a few bars!

I’m not a fan of handwritten post-its

The shop assistant, though, was of no help at all: when I asked “What’s the difference between all these types of chocolate?” she replied with a vague “We have dark chocolate, milk chocolate, but then, to be able to understand the subtle differences between two types, you need to be really good like the chef“. And that was it.

Well, she might have been right, but you just can’t assume your clients are all incompetent! 🙂

Long story short: I bought three chocolate bars and they were OK. But the box didn’t have the weight of the bar on it so I could not get an idea whether 4,40€ was a high price or not. Moreover… the day after, I realized I had bought bars whose “Best before” date had already passed! Ok, it’s chocolate and there is no health risk, but come oooonnn………

So my brief stop in Nîmes allowed me to visit this pâtisserie but I was a bit disappointed in the end. It’s not “bad”, of course: it definitely looked like the best pastry shop downtown, but I was hoping for something more.

Or maybe I just fell on the wrong products: if you go to Nîmes and visit Noailles, let me know what you think! 🙂