Le Parfait Paris, croissant
Le Parfait Paris
Ahhh, Viennoiserie. It’s how eggs, cream, butter, and sugar achieve transcendence. In the right hands, they become rich, sweet, airy pastries like pain au chocolat, brioche, Danish, and the classic to rule them all: the croissant. While ubiquitous, a truly good croissant that honors the historic French tradition is hard to find.
Enter Le Parfait Paris.
When Ludi and Guillaume Ryon first came to San Diego in 2008, they were pursuing careers in hospitality and finance, respectively. Guillaume’s shrewd business eye saw that large-scale hotels were starting to invest in bakeries. The husband-and-wife team started recruiting. “We wanted to recruit the best people we could find in France,” Guillaume explains. “We sold them the American dream of working and living in sunny San Diego. It wasn’t that hard to convince people.”
At first, Le Parfait was a wholesale operation, working with hotels in and around San Diego. “I realized that’s not the direction I wanted to take the company because it’s incredibly hard to be profitable and sustainable,” Guillaume says. “It took us nine months to open our first store downtown.”
Le Parfait Paris Exterior
Sabrina Medora
Downtown opened in 2014, and Liberty Station followed closely after two years later. The Ryon’s now have five locations—six, if you count their main kitchen facility in Mission Gorge. “We wanted to have a central bakery that provides the baked goods fresh every morning to all the bakeries,” he explains. “That’s a very big shift compared to most bakeries, where you have the kitchen in the back and the front of the store selling the goods.”
Again with his finance background, Guillaume recognized paying rent to have kitchens within each location was not as fiscally viable. But it was also a quality move. By centralizing the baking process in the middle of the city, he could guarantee the quality at all locations.
Every staple baking ingredient—from butter to chocolate—is imported from France. “For us, it’s all about taste,” Guillaume continues. “We want everything to be very, very authentic. And there’s no replacing those ingredients. It makes a world of difference.”
Le Parfait Paris, macrons
Le Parfait Paris
The pastries attest to this. Every macaron—from the Madagascar vanilla to the roasted hazelnut Nutella, lavender honey, Tennessee bourbon pecan, Sicilian pistachio, California strawberry, lemon pie—is balanced to perfection with moist, chewy meringue cookies and creamy ganache or buttercream. The desserts, like the chocolate Parfait Signature to the layers of ganache, mousse, and bread that make the banana toffee, are just right.
The plat de résistance is undoubtedly their two-pound croissant ($35-$45), customizable to include the dreamiest of fillings, creams, and toppings. There’s an argument to be made for Le Parfait’s standard offering of chocolate cream with shards of chocolate on top. It’s spectacular.
When I first heard “two-pound croissant,” I thought, ugh, stunt food. Stunt food (deep-fried Oreos! Bloody Mary with a full turducken in it!) often sacrifice taste for wow factor.
The exemplary lamination, the flawless bake, the consummate taste—Le Parfait proved me wrong.
