Fleur de Lis: the Hollywood croissant

In Hollywood, the croissant to go looking for comes from a French bakery in a building that used to be a library. The site lists Fleur de Lis on NE Sandy, but the door is on Hancock, in the old Hollywood District Library building a block off Sandy. Greg Mistell, who founded Pearl Bakery, opened it with Lisa O'Leary Mistell in 2005 as a neighborhood bakery-café with a pastry counter, bread, breakfast and lunch on house bread, and espresso. The building still has its library bones, with tall floor-to-ceiling windows that let in lots of daylight and plenty of seating, from two-tops and four-tops to a few bigger tables, a sofa or two, and a patio in season. The kitchen is tucked into a corner, which surprises people, because the display out front holds as much as a full French shop, with croissants, palmiers, tarts, scones and a big selection of bread.

Mistell has been baking French-style bread and pastry in Portland since the 1980s using traditional methods like natural fermentation, pre-ferments, poolish, autolyse and lamination. The butter is European-style, the chocolate is French, and the fruit often comes from Hood River.

What to order

Order the all-butter croissant first, before you get lost in the café menu. It's flaky and light, buttery without any oiliness, and it sheds little golden shards all over the plate. Chocolate and almond versions sit next to it. The chocolate is a pain au chocolat with a dark line of French chocolate through the middle, and the almond is the heavier one, with a toasted-sugar top, and getting all three only makes sense if you're sharing.

Then look at the bread, because Fleur de Lis is as much a bread bakery as a pastry shop. The bakers have made pain au levain, baguettes, ciabatta, multigrain and rye, all long-fermented French-style loaves baked daily. A lot of Portland already knows the ciabatta, since for years sandwich shops that didn't bake their own named this roll, and you can buy it here, flour-dusted and open-crumbed, to take home. The levain is the one to get when you want a French sourdough. The pastry case also has palmiers, small tarts, muffins, scones and Danish with seasonal fruit, breakfast and lunch sandwiches come on the house breads (ham and Gruyère on baguette is a good one), and there's a full espresso bar. You can stay and eat in the old library or take your pastry out to the car.

Before you go

Fleur de Lis keeps daytime hours. Public hours have been Tuesday through Saturday, mornings into mid-afternoon, and closed Sunday and Monday, so confirm before you go. If your heart is set on a particular croissant or loaf, get there earlier than you think you need to, because the selection is fullest early in the day. Hollywood is easy to get around, with Sandy, the theater, the new library around the corner and neighborhood parking. If all you want is a showy croissant, Twisted Croissant is a different trip, and if you want a French bakery that bakes baguettes and levain right alongside its croissants, Fleur de Lis is the place.

Wholesale is a big part of the business, and the retail bread still gets serious attention. Ask what's out, take a croissant and a loaf if you need one, and leave something for the next person in line.

The essentials are on the Fleur de Lis page.