Berthillon, ice cream maker on the Île Saint-Louis since 1954

Berthillon is an ice cream maker born in 1954 on rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. That year Raymond Berthillon, a baker and the son of bakers, came to run Le Bourgogne with his wife Aimée-Jeanne, the café and hotel her family had kept since 1928.

He kept the sorbet machine from his bakery and dared to make pure fruit sorbet, when the sorbets of the day were made with egg white. Children from the nearby schools were the first to taste them. In 1961 Gault and Millau wrote in Paris-Presse of “the astonishing ice cream maker hidden in a bistro on the Île Saint-Louis”.

Bernard Chauvin joined the family in 1971 by marrying Marie-Josée, and their son Lionel Chauvin later worked beside his grandfather. The ice creams are still made in the “lab” at the back of the shop, and the house still closes during school holidays, as the grandmother wished.

On rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, the shop at number 31 and the tea room at number 29 serve the house flavours: wild strawberry, marron glacé, honey nougat, pine nut praline, extra bitter cocoa, exotic fruit sorbets. Ices are sold in cones or shaped by hand in the original steel moulds to take home.