The French Bakery — Restaurant in Bellevue

Pastries are below average for French style, but the baguettes are fascinatingly bad. I’ve experienced baguettes of similarly low quality, but not in many years. The crust is extremely brittle and fragments into innumerable pieces as soon as a knife gets within an inch of it. These shards of bread matter taste like corn flakes. The crumb is light, spongy and airy, which is fine for a cake, but pretty terrible for a baguette. It should have pockets, but be chewy and flavorful. This baguette is neither.

I tried to find creative ways to use or resuscitate it, but to no avail. Toasting it just made it harder and it doesn’t have the density to hold up for making French toast or bread pudding. Like I said, fascinatingly bad.

On the plus side the staff is was very friendly and pleasant. Feel a little bad leaving this kind of review, but people must be warned, about the baguettes anyway.

By the way if you are looking for solid baguettes get over to gasp Costco. Yes my friends. It may be a hike to get over to Kirkland and it may belie your better judgement to go to a warehouse chain for French delights, but Costco is putting out some of the best baguettes in the area. I kid you not. They make you get two at a time. This is actually good. You...

I love The French bakery and pay visits here since they opened at Elements. We were also buying their tasty bread and croissants in my daughter's French school. However, today when I ate in, I was given completely dirty and sticky cutlery. There were remnants of food stuck on my fork and, obviously, it was not properly washed. When I brought up this issue at the cash register, they were very apologetic and replaced my fork and knife with different set which was also sticky, but at least looked clean. It took a while to get me a new set, so I suspect they were manually cleaning them. I find It is very low standards and health hazard due to a risk of passing communicable diseases. I was sure that in a public place everything should be thoroughly cleaned with high temperature water and proper cleaning solution Never had such an experience in a place like that. Will not go back till they raise their cleaning standards and teach the personnel that dirty stuff should not be served. Coffee viennese tasted really good but was warm rather than hot. Alice crepe was disappointing as the dough was thick and tasteless, like made from the box. Variety of offered products was awesome as usual, and hopefully, tasty. Added one...

It is located inside a large glass building, bright with loads of natural light. The bakery was on the first floor, easy to find with tables right by the escalator. They did have some real outdoor seating also.

We got Café Au Lait , Slice of Coffee Swiss, and Twice Baked Chocolate Almond Croissant. They were both nice little dessert, not the best I've had, but it was a good way to start the morning. We also had one real dish, savory “Paul” crepe. The filling was almost like chicken salad or tuna salad, only with salmon. This version was interesting, and quite tasty!

We enjoyed the breakfast here, so we decided to go back again for another breakfast. This time, we got Marionberry Cream Cheese Croissant, and Slice of Blueberry Cream Cake. The croissant was just a-ok, but the cake was much better than I thought it would be. The crepe of choice for this day was Pierre. It was more simple, but comforting, tasty, and filling.

The staffs were not overly friendly, but polite. The coffee was good and the food was tasty. The portion of savory crepe was pretty big, enough to share. Affordable and...