Angelina, sans Brad Pitt: a behind-the scene tour

As part of the learning curriculum, the school organized a pâtisserie visit to Angelina's this week. Angelina - not the actress but the infamous Parisian tea salon and dining room, with its glorious gilded ceilings, trompe l'oeil walls and classy ambience that was once frequented by famous celebrities the likes of Coco Chanel and Katherine Hepburn.

Despite having two class sessions preceeding the visit, I was psyched about the tour as we will actually get to visit the production area where they
make all the goodies for their tearoom. Perhaps a habit from my previous career, I've always been excited about visiting production areas, understanding the production process, equipment used, throughput (speed) of the machines, how labor intensive each process step is and how long it takes, the bottlenecks, efficiency and levers of operation, all the nitty gritty details that define the business' cost of production. The financial bottom-line is just as important to a pâtisserie as it is to any other businesses, a critical element that is often overlooked by a lot of great culinary talents who aren't as business-savvy.  Mean Chef shared with me that his first restaurant business failed not for the lack of execution but primarily due to the many faux pas made in the area of finance.

We were given a rather in-depth behind-the-scenes tour by  Pastry Sous Chef, Saori and her partner Sebastian.

No cameras were allowed in their production area but briefly, we toured the three main production spaces : the dough station where the doughs were made (mixed, rolled, cut), the oven-dough proofing station where all the baking takes place and the cold station where more intricate work like piping, glazing and finishing was done. We had a hand in making some of their popular pastries like the Mont Blanc, a rather bizarre composition of chestnut paste piped into spaghetti-like strips, cut, then wrapped around a tower of dried meringue and chantilly.  They also showed us their macaron production, the machines used and their trick to piping the filling in assembling the perfect macaron. The best hands-on exercise of the day was the glazing of the éclairs, which brought back fond memories of a particular session this past summer where Mean Chef had yelled at me for not piping enough pastry cream to fill the éclairs. And there I was, at the heart of Angelina's pastry center, glazing éclairs quite efficiently and cleanly, I must say. Well, at least the real professionals gave me a "trés bien".
The highlight of the day? Aside from meeting Saori and Sebastian? Getting to taste their thick, unctuous, creamy chocolat chaud at the end of the tour, for free, but I guess that was in exchange of the little work we've done for them that afternoon.

enjoying Angelina's chocolat chaud and the pastries we had a hand in making that afternoon: éclaid chocolat, mont blanc and macaron pistache (clockwise from top left)

Angelina
226 Rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris, France
01 42 60 82 00