We’ve got good news and bad news, and because we like to give it to you straight, we’ll start with the downer: World-renowned baker Dominique Ansel will sadly not open his first L.A. bakery this weekend, as previously announced. You’ll have to wait another week to try the James Beard Award-winning Ansel’s whimsical creations when the doors to Dominique Ansel Bakery open at the Grove on Friday, November 10 at 9am.
But it’s not all doom and Cronut-delay gloom: This Saturday, above the bakery, he’s still launching brunch service at 189 by Dominique Ansel—the chef’s first full-service restaurant—with dinner service to follow on November 11. And there’s even more good news: We now have a peek at Ansel’s L.A.-only pastries, including his first monthly Cronut flavor for Angelenos.
Ansel already owns bakeries in New York, London and Tokyo, and while they all serve registered-trademark pastries conceptualized by the chef, each location and its staff is encouraged to create its own pastries, cakes, ice creams and savory snacks. Here in L.A., we’ll be getting avocado toast.
In ice cream form. (Does the millennial-mortgage debacle extend to avocado toast ice cream sandwiches?)
“Every location has their own creations,” says Ansel. “Right now Tokyo, for instance, has about 80 percent of the menu created in Tokyo, but when it started, it was about 70 percent from the New York. So we’ll start with something similar [in Los Angeles]. We’ll bring some of our signatures from New York, and about 30 to 40 percent of the menu will be creations just from L.A., and then we’ll slowly create things more locally as we go.”
Of course, they’re not all so obvious. Some of these items, all between $6.50 and $8.50 apiece, simply draw from our state’s bounty and provide a new playground for Ansel—one where local oranges and gooseberries are available year-round. Take a peek at the L.A.-only items, then drop by the bakery when it opens next week:
Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Ansel Bakery
The California Roll, Ansel’s playful nod to sushi, is filled with avocado mousse, vanilla lime mousse, honey gelée and soft olive oil biscuit.
Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Ansel Bakery
This is the Paris-L.A., the Los Angeles version of the classic Paris-Brest. Here, it will be made with choux pastry and filled with muscovado ganache, orange blossom ganache and raspberry jam, then topped with poppy seeds and a chocolate poppy flower.
Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Ansel Bakery
Ansel’s Ruby Tart involves pomegranate seeds, lychee ganache, cherry jam and almond frangipane in a vanilla sablé tart shell, a dessert inspired by Dorothy’s ruby red slippers in The Wizard of Oz.
Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Ansel Bakery
This gooseberry-and-elderflower pavlova sandwiches local gooseberries, orange elderflower jam and vanilla mascarpone whipped ganache between meringue.
Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Ansel Bakery
The avocado-toast ice cream sandwich is a take on the dish in ice cream form, here made with avocado-and-olive-oil ice cream, ricotta mascarpone ice cream, atop house-made shortbread and topped with dragon fruit, freeze-dried raspberries, and olive oil and sea salt to finish.
Photograph: Courtesy Dominique Ansel Bakery
L.A.’s very first Cronut flavor—available only in the month of November—will be white peach with amaretto and muscovado sugar, which stuffs the croissant-doughnut hybrid with white-peach amaretto jam and tops it with muscovado ganache.
Dominique Ansel Bakery opens within the Grove on Friday, November 10, at 9am. Ansel’s first full-service restaurant, 189 by Dominique Ansel, opens with brunch service this Saturday, November 4, at 11am. Dinner service begins November 11.