The place smells awful—like no odour I’ve ever known, and nothing like a bakery—but still, it’s crowded with tourists. I really wonder how people can stand the odour. Doesn’t it give you a haut-le-coeur? There’s no way a French bakery would stink like that. In France, the good smell of the bread and of the patisseries must reach you while you’re walking in the street. Intrigued, you have a look through the vitrine and you dribble in front of all those good stuff. Then you check your pockets to see how much money you can spend. You enter the place and a warm and heady flavour comes to tickle your nose. And you spend 10 minutes in the bakery store, hesitating between the chouquettes, the macarons, the eclairs and the viennoiseries.

Not that many choices here, in Le Panier. Actually, the place seems to be a touristic spot. But why should tourists go to a French bakery while they’re visiting Seattle? Weird.

I bought a baguette and a croissant in order to taste them. I was happy to discover that they didn’t smell like the bakery store. They even smell like French croissants and baguettes. The bread is crusty enough and looks good. Same for the croissant. And in my mouth, they’re not the best I’ve ever eaten but they are good.

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I was surprised by the price, $2.25 for a baguette. The bread has not been imported, so why is it so expensive to mix some baking powder with flour, salt, and water? In France, the average price for a baguette is 0,80 euro (about $1).

I would give this place a C+.

Good points:
• The location
• The taste
• The ambient

Bad points:
• The price
• The smell
• Lack of choice

120 replies on “J’ai Testé Pour Vous: Le Panier”

  1. Ok, Frenchie. First, $2.25 is cheap for a baguette in Seattle. Go to a grocery store and see what baguettes from good bakeries cost – up to $5.00. No, our bakeries do not have government subsidies like they do in France.

    Second, baguettes are made with yeast, not baking powder. Your supidity just makes you look …stupid.

    Third. This schtick is old now. When I was in France, I found lots of stupid things, too. Why don’t you go and try real, local foods – you know, food of the quality you would enjoy back home? Seattle is an amazing food place, just pull your head out of your a** and go find real food.

  2. Will the new French kid continue to keep Dan out of his usual throne atop Slog’s “Most Commented”?

    With posts like this, the answer seems to be YES.

    Keep it up!

  5. mmmm, France. Wish I were there instead of at work.

    Delicious dollar baguettes and yogurt every morning as you backpack around. Subsidized bread and milk products are da bomb!

    Now, if we could just get rid of those pesky Roma. Hmm, let’s see, that would be “cher-riff ar-pai-yo” on le google…

  6. @anita772: I think the trouble about baking powder and yeast is just a misunderstanding. In French, we say “levure boulangère”. I don’t know how you translate it, and I don’t really care.

    @Keister Button: It depends on the place where you are. Some corners of Paris don’t have any begar nor even a pedestrian, and some other are crowded with them, but aren’t they lovely?

  12. I’m torn. Julien’s methodology — head straight for a widely acknowledged middlebrow tourist magnet and generalize the results to demean all American bakery experiences — seems designed for maximum condescension.

    On the other hand, I enjoy watching gashes torn in Seattle’s smug delusions of cosmopolitanism and reading the limb-flailing defensiveness of all the butthurt commenters.

    Does Seattle excel in numerous culinary arenas, including (some) baked ones? Yes! But as @76 said, you’re chances of finding a good macaron here are nearly zero. Seriously, anyone who tells you that you “must try the amazing ‘macaroons’ [sic]” at Honoré or at Bakery Nouveau loses all gustatory credibility immediately and forever. Both have given me garishly flavored, soul-deadeningly stale crap-domes that made my taste buds cry. (Surprising exception: the matcha macaron at Fresh Flours is quite good! As inauthentic as the flavor is, they nail the texture and the combination works.)

    The same goes for croissants. This city has a handful of good ones, but many of its lauded favorites are trash (Bakery Nouveau, I’m looking at you again!). Even Besalu‘s, while delicious, never perfectly strikes the richness/lightness balance; it threatens to devolve into a pool of buttery goo at any moment. (Butter overkill exposes a related deficiency: you simply can’t extract French-tasting butter from American cows.)

    Which is not to say that Besalu and Honoré and Bakery Nouveau and even Le Panier don’t bake some other items amazingly. And Julien might be surprised to find a crêperie or two making Breton-style (savory) galettes better than anyone this side of Saint-Malo (note to the Capitol Hill-centric: 611 Supreme is not one of them).

    A trip to Le Panier was doomed to evisceration, and Julien has rightly been castigated for being a dick about his own poor choice of sample. Now wouldn’t his taste buds be better utilized on a tour of Seattle’s actual preferred bakeries, so that he might reveal some unexpectedly authentic gems while putting to bed this city’s love affair with dubious macarons?

  14. Julia Child’s favorite French bread in the US was found in Santa Barbara at Le Belle Miche in the 80’s. Imported oven, imported flour. Sadly, the owner closed her bakery due to illness.

    General rule in France: don’t buy your bread and your pastries at the same place. No one excels at making both.

  15. French intern asks: “But why should tourists go to a French bakery while they’re visiting Seattle?”

    And why the fuck would a french guy travel to Seattle, USA, to do an internship and spend his entire time bitching and moaning about how things are different than in France.

    Try to experience something (hoepfully positive) while you’re here and analyze simply as a facet of our current surroundings, not lamenting how it’s better back home. That’s how American tourists got such a bad reputaion.

  17. Hee hee. M. Massillon’s post cracked me up and so do the comments. Who knew Seattle people were so thin-skinned and defensive about the quality of their french bakeries? Some nice wits in the mix as well! I live in Atlanta, not Seattle, but our own city weekly is so lame and sad that I was perusing the Stranger for kicks and came across this post.

    Having a french person critique the local baguettes and croissants is a great idea. It is quite difficult to find decent baguettes here in the ATL–i just paid $3.50 for one yesterday and forget pain au chocolat. They are all overpriced, overlarge, dry and crumbly–often with icky chocolate chips inside. I used to get amazing pain au chocolat from a Monoprix in Paris–buttery and squishy with two bars of Eagle baker’s chocolate inside. All bakeries in Paris made them like this. Why do the U.S. people not get this? Please, Massillon, a sequel on the pain au chocolat in Seattle–or come to Atlanta. And props to the Stranger in general–you have a good ambient.

  18. Hee hee. M. Massillon’s post cracked me up and so do the comments. Who knew Seattle people were so thin-skinned and defensive about the quality of their french bakeries? Some nice wits in the mix as well! I live in Atlanta, not Seattle, but our own city weekly is so lame and sad that I was perusing the Stranger for kicks and came across this post.

    Having a french person critique the local baguettes and croissants is a great idea. It is quite difficult to find decent baguettes here in the ATL–i just paid $3.50 for one yesterday and forget pain au chocolat. They are all overpriced, overlarge, dry and crumbly–often with icky chocolate chips inside. I used to get amazing pain au chocolat from a Monoprix in Paris–buttery and squishy with two bars of Eagle baker’s chocolate inside. All bakeries in Paris made them like this. Why do the U.S. people not get this? Please, Massillon, a sequel on the pain au chocolat in Seattle–or come to Atlanta. And props to the Stranger in general–you have a good ambient.

  19. What’s more amusing than Frenchie’s posts are the number of evidently self-loathing commenters who get off on being dick-slapped with his baguette. Good lord, women, get up off the floor, it’s embarrassing.

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