Ma Petit: A bakery with big plans

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When Ma Petit Bakery & Café inauspiciously soft-opened yesterday (Nov. 13), it served only a handful of sandwiches and pastries for lunch and dinner. By this morning, chef Nary Kim, 39, had ramped up to offer her first omelets, croissants and breakfast sandwiches. Ma Petit plans to expand its offerings day by day until the bistro’s official opening Nov. 24.

Located on the ground floor of downtown’s Douglas Building at 3rd and Spring streets, it offers a menu of sandwiches, salads, pastas, grilled meats and, of course, pastries, that should be a welcome addition to the area’s dining scene.

‘When we were building this restaurant, we were looking into this area for a long time,’ Kim says. ‘Downtown L.A. is either fast food or high-class, sit-down meals, but I thought that something like Ma Petit was missing in this area.’

Kim, who emigrated from South Korea to Southern California when she was 15, transitioned from medical administrator to chef a few years ago. She majored in pre-med at Loma Linda University but says ‘that wasn’t something I really wanted to do. Like many other Asians, the parents force you to go into law or become a doctor, but I didn’t find it attractive. I was very open-minded about food. I really wanted to do something in cooking, but it was not until later, when I was too old for my father to do anything,’ Kim says with a laugh.

Partnering with her sisters Robin, 37, who manages the front of the house, and Mary, 35, who handles the marketing, Kim has made Ma Petit a family venture. She uses fresh produce and locally sourced ingredients whenever possible.

On Monday, expect freshly baked biscuits with a trio of homemade jams: strawberry, blackberry or orange citrus marmalade. Most of the lunch and dinner entrees — including chicken roulade, chicken pot pies, fish and chips, pan-seared sesame tuna, to name just a few — will be available beginning Thursday. By the end of next week, Ma Petit should be serving its full breakfast menu, including pancakes, French toast, crepes, huevos rancheros, scones and banana bread. And by January, Kim expects that Ma Petit will be baking its own bread. (She currently buys from Berolina Bakery in Glendale.)

But the real specialty at Ma Petit are the desserts. Pastries are Kim’s first love and the area in which she’s had the most formal training, including certification from Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena. The bakery cases are currently filled with a modest selection of pastries, muffins, cookies and croissants, which will be augmented with cheesecakes, chocolate and mango mousse cakes, mini Granny Smith apples dipped in caramel and other desserts. Today, Kim is filling an order for a five-tier chocolate buttercream cake.

‘Today was much better than yesterday,’ she says. ‘We had a lot of orders today, and it went much more smoothly. Every day is a little bit better.’

Also, we’d like to tip our hat to downtown blog Angelenic for chronicling Ma Petit’s long road to fruition.

— Elina Shatkin