Dominique Ansel opening up LA bakery and restaurant

Fall 2017
First full service restaurant
Largest location to date

LA Food scene is great. That’s all.

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Great to hear this. He has a solid résumé. I hope he HAS done his homework for three years. He only needs a sit down with Andy Ricker to confirm not understanding the lay of the land here. But honestly - he could probably open anywhere and draw huge crowds, but please NOT Chinatown. And I promise to visit at least once a week if he opens in or near the Westside.

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[quote=“bulavinaka, post:2, topic:5071”]
but please NOT Chinatown
[/quote]Hah! I feel that way about the Westside sometimes. I guess we both have some pretty good stuff :relaxed:.

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I will say that Cronut isn’t bad…I had to try one when I was last in NYC. Even did the cookie shot because it was amusing. I brought back meringues and other treats as gifts for folks, and they loved it. Looking forward to seeing how the LA version is going to be different.

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I thought everybody in LA was on a gluten free diet? Tartine, Ansel and Mr Holmes all opening up within 12 months of each other.

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Trying to pull his place toward the west for selfish reasons!

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I’m pretty sure this place is opening up in the North OC. Brea is hopping these days.

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DKA :heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

Yes this is a complete sentence.

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I will probably go maybe once a year then.:disappointed:

As excited about this as I am about the Chargers coming to L.A.

yawn… I mean yay.

Is that the new Rams logo?

FIFY

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If he does open up a full-service establishment, I hope he has an equivalent of U.P. in the new LA location.

SuperChargers!

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Well :unamused:… if that doesn’t get everyone pumped then…

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I’m watching this guy as a guest judge on Top Chef. The challenge is to do a lunch-brunch mashup and make it “creative”… in 24 hours. I wonder how many months it took him to create the Cronut?

2 months per Ansel himself.

Okay, let’s talk about the Cronut. Where did the idea come from? The team was thinking of doing something new, and someone mentioned a doughnut. I said, “I don’t mind doing that, I’ll take any challenge, but I’m French – I don’t have a recipe for a doughnut. I’ll make it my own.” The dough is not a croissant dough at all; it’s very specific dough that I do for this item. It took me two months to get the recipe so that the pastry would have flaky layers, fry easily, hold the cream, and last longer than just now. We launched just before Mother’s Day. Grub Street wrote about it the same day, and they called us that night and told us they had an increase of traffic by 300 percent, and 140,000 links. They said, “Maybe you should make more.” I thought, OK, I’ll make 35 more. The next day, there were 50 people waiting outside, and we sold out in 15 or 20 minutes. There were 100 people on the third day. It took us by surprise. We slowly increased production week after week, and now we average 450 Cronuts a day. We sell two maximum per person – and we have 100 to 250 people outside the door every morning no matter if it’s warm, cold, snowing, raining. It’s great.

Well, I’m happy for him. I’m sure the cronut is great. But they stressed out the exhausted contestants, sending home a talented chef for some gimmicky shite, to - as we now know - promote this smug dude coming to SoCal. I mean, what does the cronut have to do with South Carolina’s low-country cooking? It blighted the superb Edna Lewis episode.

You realize it’s a TV show, right?

Heck, they had Michael Voltaggio “judge” a blind aptitude taste test. (And I use “judge” in its most liberal liberal sense. No pun intended.)