Patisserie Melanie — Restaurant in San Diego

I’ve been at Pâtisserie Mélanie a couple of times over the last two years, living in the neighborhood. I’m moving out of SD so I thought I would share my final sentiment.

I’m French so I know what to expect for that kind of pastries. From my perspective, it’s similar to an average village bakery in France. They seem to try being closer to a luxury experience, by the atmosphere and dining menu, so it feels quite disappointing.

The croissants are fresh, flaky and buttery enough for the US. But they look small, almost like mini versions. Also, they don’t look perfected, modern. Not even rustic. They unfortunately look very amateur, like home made. They taste definitely better than they look, which is what matters.

Rest of the pastries were good, I loved them. The cannelés are well mastered, and I loved the twist of using what I think is Grand Marnier or Cointreau, instead of dark rhum? The financiers looked great and were tasty.

But the range of pastries overall is pretty limited. There’s viennoiseries, sweet and savory, mainly. I would expect more from a French style bakery: flans parisiens, fraisiers, crêpes, choux, éclairs, chausson aux pommes, pains suisses, fruit tartelettes, or even illusion fruits! Please!

The atmosphere is indeed to be improved, it feels quite empty and sad. A central island with flowers for instance would help fill the empty middle of the room when we enter.

Service has always been perfect, congrats.

Overall, not great not terrible, and ton of things that can improve this place and make it a successful bakery in the...

So, let’s start with the negatives because let’s face it, people are always looking for what’s wrong with a business rather than what’s right.

• the parking situation sucks. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it but this is San Diego and for the most part, parking sucks everywhere.

• it’s a little tough to find. Yes, this is true if you can’t be bothered to look for businesses that aren’t ON the street. Oftentimes, the best finds are just around the corner and in this case, the from door is about 20ft from the address on the building so with the barest of effort, they’re pretty easy to find.

• the prices are WAY too high! So here’s the thing, this is purely subjective. If your experience with croissants is limited to the cardboard tube in the grocery stores refrigerated case, that lets out a satisfying POP when you open it, then sure, a $4 croissant is probably not what you’re looking for but I just ate one and I’m just trying to figure out how not to look greedy by going right back🤷🏽‍♂️

• it’s a cold, mostly empty space without so much as a single display case. One of the cool things about this place is it’s proximity to balboa park and all of its museums with amazing things on display which I can look at and be amazed by while enjoying a canneleś Bordelaise....

I guess what I’m trying to get across to anyone reading this is, don’t let people looking for something to complain about keep you from discovering beautiful, meticulously...

Was so happy to see this open in our neighborhood. My wife loves pastries and I love a great cafe experience and having something we could walk to was exciting. After my first experience here I will never step foot in this store ever again. Extra star for the pastries because I want to be as fair as possible. The pastries were good. I didn't think they were exceptional, we didn't finish all of them, but I wasn't sad about them at all. The apricot filling was especially tasty. The tea I had was good too, steeped appropriately and just what I wanted. The atmosphere is fairly nice. They have custom ceramicware which is pretty if a little impratical in the way the handles are shaped on the cups. The problem came with the service. We sat in the cafe for our breakfast and the employee that rung us up proceeded to come out and "clean" tables less than 5 feet from us for an uncomfortably long time (over 15 mins). We were one of the first people in the store, it was pristine already. Then he finally left and proceeded to come sweep less than 5 feet from us for over 10 mins. We were some of the only customers in the lobby. The whole time he kept looking over to our table, I caught him straight up staring at us more than once. We felt very unwelcome and honestly a little creeped out. I'm a pretty boring person and we weren't talking about anything particularly interesting so not sure why he felt compelled to listen in but we ended up leaving early....