Dominique Ansel Treehouse: Pastry chef to launch a London restaurant – without his famous Cronut

Pastry master: Chef Ansel at work
David Ellis @dvh_ellis10 December 2019

Famed pastry chef Dominique Ansel is set to launch his latest site in London – and it won’t be a bakery.

Due to open in Covent Garden at the end of January, Dominique Ansel Treehouse is slated to be a cafe restaurant, and a breakaway from Ansel’s previous projects – going so far as to exclude the Cronut from the menu, the snack which made Ansel famous.

“For us, it’s never about cutting and pasting – I wanted to create something entirely new, something that celebrates the fundamental recipes and techniques that pastry chefs do best, but on a more savoury level,” Ansel told the Standard. Unlike his other projects, Treehouse will offer a sit-down restaurant with a proper menu, divided into three sections, which will loosely follow the long-held pattern of starter-mains-pudding. The majority of dishes will be savoury, made with techniques most often left to pastry chefs.

“When we were conceptualizing the menu, I thought about how in a traditional restaurant setting, the pastry department typically works on all the different doughs on the menu, even from a savoury perspective, like breads and pie crusts, pastas, and so on,” Ansel said, “So our menu will centre around these pastry foundations and classic techniques: freshly baked breads, puff pastry for vol au vents and pithiviers, handmade pastas like caramelle, which are shaped like bonbons or fluffy hand-mixed gnocchi, short crusts for savory pies, gougères made with classic pâté à choux. I’m really excited to explore this more as we build out the menus.”

Found on Floral Street, there is some sense in the unusual name: while the ground floor will be given over to a bread and baked goods counter, upstairs is being described as a “treetop canopy”, where the main seated restaurant will be.

The move marks a change for Ansel, especially with no Cronut on the menu. The pastry, cross between a croissant and a doughnut, proved an instant hit when Ansel invented it at his eponymous New York bakery in 2013, and launched the chef to international fame.

Treehouse will open in late January 2020. For more information, visit dominiqueansellondon.com

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