Little works of art

Great patisseries and great walking cities go hand in hand.

One morning you set out fresh and loving life, determined to see every facade in Paris or to cross Central Park and then window-shop through three Manhattan neighborhoods. Later in the day -- say, four hours and many miles later, just as you’re becoming tired and irritable -- you will inevitably pass an inviting storefront that features delicate, detailed sweets so tiny you can’t believe how much time someone has spent perfecting each ephemeral bite. This will immediately cheer you up. You may be enticed to go in to have some tea and eat some of these diminutive handmade wonders. This will refresh you unaccountably.

Here in L.A., where we famously do not walk unless it’s in hiking shoes in a canyon, we are not likely to run into a place like this when we need it.

While our restaurant desserts may be the envy of the world, thanks to such pastry chefs as Nancy Silverton and Sherry Yard, we have been woefully short of world-class patisseries. Now, thanks to two women with similar visions, there are two such places in Los Angeles.

Boule, the stunning boutique that opened last Thursday on La Cienega Boulevard, sets a whole new bar for patisseries in this city.

Pastry chef Michelle Myers has just opened her shop across the street from Sona, the highly regarded restaurant that she runs with her husband, chef David Myers. Her aim is to duplicate the feel of Parisian shops like Fauchon and Laduree. She designed the shop’s interior, which features jewelry cases that display her elegant chocolates and pastries, macarons and madeleines, fleur de sel caramels and white chocolate-pistachio caramels, profiteroles and croissants, raspberry jam Linzers and tarts filled with Valrhona Manjari chocolate ganache. At present Boule is a retail shop, but Myers hopes to add an upstairs tearoom by the summer.

Myers gave considerable thought to Boule’s signature color -- the creamy, light robin’s egg blue-green on the walls and boxes -- which she chose for its soothing tone. It happens to call to mind the classic light blue of Tiffany’s, signaling serious consumer culture. The Boule box, tied up in a warm chocolate brown ribbon, says: This is the finest, the best, and quite possibly the tiniest and most expensive sweet thing in the city. (To overextend the metaphor, Myers plans to offer earrings, rings and watches made of Valrhona chocolate.)

A jewel-box setting

Halfway across town in Venice, Kristy Choo has had her longtime dream up and running for a little more than a year. Jin Patisserie is on a street where people actually do shop and walk and need to rest. Browsing the windows on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, you will pass an arresting storefront with an Asian feel, a spidery red chrysanthemum logo and opaque plexiglass windows that barely allow you to make out the charming front garden. There people sit and enjoy a revivifying tea that involves sandwiches without crusts, vol-au-vent (puff pastry) filled with Asian-style sauteed tuna, handmade pastries, chocolates and a superb collection of green, black and scented teas.

But what’s really different about Jin is the small retail space inside. Choo’s delightful-looking pastries -- small, whimsical, colorful mounds made with Manjari chocolate or green tea mousse, vanilla creme brulee, tender, spongy cakes and delightful glazes -- are brilliantly showcased at eye level against deeply colored walls of magenta, hot pink and bright orange. She displays her delicate chocolates, in such flavors as jasmine, lavender, ginger and soft caramel-sea salt-truffle, in a “watch case” with pull-out drawers just below the cash register.

Choo grew up in Singapore, where as a child she peeled prawns and washed vegetables at her mom’s food mart. She became a flight attendant for Japan Airlines when she was 23. During her frequent working trips to Tokyo she became acutely aware not only of sophisticated Asian baking but also of the importance of presentation, of beautifully fashioned packages and retail shops. Transformed by the Japanese aesthetic, she enrolled at San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy and then took a pastry-making job at Raffles in Singapore. Later, cooking in competition for the Singapore national team, she traveled the world. She moved to Marina del Rey when her Singaporean husband opened his fruit and vegetable export business there in 2002.

But she kept traveling, primarily to refine her menu and her design. When she saw coffee-stirring sticks made of rock sugar at Mariage Freres in Paris, she knew she had to have them in her own shop, no matter what the cost. In Singapore, she picked up rectangular boxes covered in green silk that she uses for gift packaging, and she also found interesting assorted tea plates.

While Myers’ pastries have a decidedly French pedigree and Choo’s aesthetic leans more toward the Asian, both women borrow freely from both cultures. French baking, which relies heavily on butter, cream and eggs, is all about precision. At Boule, French techniques are reflected in the viennoiserie and light-as-air macarons, but Myers looks to Asia for spices and flavor combinations.

