Quick Take
Eight-year-old Adorable French Bakery serves 5,000 customers at 22 farmers market locations throughout the Bay Area, including three in the county, from its Santa Cruz production facility. Last week, it opened brick-and-mortar locations in Scotts Valley and Soquel, with plans to expand with lunch and dinner bistro service within a month.
After eight years serving rustic French pastries and baked goods at farmers markets in Santa Cruz County and the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz-based Adorable French Bakery opened brick-and-mortar locations in Scotts Valley and Soquel last week.
The Scotts Valley bakery opened inside the former Malone’s Grille space on Scotts Valley Drive (Malone’s closed earlier this summer after more than 40 years in business). In Soquel, Adorable French Bakery purchased the wine bar Vinocruz on Soquel Drive. Both businesses currently serve savory and sweet pastries, grab-n-go meals, bread and coffee from 7 a.m to 7 p.m. every day. Sit-down lunch and dinner service at both locations with beer and wine will start within a month, said Nicolas Lossky, who co-owns the bakery with his wife, pastry chef Muriel D’Agostino.
Adorable French Bakery operates 22 market stalls, including the Westside Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley markets on Saturdays and the Live Oak market on Sunday, as well as booths at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford University. At the farmers market, the overflowing array of goodies can be mesmerizing, from rustic baguettes and loaves of compagnon, a dozen varieties of savory quiches and tartes, plus buttery croissants and delicate patisserie filled with vanilla-scented pastry cream or sweet almond paste.
The Scotts Valley bistro is not quite as opulent, but still offers a generous number of treats, including savory lunch pies like the tomato and zucchini-topped tarte provencale ($10), vanilla and frangipane galette de rois ($8), and a variety of twisted, generously proportioned breakfast pastries, thick American-style cookies and a lemon tart topped with swirls of glossy meringue.
Both bistros will have similar menus, but they’re keeping the details to themselves for now, said Lossky. They are working with the staff at Vinocruz to create a menu that is oriented toward wine but has a greater emphasis on food. “They’ve done an excellent job. We’re combining efforts and forces to implement new dishes, and we will work with them to set up the new menu at both locations,” he said.
D’Agostino, a Paris native, received her pastry training in France and is the “woman behind everything,” Lossky emphasized. Her scrupulous approach to baking includes making everything by hand without using industrial ingredients, occasionally sourcing from France and using spring water instead of tap water in all of their products; “It makes a huge difference,” said Lossky. The rigid process creates a flavor and texture that their fans return to again and again.
Adorable French Bakery serves 5,000 customers at farmers markets every week, thanks to its staff of 26 at its commercial kitchen on Potrero Street in Santa Cruz. “We have a great production team, producing all these goods seven days a week to service the farmers markets,” said Lossky. “To us, servicing a restaurant is the same. Usually the problem is how to supply the food. We had the opposite problem – we have plenty of food, but not enough places to serve it.” Some of the staff will transition to working at the restaurants, he said.
With more on the way from the two new bakeries and bistros in the coming month, Lossky hints that this isn’t the end of the road for Adorable French Bakery: “There might be more in the future.”
4402 Scotts Valley Dr., Scotts Valley, & 4901 Soquel Dr., Soquel; adorablefrenchbakery.com.
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