L'Eclair De Génie - Galeries Lafayette Le Gourmet

One pastry, reworked in public

The éclair is the entire proposition. Christophe Adam launched L’Éclair de Génie in December 2012 on the idea that a pastry usually treated as a filled-choux afterthought could carry a whole shop if it were made with haute-pâtisserie flavours and finished like a piece of jewellery. The glazes are mirror-bright, the colours are deliberate, and the flavours are named rather than generic: caramel beurre salé, praliné noisette, vanille noix de pécan, pistache orange. The counter inside Galeries Lafayette Le Gourmet carries that range in the middle of the store’s food hall, among the other specialty counters, and it is the éclairs that do the work of standing out.

A food-hall counter, not a tea salon

This is a display case among other food stalls, so the visit is short by design: look, choose, pay, carry on through the hall. There is no production on view here, which puts the whole weight on the finished pastry, and the éclairs are built to survive that scrutiny. The location, in the Opéra and Grands Boulevards quarter, means constant shopper and visitor traffic, heaviest around lunch and at weekends, and the boxes are made to be carried, which is part of why the format works as well as it does. Alongside the éclairs, chocolates and croissants under the Christophe Adam name fill out the counter.

What to choose

Start with caramel beurre salé, the flavour that made the brand’s name and still the clearest statement of what it does with an éclair. Praliné noisette is the nuttier equivalent, vanille noix de pécan the softer one, and pistache orange the most obviously modern of the four. The range rotates, so whatever is in the case that day is a fair part of the reason to stop. In summer the house turns the éclair into a frozen popsicle, which is the most playful thing it makes. Do not come looking for a bread programme. This is a pastry counter with one idea, executed across fifteen outlets and several countries including Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong, and it is the idea rather than the location that people come for. An éclair here works as dessert and as a souvenir at the same time, which is the trick the brand has never needed to repeat.