Take-5: Baguettes
The humble baguette. Like rice or potatoes, it’s the cornerstone of a cuisine. Get the wrong one and pay the price in ruined dinners. Here are five suggestions for getting the right one in HK.
When you’re throwing a party and want to look like a functioning adult and not welcome your guests with Doritos, get a baguette. Experimenting with international cuisine? Get a baguette for a side. Trying to recreate your trip to France with fresh bread and jam with your morning java? You get the idea.
The preferred item for prop masters and directors signalling a woman’s status as professional, difficult, cat-owning and single in every rom-com ever made by having a baguette sticking out of her bag is a fussy little number despite its simplicity. For the record, you can’t just use regular white bread dough shaped into a long stick and call it a baguette. Sacre bleu! Plenty of baguette-iers have moved into Hong Kong in the last decade, so a good baguette is no longer the purview of the Mandarin Oriental alone. We tested these with the basics: butter, and/or a piece of medium brie.
Bakehouse
| Location: Wan Chai, SoHo, Tsim Sha Tsui |
Price: $25
Grégoire Michaud made a splash when his Wan Chai bakery opened a few years back — lines out the door, waiting lists, the whole deal — and as the former pastry chef at the Four Seasons the dude clearly knows how to make bread. But Bakehouse makes a sourdough baguette, and the heavy, dense, erm, sour finish isn’t really right for some canapés, snacks and appetisers. It is, however, delicious and it’s killer for sandwiches and any dish with a sweet edges that could benefit from its savoury flavour (like shakshuka) or toasted for breakfast.
Gontran Cherrier
| Location: Tsim Sha Tsui
| Price: $27
Move over everybody, there’s a new playah on the block. When Gontran Cherrier moved into TST, the lines made the ones at Bakehouse seem moderately annoying by comparison. The store spans three spaces in K11’s basement — restaurant, kitchen, takeaway shop — and people literally hang around waiting for the dude to roll out new croissants, brownies and breads every few minutes. This could be Hong Kong’s best baguette: chewy and airy, with a dusty top, succulent and yeasty smelling, perfectly tasty with nothing on it. You’d swear you were on a cobbled street in the Montmartre. This is absolutely worth the line-up.
Maison Eric Kayser
| Location: Various
| Price: $25
Kayser was the city’s baguette champ before Cherrier moved in, and saying it’s been usurped is not to suggest these baguettes are bad. They’re not. Kayser’s baguettes are more “country” if that’a thing, firmer, with harder crusts and a dense bread that’s relatively edible the next day (assuming you don’t eat it all in one go). This is one the smaller loaves, so you need more of them for a party, but waste is also less likely. Like M&S (see below), there are lots of Kayser stores around, making it an easy one to pick up in a pinch.
Marks & Spencer
| Location: Various
| Price: $25
Yeah, yeah. It’s M&S. It’s British. What do the British know about food? Fortunately the UK was also full of Europeans who brought their know-how with them and saved the country from a life of beans on toast. M&S’s baguette is a bit of a cheat: it’s more standard bread shaped like a baguette than actual baguette. That said, the stores bake regularly, it’s a sturdy bread that holds up to liquids, the crust won’t scrape the roof of your mouth and, best of all, there’s a bloody M&S in almost every district, sometimes two or three. Accessibility and a baseline of quality makes this one a winner.
Donq
| Location: Yata (North Point), Sogo (Causeway Bay)
| Price: $28
The Yata supermarket chain has any number of bakeries within its stores but the best one is the Boulangerie Française Donq, a Japanese chain. Like M&S, this may not be the most authentic baguette in the city, but it’s most definitely the best bargain. The gigantic loaf — seriously, it’s huge — has a nice chewiness to it, is partially crusty and also airy enough to work well with soupy foods. But the size of it makes it a good choice for parties, and if we’re honest: a French friend swears by this one. D’accord. Sold.