I had a doubt about this one when I saw its name. Because Bakery Nouveau doesn’t mean anything in French (and in English, neither). In French, “boulangerie” is a feminine noun, so the adjective after should have been “nouvelle” and not “nouveau”, which is the masculine for “new.” No French person could have made such a mistake. I know it is hard for you to find out when it’s a masculine noun and when it is a feminine one, especially since there is no rule concerning this.

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But when French is your mother tongue, you just know. The name of this bakery had clearly not been designed by a French person.

As I was searching for the French guy behind all this, an employee gave me the answer: There is no French baker here. It’s just “French-inspired.” The inspiration may have lost its source then. I nearly fainted when I saw a peanut butter cookie. That would be an abomination in a French bakery.

In fact, Bakery Nouveau succeeds by moving away from mainstream bakeries. Right after entering the shop, you may have a look on the different praising articles about how wonderful this bakery is and how much its founder, William Leaman, changed the world of baking. Indeed, I had never seen croissants with these shapes. But I was upset about the mix of all those pastries with different origins: American scones, Danish apples, and French pain au chocolat on the same row. Uncommon, unusual. It is nouveau, ça c’est sûr.

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It is this sense of change and innovation that was rewarded five years ago when Leaman won la Coupe du monde de la boulangerie. He may have deserved this, even if I preferred the croissant from Le Fournil. But fame and glory may have given him delusions of grandeur. Eating here is expensive. You’ll have to pay $3,50 for a baguette and $2,25 for a croissant. Usually, when you can’t finish your bread, you give the rest to the pigeons. Here, you’d better swallow it all even if you’re no more hungry. Furthermore, the place is a bit dark. Yeah, I may be trying to find this place more drawbacks than it has because I’m frustrated since Leaman won the Coupe du monde while the French team was only second. That was so unfair.

I think that Bakery Nouveau deserves a B-.

Good points:
• The food is good.
• They dare create new things you’ve never seen before.

Bad points:
• They’re not French, and that’s the whole point.

86 replies on “J’ai Teste Pour Vous: Bakery Nouveau”

  3. Les japonaises get the French wrong too in their store names. I don’t care — their versions of European cafes are superior to what’s available five miles from my house.

  5. C’mon people. You know what to do. Let’s rack up the comments, even if you don’t want to.

    Lie back and think of England. (Do Parisians have a similar phrase?)

    Seattle, when you are through with this intern, send him to the Twin Cities. We have some pretentious French bakeries and cafes that need to be taken down, too.

  7. call me ignorant but what is the difference between a boulangerie and a brasserie? I saw tons of bakeries in Lille labelled brasserie but none labelled boulangerie. forgive me though. I have only been to northern france. dun dun dun.

  10. Most of the croissants I ate in France seemed to be made with margarine. I’ll vouch for Besalu once more- better than any I had over there.

  11. When are you going to review La Boulengerie in Wallingford, mon ami? Best croissants in town, made by a Vietnamese guy who learned to bake when the French were all up in his country.

  12. Pastry school. Culinary arts? French in origin. There isn’t a problem with this. They learn their shit, then they go open a bakery. They don’t make a killing, and work their asses off.

    $2.25 is the going rate for an artisan made croissant here, btw.

  15. So, this tour of Seattle bakeries is interesting and all, but it lacks a little substance.

    Julien, you are a black man visiting a country that has a long and tangled history of racism and is currently struggling with virulent religious intolerance (in the guise of political boostering). France has its own tangled history with racism and religious intolerance, too. Your government just passed a law outlawing the burka, and there remain tensions about the place of africans in France. I would much rather read your thoughts on this then the next mediocre seattle bakery, because this is the shit that actually matters.

  16. I heart this guy.

    BTW could he please go to Howard Schultz and tell him he’s not serving “chocolate croissants” because they are not in a “cross” shape? Bon jour!
    They’re just plain old pain chocolat.

    (After that we can start on how they should not call it “the New York” as in “oh you want a Seattle Times, and the New York?”).

