Chocolaterie Vincent Guerlais - Carquefou

Chocolate first, then the pastry case

The Carquefou counter is a chocolate counter before it is anything else: ganaches, moulded pieces and confectionery, with pâtisserie, biscuits, bread and ice cream ranged around them. Vincent Guerlais founded the maison in Nantes in 1997 and works as pâtissier, maître chocolatier and biscuitier under the nickname Agitateur de Papilles. This shop is one branch of a Loire-Atlantique network that also takes in Nantes addresses at Franklin, Gare and Talensac, plus La Chapelle-sur-Erdre, Saint-Sébastien-sur-Loire, Sautron and Saint-Malo, with a Biscuits Français outpost in Nagoya, Japan. Carquefou gets the full maison range in a town-centre room near the church square, which makes it a neighbourhood sweet stop rather than a café that happens to sell cake.

A boutique built for browsing

Service runs on the display case rather than the table. You look, you choose, you leave with a box: chocolates, a cake, a pastry, a seasonal ice cream or a gift format from the Guerlais range. Bread and viennoiserie are stocked, but the centre of gravity stays chocolate and sweet pastry, and the house makes no claim to a long loaf list, a mill or a fermentation programme. The room is small in scale and modern in finish, sized for a queue that moves at the speed of a chocolate decision. Each shop in the network shows the same production in a slightly different register, so the real question is which part of Loire-Atlantique you happen to be standing in. A three-hour Atelier Gourmand workshop sits alongside the retail range, which says something about how the maison sees itself: a craft house that teaches as well as sells.

Fondant Nantais, then the Kawaii tarts

Start with the Fondant Nantais. It is the house rereading of the chocolate fondant and the clearest single statement of what Guerlais does with chocolate. Kawaii is the next move, a collection of six miniature tarts that gives a sharper target than asking for a generic cake. In summer the answer changes: Guerl'Ice is the named seasonal ice cream line, carried under the phrase “L'été se savoure glacé”, and it is treated as a proper part of the range rather than a freezer afterthought. Biscuits are the thing to carry away if the visit is a gift errand, since the biscuiterie is one of the three trades the house works in. The chocolate work also travels beyond the shop: Guerlais supplies the closing chocolate touch to a gourmet menu at Le Manoir de la Régate, outside Nantes.