Dining Out 037: Maison Bertaux

Dessert in Soho.

Dec 12, 2024

When you think about the places that people seem desperate to queue for in London – the ones that people make TikToks about, always saying “COME with ME to LONdon’s VIRAL cheeseCAKE bar” or whatever the fuck it happens to be that week, always in the same weirdly lifeless see-saw cadence – the common denominator largely seems to be: dessert.

Obviously it’s well-established that people absolutely love queueing for bakeries – anything that might possibly run out is like gold dust in a social (and social media) climate defined by excess and Amazon next day delivery. But even when you think about other big viral Central(-ish) London queue stories of the last six months, like Humble Crumble, and Little Pudding, and the wretched Broadway Market banana pudding shop, they too seem to speak to everyone’s base-level desire for a sweet treat.

More often than not, though, I find that these very popular, usually expensive desserts can be a bit of a letdown. Hype is reproduced because there’s the sense that if this many people are lining up for and talking about something, then it must be good. But ultimately, I’d say that realistically, virality actually inadvertently engineers disappointment. You know that thing people say about horror films – that it’s worse when you can’t see the Big Bad, because nothing is as frightening as what you can make up? I’d say that Instagram videos of ice creams are the same: nothing can be as delicious to you personally as what you project on this stuff when you’re imagining how it tastes.

As if to prove my point, the other day, I watched a Reel about Little Pudding in Covent Garden, which as far as I can gather seems to trade in sort of Buzzfeed Tasty-style riffs on bread and butter puddings of various kinds. The voiceover on the clip just seemed kind of dejected, the upshot being that the narrator had stood in the queue for ages, hoping for a life-changing slice of pudding (the time waiting only serving to heighten the anticipation!), but then at the end, their croissant molten chocolate concoction was just OK.

Because our food culture has become so entirely visually-led, then, it’s kind of easy to make a mid product go viral if you stick it in a luxe-feeling cardboard box, printed with a font from Canva. As such, there’s a new “POV: you are eating London’s viral pistachio sundae” gaff practically every week – and the turnaround is so quick that after a bit of initial success, it’s rare that these spots stay on people’s radars*. I guess if you live by the fast and loose rules of viral culture, you kind of have to die by them too.

This, anyway, is all a very long-winded way of saying that I recently found myself knocking around Soho in dire need of a sweet treat. It was the definition of a blustery day, I was carrying a heavy bag, and I didn’t want to entertain the possibility of disappointment that visiting one of the many nearby, much-hyped spots would probably entail. What I wanted instead was a classic; the hits. Something proven, something always excellent. There was, then, only one thing for it. Maison Bertaux.

This patisserie on Greek Street has been serving pastries since, literally, the 19th Century, which is quite something in the face of current London dessert trends, which change every five minutes. I know I sound a bit old-man-yells-at-cloud here – I’d like to assure you that I’m not giving it the Bittern and bemoaning all that is new-fangled about London food culture; I am someone who has had fun at Big Mamma Group restaurants, I swear – but I do think I’m just buoyed by the idea that something has managed to stay the same for so long, in the face of so much change, by doing what they do so well (kind of like Paul Rothe and Son, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago).

Essentially, Maison Bertaux is a French-style bakery and café which sells delicious patisserie, and its major selling point is a treasure chest of an illuminated front window that turns everyone who sees it into a wide-eyed child. This display is full of every type of beautiful cake you could possibly imagine: chocolate eclairs, coffee eclairs, choux buns, chocolate mousse cake topped with choux buns, fruit eclairs, strawberry tarts, raspberry tarts, forest fruit tarts… you name it, it’s glistening like a precious jewel in the Maison Bertaux cabinet, as it peeks out onto the Soho street, to be ogled at by passers by, like a Page 3 girl in 2002.

