Inside the Life of a Baker's Apprentice

After one too many twelve-course lunches, an American bon vivant in Paris turns his attention to simpler pleasures—and signs up for the early-morning shift in a busy bakery kitchen.

- Alexander Lobrano

Not long ago I found myself sitting in a neon lit bus shelter at 3:30 a.m. The sidewalks of Paris were black and shiny after a hard rain on a winter’s night. I passed the time waiting for the bus, half reading a magazine and eavesdropping on a pretty African woman with intricate black-cherry-soda colored braids who was chatting in a beautiful, lilting creole with a friend in faraway Mayotte, a French island near Madagascar.

After she ended her phone call, I could feel the lady staring at me. When I looked up, she smiled and asked, “Why are you here?”

“My job,” I answered brightly. “I’m going to work as a baker.”

She chuckled and arched her eyebrows. “Now that is some good honest work,” she said.

Once on the bus, I wondered at my new friend’s amusement: Did I really look so implausible as a baker? After all, I had once worked in a bakery—though that was a long time ago, in a New York kitchen where a messy mishmash of English, Spanish, Haitian French, and Yiddish was spoken and we drank beer and smoked joints all night while producing improbably decent scones and muffins.