JinJu: coming back to Williams

We are going to start this one with the thing you actually need to know, because enthusiasm does not help if the door is locked! JinJu Patisserie closed the original small shop on N Williams at the end of 2025, and Portland pastry fans have been wondering ever since when chefs Jin Caldwell and Kyurim “Q” Lee would bring those shatter-crisp croissants back. They are planning a reopen at 3494 N Williams — Carbon 12, the former Harder Day space, just south of the original — around early October 2026. That is a plan, not a promise we can stamp on your Saturday. CHECK BEFORE YOU GO! Look at their site. Look at the account they actually update. If they are not open yet, do not camp on the sidewalk narrating your disappointment. If they are open, go.

When the case is lit, this is laminated pastry on the Williams / Mississippi corridor, in Boise, from the shop that won the 2025 James Beard Award for Outstanding Bakery. Caldwell and Lee trained in Las Vegas — Lee in the pastry kitchen at Joël Robuchon, Caldwell on serious chocolate — then moved to Portland and opened JinJu in 2019 in a tiny Williams storefront that filled every morning with huge, dark-golden croissants and a chocolate case that looked like someone had been serious about bonbons for a long time. They kept the shop boutique on purpose. When the original lease came due, they chose a new room a few blocks south instead of another long term in the old box, and they spent the break traveling and looking at bakeries, which is exactly the kind of intermission a James Beard bakery should get!

We have not toured the new Carbon 12 room as a finished patisserie yet, but we can already picture the visit from the original shop and from everything they have said about the move. The original was a sliver of a bakery: case glass packed with laminated pastry, a chocolate case of airbrushed bonbons, racks of croissants cooling until they were shatter-crisp, and almost no extra furniture because the pastry was the room. The new address is still a patisserie, not a dining room you reserve, and we expect the same energy — a lit case, a short line, and pastries that do not wait around to be admired. It feels super Williams either way: corridor, morning, people who came for butter!

Out of all the things in that case, Portland pastry fans have been wondering which one is the actual must-get, and we are settling it: the kouign-amann, if it is out, is THAT pastry! Sugar, butter, laminated dough that goes past “flaky” into something that shatters and then goes sticky in the same bite, sometimes with a weekend gianduja heart of hazelnut-kissed chocolate cream. We do not split it. We have tried. It does not split well, emotionally. Then take a croissant, because this is the shop people mean when they talk about a croissant that actually shatters — dark, golden, huge, the layers so crisp they crackle when you touch them. The ham-bacon-cheese croissant is the savory we name when we want the case to feed us like lunch. Fruit tarts if the fruit looks like fruit. Bonbons if you are the person who came for pastry and also needs a box for later, because the chocolate program here is real!

If the kouign is gone, do not invent a consolation ranking. Take the croissant that is left and looks the most like it will break when you touch it. That is still a JinJu visit. Know this before you go: pastry sells down, that was true in the original room and it will be true in the new one, and laminated pastry does not wait around to be admired. Go earlier than you think. Have a backup pastry in mind. Have a backup plan if the reopen date slipped. Early October 2026 is the public target Caldwell and Lee have given, and between now and then — and after — the only grown-up move is to check. We do not replace this with a random croissant down the street and call it the same trip!

Want the short version? It’s on the JinJu Patisserie page.