The Asian connection

Japanese pastry is much lighter and generally more citrusy, and, in baking, the mousses are lighter, the flavors are brighter and the cakes tend to be more moist. At Jin, this is played out in Choo’s flavors; she puts lotus jelly in her tea creme brulee, chrysanthemum jelly in her chocolate mousse cake, and her green tea cake is made from green tea mousse, green tea sponge and red bean paste. Choo tends to use sweeter chocolates than Myers; they work better with the many tea infusions she favors. “My life was changed by the first pastry I had in Tokyo,” she recalls. “It was a strawberry choux pastry, so soft inside and yet not too sweet at all. I started baking at home and giving things to friends. But that was when I knew I needed to study in a serious way.” Ironically, Choo was not able to feature her formative strawberry pastry at Jin; the customers didn’t go for it.

Myers (nee Bobila) grew up in Pennsylvania in an extended Filipino family; she met her future husband “over gnocchi” when he was a sous-chef at the old Patina on Melrose and she was a pastry cook. Apparently knowing a good thing when they found it, the couple married two weeks later.

She’s a self-possessed young woman who looks so young that it is puzzling when she will not divulge her age. Like Choo, she has toured the world and done a lot of recent traveling (along with her sous-chef, Ron Mendoza) to refine her ideas for Boule -- specifically to New York, France and Switzerland to examine the state of the art in patisserie baking and presentation.

Visiting a lovely small bakery in Basel, Switzerland, where every item was handmade, she decided to follow suit in her shop. After sampling a cured ham sandwich on a delicious salty-sweet pretzel bread, she made a note to introduce a pretzel-bread sandwich at Boule (though she has not yet). And the elaborate window dressings at Fauchon in Paris inspired her present one: a grouping of seven trees ranging from 3 to 6 feet in height, made entirely of light blue-green macarons.

The macaron is “the quintessential French patisserie cookie,” says Myers. It’s the one item that, if you do it perfectly, proves “you are in their league.” Looking a little like tiny hamburger buns, macarons have a light, thin crust that gives way to a soft, chewy center. Myers offers them in Venezuelan chocolate, Meyer lemon, green tea, rose petal, gianduia, gingerbread-apple butter and pumpkin.

“They are so delicate and fragile that anything can alter the recipe -- even a breeze in the kitchen,” says Myers. Her sous-chef Mendoza enumerates the difficulties: “After you have the batter made you want them to dry out and get a skin on them. That’s what makes them glossy. You don’t want a lot of air to go in while it’s forming its skin. So we make them in the Sona kitchen, early in the morning, starting at around 7 a.m. Then the ovens aren’t going yet and the air is stagnant, and there’s less of a chance that someone will walk in.”

Myers sees the difficulty and precision of French pastry making as one of the reasons for our dearth of first-class patisseries. “You have to have the culinary background and experience to do these recipes well and on a consistent basis,” she says. “It is very hard, not the least because these recipes were perfected in France and they have to be tweaked for the U.S. ingredients. The almond flour, for example, can be tricky. If it is too porous it will throw off the results.”

Inventive combinations

As in her work at Sona, Myers uses only organic fruit from farmers markets (Chino Farms in San Diego is a favorite). Her pates de fruit are intense and eye-opening soft gelees in flavors such as passion fruit-jasmine tea and mojito (lime-mint). Sorbets come in such unlikely but wonderful combinations as Meyer lemon-saffron, pineapple-Indonesian long pepper and ruby red grapefruit-vanilla bean.

Why pineapple with Indonesian long pepper? Mendoza, who works very closely with Myers, describes the germination process this way: “In the fall we have very good pineapples. We always borrow from Asia for the savory side of things, which is very important both at Sona and at Boule. We thought of the Indonesian long pepper because it’s a sweet pepper; it has heat but it also has a fruitiness that we knew would go nicely with the tartness of the pineapple. Tropical flavors are so clean and clear, and Michelle and I just thought, ‘What will punch through that?’ And we came up with the long pepper.”

Why call a patisserie Boule? That, after all, is the name of a French bread. “My first impulse was to do breads as well,” says Myers. “But we have no room at all for a bread oven. I’m still hoping that one day we will.”

Myers does offer a couple of sandwiches for lunch: a lightly seared tuna on ciabatta with mayonnaise flavored with yuzu and kosho (a Japanese pepper), and a “BLT” on olive focaccia, with pancetta, aioli, romaine hearts and tomato confit. The focaccia and the ciabatta are made, as are Boule’s pastries, across the street at Sona.

Driving down La Cienega these days, you just might have to slow down for Myers or Mendoza, crossing the street from Sona to Boule with a tray of amazing sweets. Slow all the way down and park. Boule will surely be an important addition to Los Angeles. It might even inspire strolling along La Cienega.

Boule, 420 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles; (310) 289-9977

Jin Patisserie, 1202 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice; (310) 399-8801