Bachir Ice cream

Paris’s fist EVER Lebanese ice cream parlour has opened !

I was SO excited about hearing this news that I grabbed my husband and headed there on his afternoon off in the middle of a very cold January ! It was one of those crazy happy moments that we had. We just smile at each other and went for it in a spontaneous silly way.

This type of ice-cream is special for us separately, and it made us relive our happy childhood memory individually whilst being together. The first time both of us tasted this ice-cream was in Damascus, Syria, in our childhood. In a specific well know ancient roofed market (dating back to Roman times) named Al-Hamidyah Souq which is a mix of a Parisian passage and Middle Eastern bazaar. In the middle of the market you will find a small wooden framed ice-cream vendor called Bakdash. This ice-cream plaour is famous for serving THE best ice-cream, perfumed with rose water and topped with roasted pistachios. The flavour is so soft and sweet that years on we can still remember it. So when decades later I met and married my husband in London we jumped for joy at discovering a similar ice-cream parlour opened on Edgware Road in London and we went there few times with big smiles like the ones we had as children. Fast forward a few years, we are living in my husband’s home city Paris, we discover Bachir, a place truly fills us with happiness at recapturing our own individual childhood holiday treat that has transcended into an adult shared treat.

Bachir is not Syrian but Lebanese (however the taste is identical to me) ice-cream parlour that dates back to 1930’s. It has opened across Lebanon and it made it’s debut outside of it’s home country this year in Paris, France.

The shop is run by three beautiful talent women who thought of the idea and developed it. I spoke to two of them and they are so adorable and full of smiles. They are keen to keep the family tradition and values of Bachir. They use wholesome french local produce and authentic Lebanese ingredients. The staff are more than happy to guid you across the many Lebanese flavouring and serve you even traditional Lebanese coffee. You can sit inside and enjoy your perfumed ice-cream or you can not only take it away with you, but they have tubs of their Bachir ice-cream ready for you to take home and enjoy in your own time!

It didn’t matter that I was having ice-cream on a cold January day, what mattered is who I was with when I was enjoying the most delicate sweet cold dessert.