Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [138]
Founded as a tea and vanilla import firm in 1854, Mariage Frères remained a family business until 1982, when it was sold to Richard Bueno and Kitti Cha Sangmanee. Marthe Cottin, the only family member who was still with the company at the time, shared her knowledge of the tea trade (which was considerable) with Bueno and Sangmanee, as well as her “priceless asset—an extraordinary address book rich with one hundred years of suppliers as well as clients.” Franck Desains, who created the company’s distinctive black and pale yellow packaging, joined the company in 1987, and he continues guiding the company with Sangmanee (Bueno passed away in 1995). (The family name Mariage has nothing to do with marriage or nuptials: the word comes from the old French verb maréier, “to run the seas.” In a nautical context, a maréage referred to a sailor’s contract for the run, a set wage for a voyage no matter how long it lasted. Before 1650 the family name was spelled in several different ways, but after 1650 Mariage was adopted as its official spelling.)
At the time Bueno and Sangmanee came to Mariage Frères, tea was barely noticed in France. But even when Sangmanee visited England to learn more about tea, he discovered that tea there was mostly sold in tea bags found in supermarkets. At fancy hotels that offered proper afternoon tea service the selection of teas was limited to five or six varieties, and Sangmanee realized that the quality and variety of tea he and Bueno were offering was far greater than that commonly found in England. Tea was woven into the fabric of British life but it was not considered a fine, high-quality product. Sangmanee realized then that the future of Mariage Frères lay in a “gourmet” direction: offering a large range of teas and seeking out the very best leaves and harvests in the world.
If Mariage Frères has since become somewhat ubiquitous (you can buy Mariage Frères tea at a number of stores in New York alone, for example), its rue du Bourg-Tibourg shop remains distinctive, not only for its interior but for its Musée du Thé, upstairs, which is filled with exquisite objets. Fans both of tea in general and of Mariage Frères in particular will want to immediately obtain a copy of the book noted above—it’s a gorgeously produced volume in its own slipcase, and its author Alain Stella, is “an enthusiastic connoisseur of the everyday pleasures that define cultures and civilizations.” (Don’t you just love that?)
Cafés
“Cafés are central to Parisian life,” writes Noël Riley Fitch in Paris Café: The Select Crowd (Soft Skull, 2007), which is a wonderful read both about the famous Select café of Montparnasse—in the immediate vicinity of Paris’s other legendary cafés, Le Dôme, La Coupole, and La Rotonde—and about the role of cafés in French life. “They have been called the salons of democracy because we are all free to choose our own café. Once you have cast your lot with a particular café, you in a sense ‘own’ the café (and it owns you!). Loyalty binds. ‘It is easier to change one’s mind,’ as one wag said, ‘than it is to change one’s café.’ ” Fitch and the illustrator of the book, Rick Tulka, are so fond of Le Select because it remains