Fleur de Lis: the Hollywood croissant

Fleur de Lis is the Hollywood French bakery we use when we want a croissant that was laminated on purpose, in a room that used to be a library — and walking in still feels a little MAGIC! The site pins it to NE Sandy; the door is on Hancock, in the old Hollywood District Library building, a block off the Sandy commercial strip. Greg Mistell — Pearl Bakery’s founder — opened it with Lisa O’Leary Mistell in 2005 as a neighborhood bakery-café, and it is still that: pastry counter, bread board, breakfast and lunch on house bread, espresso. The building kept its library bones. Tall floor-to-ceiling windows let daylight spill across a room that is actually large enough to sit in — a mix of two-tops and four-tops, a few bigger tables, a sofa or two, and, in season, a patio. We can also see the kitchen tucked into a corner, which always surprises us, because the case out front looks like a full French shop: croissants, palmiers, tarts, scones, a bread board that is not an afterthought. It is a working French café, not a secret, and we treat it that way.

Mistell has been baking French-style bread and pastry in Portland since the 1980s. The methods on the door are the old ones: natural fermentation, pre-ferments, poolish, autolyse, lamination. Butter is European-style. Chocolate is French. Fruit often comes from Hood River. That is the shop’s own ingredient list, and you can taste it in the layers.

What we always order

The croissant. All-butter first. GET THE CROISSANT before you get distracted by the café menu! That is the must-try on our page, and it is the order we place while we are still looking at the glass. The pastry is flaky and light, butter without being oily, with those shatter layers that flake onto the plate in little gold shards. The shop also laminates chocolate and almond versions; we take chocolate when we want pain au chocolat with a dark line of French chocolate through the middle, almond when we want the richer pastry with that toasted-sugar top. We do not take all three unless the table is a project. One well-made croissant will tell you if the butter and the bake are right. Here, they usually ARE!

Then look at bread. Fleur de Lis is a pastry shop and a bread bakery. The board has included pain au levain, baguettes, ciabatta, multigrain, and rye — long-fermented, French-leaning loaves, baked daily. The ciabatta is the one the rest of Portland already knows. For years sandwich shops named that roll when they did not bake it themselves. You can buy it at the source, flour-dusted and open-crumbed, and we do. The levain is the other loaf we ask for when we want a French sourdough instead of a pastry-only visit. The rest of the counter is a real French café case: palmiers, small tarts, muffins, scones, Danish with seasonal fruit. Breakfast and lunch sandwiches are built on the house breads — ham and Gruyère on baguette makes sense here — and there is a full espresso bar. Use the café if you want to sit in the old library and eat. Use the counter if you are taking pastry to the car.

Before you go

This is a bakery-café with daytime hours, not an all-evening pastry bar. Public hours have been Tuesday through Saturday, mornings into mid-afternoon, closed Sunday and Monday. Confirm before you go. Get there earlier than you think if you want a specific croissant or a specific loaf, because the case is better at the beginning of service! Hollywood is straightforward: Sandy, the theater, the new library around the corner, neighborhood parking. Do not confuse it with a laminated-only shop. If you only want a stunt croissant, Twisted Croissant is a different errand. If you want a French bakery that still bakes baguettes and levain in the same oven as the croissant, this is the Hollywood stop.

Wholesale is a big part of the business. That does not make the retail loaf a leftover. Ask what is out, take the croissant, take a loaf if you need one, and let the next person reach the case. We order the croissant first. We take bread if the board still has it. We leave through the same library doors — already talking about the butter!

More on the place page: Fleur de Lis