  23. As someone who lived in Montreal for 4 years, this article is not right in its whining.

    Any french person would understand the meaning of bakery nouveau and would have no problem with the gender. If a French person wanted to use the word nouveau instead of nouvelle they WOULD call it Bakery Nouveau, and if they wanted to call it Bakery something, they would just pick whatever gender they felt like. Boulangerie is feminine but bakery is whatever you feel like since it’s not a French word.

    Also $2.25 for a croissant is completely reasonable, you’d probably pay more in France.

    Maybe this place is annoying for other reasons. But these aren’t the right reasons.

  28. A “B-“, you say ? Don’t you Frenchies grade on a scale of 0-20 ?

    You’re not French. J’accuse !

    (P.S. : The commas-for-periods trick was cute, though. We caught it.)

  29. @ 24

    please monsier, montreal?

    C’est n’est pas la France!

    Do you thinking you know the English by the living in Texas or the Mississippi?

    You must be choking!

  32. Hey you, Frenchie…. Please make up your mind about your headers in this series. You’ve spelled “test” several different ways.

    Quelle frommage…..

  33. @ 30 JVM is referring to language more than culture. I think that his argument is valid. Bakery is an English word and has no gender, so nouveau is appropriate. If anything, it should be very readily accepted by the French since the masculine tense is the one used in situations where there are both genders.

    Plus, in some ways, Quebec is more strict about the French language than in France. In Quebec, a parking lot is stationnement, but in France it’s a parking.

  35. It’s either $2.25 or 2,25$ if you’re Frenchifying your dollars. It’s not dollars anyway it’s euros (€) anyway. If you really want dollars in France go to an American Excess… er Express office. I’m not sure what good dollars would do for you in France, but…

  39. OK, I swear this will be the last time I comment on one of the French Intern’s posts. Seriously, Slog? REALLY. Hire a French intern and have him come criticize American supermarket culture and our poor attempts at French bakeries? Whether this is an earnest critique of Seattle, a meta-level joke about French and American cultural differences, or some kind of ironic ‘in’ joke by the Stranger staff involving a fictional intern, all I can say is: YAWN. I am le tired.

  40. I’m with Gloomy Gus @31. I really enjoy these reviews, but they would be much improved by Julien being in the pictures. Personally, I think pictures of him eating the foods would be the best. Maybe even video clips. In slow motion.

    @24 – yes, clearly you have a better idea of the cost of croissants in France than the French guy who has recently arrived from France.

  44. @41 Oh please…. The guy didn’t even know that bread is made with yeast or that France subsidizes bread production.

    Some people here have shown that they do in fact know more about his home country and subject of baking than he does. It’s kinda the point, n’est-ce pas?

  47. who really cares if its just like the ones in france or not. i mean really. we’re not in fucking france, we’re in seattle, usa. i have stop trying to compare the dim sum from hong kong to the dim sum in seattle, because we’re not in fucking hong kong. if its good just eat it and enjoy it, it’s chinese seattle food. or what ever you want to call it.

  48. So the only body of work you are going to have to present to future employers from an international internship is reviews of bakeries posted on a blog?

    If I were you, I’d feel used and mildly insulted by the Stranger.

  50. …and since these write-ups are poor, you won’t have anything at all for your portfolio to begin with, heaven forbid an English speaking employer seeing any of these comments…See, when your name is googled, all of this will be the top results, you know that, right?)

  52. That really is pretty funny, you know. I can see it now: Future employer Goggles his name, pulls up these posts, and (not knowing the first thing about Slog) reads comment after comment of us calling him a stupid, ignorant, lame-brained nitwit. I’d pay money to see that.

  53. @45,

    That he doesn’t know the details of French food production means he doesn’t know how much shit costs in France?

    @17,

    Croissant means crescent, not cross.

  54. Bakery Nouveau seems to be pretty full of itself. I think it is overpriced and not very good, regardless of it’s Frenchery. I do like the cheesecake, though. Otherwise, big “meh”.

