Amélie's French Bakery & Café | Park Road — Restaurant in Charlotte

I’m going to try and be very honest here, because I love Amélie’s and I wanted to love my experience today.

I am a born Charlottean who has since moved away, and I was back in town for a brief few days and I knew I wanted to show this place to my partner. The last time I went to Amélie’s, it was the original flagship location in NoDa. I even took a small group of women there for my bachelorette party back in the day. I see now that there are several locations now and that the original has moved, which is very exciting.

The Park Road location recreated the original spirit very well and I felt at home when I walked in. It was a Sunday morning, so it was very busy. The staff seemed a little panicked, and the line was very long. We had ordered ahead and picked up our breakfast sandwiches when we arrived—they were ready to go and very yummy!

However, the pastry I had ordered was sold out. I was a little disappointed because it initially was “orderable” online, and I noticed that for the online ordering system for Amélie’s, items that are sold out appear grey and unelectable. So I was able to select this one and order it, but it was actually sold out. Oh, well. The problem is, I have Celiac’s disease and also some minor issues with almonds and chocolate. So there wasn’t really anything I could replace that order with.

Here’s where the service made me a little sad; when we went to pick up the pastries at the counter, the text we received told us to pick them up “at the bar,” but they weren’t at the bar, they were at one of the cash registers. It was then that we found out that the crème brûlée was sold out. We asked the gentleman at the register if I could switch it out with something else, and he sort of snapped at us. He said, “Yes, you can do that but I can’t help you, I have to get my drinks out,” and immediately walked away. Didn’t pass on the information to another server, didn’t even really take time with us. I saw that he was working on coffee drinks and he seemed sort of distressed. He also attempted to hand my partner the wrong drink at one point.

I’m a former barista and I get the panic behind a backup of drinks. However, I just don’t think this was good service. Bare minimum, he could have taken a little more time to be friendly with us or offer a different solution. We didn’t feel welcome, just felt as if we were an imposition. It definitely wasn’t the special, celebratory feeling I remembered from the original shop. If the staff is stressed out on a weekend morning, more staff should probably be hired and scheduled.

We ended up leaving with sort of a bad taste in our mouth. Now, anybody could see, the demand was high. There was a line out the door pretty much the whole time, which I get can be stressful on servers. But—yeah. We were left feeling...

Came here TWICE this past week because the parents were in town and recently discovered Amelie’s. We really enjoyed both visits!

The Good: first, the ambience is super cute! Kind of reminds me of an antique shop with French flair. As for the food, we all really enjoyed everything we tried. We tried several macaroons and multiple tarts. The tarts were the MVPs as they were delicious and not too sweet. The macaroons were also really good but were too sweet for all of us (none of us eat much sugar so we’re all probably too sensitive to it). We also got some crustless quiches and chicken salad on croissant. My favorite was the chicken salad sandwich. The chicken wasn’t fatty or gristly and seemed to be all white meat, which is my preference. The croissant was also insanely delicious and not stale as other reviews have mentioned. In fact, all of our pastries and food both times seemed to be really fresh.

The Meh: service wasn’t the friendliest (except for the super nice lady who brought out our food - she was awesome). The ordering structure is confusing for newbies (see below) and I felt like the people working the pastry counter were impatient with us. There’s a lot to look at within the pastry area and it may take some time to decide. They weren’t busy when we came shortly after opening but I felt rushed making a decision on pastries.

The Bad: if you’re new to Amelie’s the ordering structure/process isn’t clear and is confusing. One person takes pastry only orders and if you want anything else besides something in the pastry case, you have to place that order with a different person at the register. I get it but clear direction and patience would be appreciated. Apparently, if you order coffee, that comes out in the coffee bar area and not with your food. I think they call your name when your coffee order is ready but, due to the acoustics of the restaurant, I didn’t hear a thing. Eventually, after I was almost done with my meal, I went in search for my latte and it was sitting on the counter. It would have been better if the cashier had let us know to watch out for our name or coffee at the coffee bar but I expected it to come out with my food. Like I said, I understand the structure of the food, pastry, coffee areas but staff were not helpful in communicating the process.

Overall, we really enjoy the food and the ambience so we will definitely be back when my...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.

Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to ‑271.3°C – a temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.

Replacing one of the LHC's dipole magnets (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. These include 1232 dipole magnets, 15 metres in length, which bend the beams, and 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 metres long, which focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to "squeeze" the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two needles 10 kilometres apart with such precision that they meet halfway.

All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From here, the beams inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of four particle detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

Explore the CERN Control Centre with Google Street View (Image: Google Street View)

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LHC Facts and Figures

The Safety of the LHC

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Virtual tour of the LHC

Status of the LHC in real-time

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