If you’re tempted enough to go inside and order for takeaway, you’re given your chosen items in a white box fastened with a ribbon in a bow, which is charming and understated and makes you feel like you are in Amelie. And if you want to sit in with a pot of tea, you’re offered a small space in one of a few different dining rooms, where your cakes of choice are brought to you on little saucers (scones, cream and jam are also available should you seek a bit of obligatory Englishness). Last Saturday, after a pasta lunch with my friend Seán, we opted for an indoor seat, and some dessert that we weren’t taking a risk on – we just knew it would be good.

It was a busy afternoon but the Maison is walk-ins only, so our request for a table was accommodated pretty quickly in the upstairs dining room. And for a café in the middle of Soho, I always find this place enjoyable higgledy-piggledy. The decor is refreshingly “nan’s house”, and in order to even sit down, we had to move our table a full 90 degrees, which you’d never really get in one of the locale’s many AirSpace-type coffee shops. The upstairs dining room was pretty lively with talk, and the clientele was varied – there were groups of friends, families having a rest from rowing over the Christmas shopping, and actually, quite a number of people reading books alone. I was especially heartened to see that, because I love the idea of someone treating themself to an ostentatious cake for no reason other than that they’re an adult and they want one.

Order-wise, we kept it very simple, having just come from lunch – a mint tea for me, a breakfast tea for Seán, plus a strawberry tart and a chocolate eclair to share. The tart, a positively sculptural tower of strawberries and cream which looked kind of like a hat someone would wear to Ladies Day, was a hit of juicy, macerated fruit. The berries were cushioned by fluffy cream and grounded by a very thin disc of pastry, and on the whole, the flavour was much more intense than I expected, which I appreciated. The star, inevitably, however, was that eclair.

I don’t know if you’re the same as me, but sometimes when I am eating certain foods, a weird thing happens, where my brain sort of rushes with all of the emotional attachments the taste is bringing up for me. In some ways it’s actually sort of embarrassing and overwhelming because I feel like Sherlock in the Mind Palace, but in other ways it’s an often-unexpected reminder of the ways in which food is so closely tied to who I am.

When I ate my half of the eclair (symphonic by the way; gooey, half-set chocolate lashed over crisp choux, with more of that bouncy fresh cream which I would happily eat from a bowl with a spoon), the flavour and texture immediately brought me to a couple of places: to two summers ago, when I gleefully devoured another Maison Bertaux eclair to cool down on a hot day, which actually worked weirdly well, and to being bought a treat at Gregg’s by my nan as a small child. Despite being over 20 years apart, I know I felt the same unbridled enjoyment on both of those occasions, and I felt it again on Saturday when I tasted that specific amalgamation of chocolate, whipped cream and choux.

Maison Bertaux, then, deals in the types of classics that literally follow you throughout your life, executing the standards so definitively that your pleasure sensors instantly know when these flavours have graced the threshold before. It sounds stupid but my first bite of eclair genuinely took me somewhere else – I even said it in the moment when it was happening. As tasty as I’m sure a Humble Crumble is, I’m not quite sure it can offer me that.

* The one properly amazing and delicious exception within this new, hyper graphic designed guard of Central London dessert places is Créme, whose cookies I think are to die for.

I paid for this visit.

The pasta lunch I mentioned, by the way, was courtesy of the very kind people at Officina 00, who invited me to their Fitzrovia location after my recent newsletter on their Old Street restaurant. I was there specifically to try their new truffle supplement – you can add five grams of English or Italian truffle to any main pasta for £7 – which is generous, and good value. Because I Can’t Be Tamed – Miley Cyrus, I chose to try it with their Truffled Spaghetti dish, which comes with black pepper butter (really silky, with just the subtle heat it needs). If you have a strong appetite for truffle (I don’t think I’ve ever typed “truffle” so much in my life) I would highly recommend. Also, get the aubergine and nduja arancini.

Dining Out is written by Lauren O’Neill and illustrated by Lucy Letherland. Weekly reviews are free to read every Thursday, and you can follow us on Instagram here, but if you’d like to see more, you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year, to get extra content every second Sunday.

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