  55. EDITORS: Please do this French guy a favor by forbidding him to write about food. It’s boring as shit and he’s not being challenged to get out of the insecure shell of stereotype Frenchness he’s built around himself.

    Perhaps he could be forced to write about right-wing masturbation and racial/class warfare.

  56. @45 – Looks like #54 beat me to it.

    And P.S. @ 50 and anyone else whining that Julien is hatin’ on your food: correct me if I’m wrong but he has stated that the food is good at each of the 4 bakeries he has visited. He was negative toward the supermarket food, but let’s be serious, it’s justified.

  58. @ everyone: the ugly-American chauvinism is hilarious; we simply can’t stand being critiqued by any furrener. And coming from Seattleites, who view themselves as so world class, and above flyover country, even more so. We even have folks lecturing a French person on his own language and mores.
    @54: okaaaaay…..d’accord, mea culpa, touche. Permitez-moi de me moi correger moi meme, d’accord?
    Dear Howard tell your baristas to stop calling pain chocolat “chocolate croissants” — they are not *crescent*-shaped.

    (And they say the French are particulier….)

  64. @63 – that would be interesting to find out. But I’ve noticed French people tend to not do multiple things when they eat. It’s usually a meal and wine – OR dessert and coffee. Never both, unless it’s a grand celebration.

  65. I love these posts they make me smile. And, please lump me in with Gus and Dee as wishing to see some pictures of you too. I love to eat, but men are more beautiful to look at than baked goods.

    Happy Bourbon Heritage Month you deserve a nice dram or two for tasting all of this for us, Julien. Hopefully someone will buy you one.

  73. Oh, man, 73 comments. Best. Troll. Ever.

    The “everything is better in Paris” rhetoric got ramped up to 11 multiplied by eleven to the eleventh power when everyone started bitching that he was a snob.

  77. Is it sad I can kind of relate to French guy? I’m stuck in Japan for another three months (have been here four years) and all I can do at this point is laugh at their idea of American food and the stupid names of their American restaurants and why do they hate peanut butter but love something called peanut cream that is basically like vaguely peanut-flavored whipped cream???

    We do have a great french bakery. It’s called Paul’s. The croissants are about $3. French intern should go review them and tell me how un-french they are seeing as no french restaurant in Japan has a french guy in it.

  78. @38. I can think of cases where nouveau would definitely come after the noun and cases where it would slightly change the meaning if it were placed before or after. With food and drink nouveau would almost always come after the noun (le beaujolais nouveau, for example.) Un vin nouveau is a fresh wine, whereas un nouveau vin is a wine that is “new” i.e. not the same one, etc. There are also instances where stylistically one would want to put nouveau after the noun, as well. (native French speaker)

  80. Oooo suck on my chocolate salted balls
    stick em in your mouth, and suck em!
    Suck on my chocolate salted balls,
    they’re packed full of vitamins, and good for you.
    So suck on my balls.

  81. Fucking hell, @63:

    Those are “macarons.” Ma-ca-rons.

    A “macaroon” can be either an American shredded-coconut-and-sugar confection or a ground-almond-and-sugar cookie (like a softer amaretti) found around the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroon

    Now go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaron

    Use of almond flour notwithstanding, that looks like a totally fucking different thing, right?

    Oh, and Bakery Nouveau makes the worst macarons I’ve ever tasted. Dry and crumbly and wierdly enormous and just plain bad. The only people who like them seem to be the ones who think they’re called “macaroons.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Kh7nLpl…

  83. As one of the employees that work there, I have to say that pretty much all of West Seattle does NOT share your opinion. Lines out the door every Saturday & Sunday says to me that it’s pretty Fu*king good.

  84. @84: As evidenced by the multitude of 5-star Yelp reviews of your “macaroons,” there is no shortage of people in West Seattle who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

    Truth is, Nathowells, I think many of your other treats are fantastic! The less you try to make your desserts “French,” the better they succeed.

    But your tentatives de faire des pâtisseries françaises are abjectly horrible.

    There would be “lines out the door” for Coldplay tickets too. That doesn’t make them good.

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