L'Art Sucré GmbH

Handmade French pastry, with the chocolate made in house

The case is French: macarons in rows, individual desserts and cakes, and bars of chocolate the house makes from the bean. L’Art Sucré is the Frankfurt branch of Maison Köller, a pâtisserie with rooms in Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and Bad Homburg, and the Frankfurt shop opened in 2016 as the third of them. The work is done auf traditionelle Weise, by hand, with butter, eggs, cream, fruit, nuts and the house’s own chocolate rather than industrial shortcuts. The founder describes seventeen years given to pâtisserie and to making kulinarischen Genuss zum Erleben, which is where the precision in the display case comes from. It reads as a pâtisserie-manufactory rather than a general coffee stop.

A counter to pause at in the Innenstadt

The Frankfurt shop sits in the Innenstadt near the Hauptwache and the Alte Oper, which makes it a stop in the middle of a city-centre day rather than a destination of its own. It works two ways at once, as a café to sit in and as a retail pâtisserie for chocolates and sweets to carry off as gifts. There is seating, but the rhythm is counter first: choose the dessert, the macarons, the chocolate or a drinking chocolate, then decide whether to stay with it. The same products go out through a webshop, so the Frankfurt room is one face of a larger sweet-making operation. Expect something traditional and refined rather than a specialty coffee bar with a laptop on every table.

Start with the Trink-Schokoladen

Begin with the drinking chocolate, since it is a category of its own here and the fastest way to taste what the bean-to-bar work produces. From there stay with the pastry and the chocolate: desserts and cakes, macarons, chocolate bars, single origin and filled chocolates, and the nut and fruit range. Fruit and nut spreads and a small baked and salty selection round out the shelves for anything going home. The ingredient list tells you what to expect from the pastry itself, butter-rich creams, eggs, fruit, nuts and house chocolate. It is a dessert-led visit: macarons, a cake, fine chocolate and something hot to drink beside them.