Popular La Jolla Bakery is Magnifique and Kosher Too!

By Jacob Kamaras

LA JOLLA, California — At age 6 in Morocco, Annie Benaroch made her first lemon meringue tart. At 8, she baked her family’s challah for each Shabbat. From 15 to 22, she lived in Paris and spent hours on end sitting in cafés and watching what people would eat.

Every step of Benaroch’s journey is palpable when you walk into her kosher bakery-café in La Jolla, Parisien Gourmandises.

“I always dreamed about this moment,” she tells me during my latest visit there. “These chairs. This table. Where we sit down with coffee and pastries, and we feel like we’re in Paris.”

Three years ago, I covered the opening of Parisien Gourmandises. At the time, San Diego was mostly devoid of kosher restaurants. While the local kosher dining scene has significantly expanded in the ensuing years, it’s easy to forget that Parisien Gourmandises came at the start of what feels like a renaissance for kosher-observant San Diegans.

When she moved to San Diego, Benaroch initially had a catering business for events such as weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, and other parties. But her heart and mind always went back to Paris and its beautiful pastries.

“I had to bring it with me here. I felt like I was missing it. I needed to have a space where people could come,” she says.

She began selling pastries at a friend’s store in Rancho Santa Fe, before her friend discovered the bakery’s current venue in La Jolla. Today, Parisien Gourmandises still shares space with Floral Palette at 7643 Girard Avenue, with both stores contributing to the café’s upscale ambiance.

Initially, Benaroch’s doubters claimed, “Jews won’t buy anything from you.” And she was determined to prove them wrong.

“I felt like, ‘You know what, let’s make it attractive and delicious for everybody,’” she says. “I get my clientele who I really want to serve, my Jewish community, and I also serve also the people who will just come across the store by chance and say, ‘Oh my gosh, a French bakery!’”

Then about a year ago, thanks to an influencer who posted about Parisien Gourmandises on Instagram and TikTok, the bakery suddenly went viral and had lines out the door.

“I created something that didn’t exist here — a croissant that was famous in New York, and no one had it in Southern California, the rolled croissant,” Benaroch says. The viral croissant would sell out daily, by noon. (Trust me, the croissant is worth the hype.)

Now that the fever pitch around the rolled croissant has calmed down, Benaroch is looking to expand her service of San Diego’s Jewish and kosher community. For Rosh Hashanah, her featured items include challah, honey cake, an apple tart with French bourbon, a fig tart, pomegranate-themed items, and more.

Apart from the holidays, the next big thing at Parisien Gourmandises could very well be Benaroch’s croissant version of the viral pistachio-filled Dubai knafeh chocolate bar.

What exactly makes people so excited about French baked goods? Benaroch, who trained with the famed pastry chef Stéphane Tréand, explains, “A French pastry, it’s a science. It’s not like you put a little sugar here or a little flour there, and then you have a cookie. You need to be careful with the temperatures, you need to calculate the amount of sugar, the amount of flour, so everything is balanced and beautiful.”

Ultimately, her goal is to create a pastry that is not only delicious but just as importantly, aesthetically pleasing.

“Every pastry that we have here, we go through a trial,” she says. “First, we do the samples. We taste it. Reduce the sugar. And I just try to decorate it in a way that it’s ready to be sold.”

Benaroch also takes pride in many of her customers’ emotional connection with the product. She tells the story of one frequent customer, a native of Greece, who grew up with his grandma’s challah but hadn’t had one in years before visiting Parisien Gourmandises. “Every Friday when he buys his challah, I touch his soul,” she says.

“When you bake, you don’t bake for yourself,” adds Benaroch. “You bake because you want to share with others. You want people to taste what you love, and what you love making. I feel when I sell a tart and see a smile on the customer’s face, and I can just imagine them around that tart, sitting and eating it. Each pastry makes someone content, and I just love that.”

Learn more about Parisien Gourmandises at https://www.parisiengourmandises.com/.

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Public relations executive Jacob Kamaras is a former publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.