The face that launched 1,000 walking tours.
Photo: Netflix/MARIE ETCHEGOYEN/NETFLIX

Emily Cooper, the fictional lead of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, occupies a very real apartment in Paris. It used to be listed as a tourist attraction on Google Maps with a perfect, five-star rating — from all eight reviews — but it recently got removed. Perhaps the ten-foot tan double doors that lead to where Emily experiences love, friendship, and a cast-iron skillet in her toilet are no longer of note for most of the city’s tourists, but they are still the first stop on the Emily in Paris walking tour.

I arrive late and hung-over for the 10 a.m. experience. (The stranglehold Aperol has on the continent of Europe and those who visit cannot be underestimated.)

“Welcome! It’s okay!” our guide, Natacha, says, consoling me. “Today is going to be Nicole in Paris, Kaya in Paris, and Zach in Paris!” My tourmates are a mother-daughter pair from Switzerland. I expected the trek to be full of selfie-obsessed Americans, a gaggle of real-life, out-of-touch Emilys in bedazzled black dresses and red berets, but the universe reminds me the Swiss appreciate cheese, too. The mother seems eager; the daughter seems 14.

“We are going to be following a day in the life of Emily,” Natacha announces with an enthusiasm usually reserved for children’s television. She developed the tour herself and might, from my informal polling of everyone I met, be the only Parisian who likes Emily in Paris.

“Is this Emily’s bakery?” the mom, Nicole, asks, pointing to a small black and brown store with La Boulangerie Moderne written on the awning in a thick, buttery font.

“You are one step ahead of me,” Natacha says.

Next door is a more important site: the burgundy-fronted restaurant run by Gabriel. The restaurant is real, opens at noon, and serves Italian, not French — a little monument to a centuries-old food fight.

We begin our journey to Emily’s workplace across town, but Kaya has already hit a roadblock. She’s using a scooter since a recent injury has her in a boot, but the terrain is too uneven. She switches to crutches.

“Emily in Paris was created by Darren Star,” Natacha tells us, “who also wrote the show Sex and the City.”

“I think he also wrote Grey’s Anatomy,” Nicole adds, launching into a monologue about Meredith Grey, a character most certainly created by Shonda Rhimes. I don’t correct her.

“Who are your favorite characters from the show?” Natacha asks.

“Sylvie,” the daughter, Kaya, says, referring to Emily’s stern French boss. “Because she is mean.” (Ice cold, Kaya.)

“The downstairs neighbor,” I answer.

“Oh, you mean the Hot. Chef. Gabriel,” Natacha says with a grin.

“Gabriel is my favorite too,” Nicole adds. “But for different reasons,” she says with a wink.

“No,” I say. “For the same reasons.”

I’d only just binged most of the first season on the flight over. It was the perfect plane-to-Paris show; while the passenger next to me watched Garden State (it starts with a plane crash), the only explosions in my feature presentation were cultural and carnal. The rest of the U.S. watched the show in October 2020; the click of a button took viewers from shelter-in-place couches to a sugary-sweet Paris-dise, where no one dies and your biggest problem is juggling all the hot boys you’re fucking. I was catching up, with similar aspirations.

As Nicole continues on about Grey’s Anatomy (“It’s a bit like ER”), we continue on to the majestic Panthéon, a centuries-old structure with wide off-white columns and a massive stone dome. Natacha points away from it to a black toothpick-thin lamppost.

“Does anyone know what happened there?”

“This is where Doug tells Emily he is not coming to Paris,” Nicole answers. Doug is Emily’s long-distance Chicago boyfriend who does something only a straight man would ever do: pass on a chance to visit Paris.

“Yes,” Natacha says with a performed frown. “There are things in life that seem like bad news but end up being good news. Emily had to be dumped by Doug so she could commit to Paris.” I did not expect philosophy on the Emily in Paris walking tour.

“Next we’re going to the poshest toilet in Paris.”

At the Samaritaine department store, you can drop a deuce and thousands of dollars. It’s seven floors of top-shelf luxury goods, and the highest floor is the setting for a very important scene in the show that I hadn’t yet gotten to.

“Sorry, Zach, for the spoiler!” Natacha apologizes, two fists in the air. “I must do it for the tour!”

On the ground floor, Natacha grabs a sample of her favorite perfume, La Vie Est Belle, from a display and sprays our wrists like she’s spraying Champère.

Nicole’s in the market for a new scent. “It is how you know you’ve become old,” she says. “Your perfume is discontinued.”

I ask how she and her daughter learned about the tour, and she said her husband found it for them.

“And where is he?”

“Working out with my son.”

Kaya was getting a workout, too. I wondered how much of this tour was for mother-daughter bonding and how much was for mother.

“Do mostly women take the tour?” I ask Natacha.

“Boyfriends and husbands will come and say they are watching the show for their girlfriends and wives, but they end up knowing more about it than the women do,” Natacha says.

As we near the department-store exit, Natacha announces she’ll be delivering her “one joke” of the tour: “We are going to meet my BFF.” She pauses, then takes us outside and points up to a building with a black engraved sign that practically whispers Louis Vuitton. “There he is,” she says. “My BFF: my Best Fashion Friend.” I laugh as a courtesy, an act of international diplomacy to keep Franco-American relations intact.

“I’ll be here all week,” Natacha adds.

We pivot to competition.

“Do you know what this place is?” Natacha asks. “Whoever gets it first wins the Bragging Trophy. It is invisible, but it is fabulous.”

I couldn’t place the place; it looked like any other collection of gorgeous stone buildings I’d seen in Paris.

“You know it,” Natacha encourages.

Nicole, against all odds, says nothing. Eventually, I spot a triangle on a sign in the distance.

I say, “The Louvre!”

“Yes!” Natacha cries.

Take that, Nicole. The Invisible But Fabulous Bragging Trophy will not be surrendered to Switzerland.