Payard

Payard's is a chain of bakery's belonging to Francois Payard, a french pastry chef. They have classic French pastries are well as savory snacks. All of the employees there speak French, and have somewhat of a French attitude. It was a very casual style bakery, and the pastries looked amazing. Since there were three of us there, we each ordered 2 things and share. I ordered Opera Cake and a big chocolate macaroon, Jessica ordered a lemon roulade cake, and a strange pie-like thing with an unknown filling. Ming ordered a chocolate almond croissant and a Sacher torte. Everything was about $4 dollars each.

Everything was very rich, but good. The only thing I was sort of iffy on was the pie-like thing and the lemon roulade cake; the lemon roulade had good flavor but had sort of a strange texture to it. It was stiff and tacky, like there was a lot of gelatin in it. The pie-like thing just confused me and wasn't anything I was used to eating. My favorites were there opera cake and the chocolate almond croissant. The opera cake is  layered sponge cake soaked in coffee syrup with chocolate ganache and coffee buttercream. Their opera cake was very chocolate-y, the coffee and chocolate flavor worked together to bring each other out. The croissant was amazingly buttery and flaky. I was told that the croissants weren't very good there, but I disagree. They were great! The chocolate macaroon was okay, a little too sweet, I should have tried pistachio. The Sacher torte was also pretty good. A Sacher torte (usually pronounced soccer) is a cake layered with chocolate cake, apricot jam and topped with chocolate icing. The original recipe has never been shared so the sacher tortes we eat or make are usually close replicas. The one at payard used a raspberry jam. After eating all of these, we went for ice cream... and after that, I felt sick. I give this place a 7.5 out of 10, the pastries were great, the service was okay, it was pretty expensive for the servings we got.