The cinnamon croissant at Auburn belongs in the upper echelons of the viennoiserie world. It appears only during brunch, a more casual way to experience the Hollywood restaurant, which heretofore has served only dinner and offered only three speeds (four-, six- or nine-course) of tasting menu.
Brunch is a la carte; you can get eel in potato milk (just like mom used to make!), or duck sausage with grits, or crudité with avocado butter if you’re still living a resolution. And then there are the croissants — cinnamon, chocolate hazelnut and almond. You should eat them all, but you are there, almost expressly, for the cinnamon one.
Pastry chef Dyan Ng burns and then grinds cinnamon sticks, incorporating the burnt cinnamon dust as she laminates the dough, so that each layer of the croissant is overloaded with cinnamon,
The exterior swirl and the croissant butts (the bookends of the pastry) are textbook crisp and flaky; inside the web of dough and butter is soft and luscious. And that slight gray hue to the pastry? That’s the torched cinnamon, the reason you’re there, the deep, earthy, smoky flavor of the best croissant in Los Angeles.
6703 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 486-6703, auburnla.com
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