Renée Kaplan, a Paris based Franco-American journalist, shares on her blog how the Baguette, one of France’s national symbols has been taken over by a Korean company. 

“Just a few weeks ago, a discreet offensive took place unnoticed.

At the end of July, while most of the French capital was scrambling to get out of town, a new boulangerie opened in the city’s historic 1st arrondissement, within walking distance of both the Louvre and Notre Dame.

Sounds like a banal event, just another of the hundreds of bakeries in the city (there is one boulangerie for every 2000 people).

And yet this boulangerie, selling baguettes, country bread, croissants and all the usual customary French patisserie like éclairs and pains au chocolat, is different: it’s Korean…

In a perfectly quiet and undeclared cultural infiltration, a massive Korean bakery chain called Paris Baguette, with nearly 4000 thousand stores in South Korea, China, Vietnam and the U.S., has just demonstrated the extraordinary cultural bravura of opening a French bread store…in France. Called “Paris Baguette.”

Find the full story on Renée Kaplan’s blog.