Pétrin Couchette

Bread first: pain de campagne, a grain version, petit épeautre, khorasan and a rice-buckwheat blend, all long-fermented from organic flour and natural yeast, and no baguettes at all. Pétrin Couchette is the bakery, specialty coffee shop and sandwich counter that the Small Group team of Julia Mitton, Harry Cummins and Laura Vidal opened in April 2022 beside La Mercerie. The name is a pun, deliberately silly, picked off a long list.

Friedhats coffee, brioches and cakes

The coffee runs wider than one house standard: batch brew, hand-poured filter, classic espresso, a modern espresso profile and decaf. The shop works exclusively with the Amsterdam roaster Friedhats, with a weekly changing espresso du jour alongside the batch brew, premium espresso and filter selections. Chai latte, kombucha and soft drinks cover the rest of the board. The pastry side is just as central: classic brioches, English-inspired cakes, a lemon cake, and white chocolate and cranberry cookies.

A yellow counter facing the bakery

The room is organised around a large yellow tiled counter and a window into the production lab, where the mixers, the oven and the shaping tables are all in view, so it feels as much a working bakery as a café. A wooden frontage and beamed ceiling keep the mood casual and energetic rather than restaurant-like. Service is at the bar: order, choose from the display cases, give a name, wait for the drink to be called. That system suits the daytime rush, and the business has shifted over time from a bakery with some coffee towards a coffee shop with bread. The north-facing terrace, with roughly sixty to seventy seats, carries breakfast, lunch and goûter.

Coffee first, then something sweet or a sandwich

Start with the rotating espresso du jour, a batch brew or a hand-poured filter, then take a brioche, the lemon cake, an English-style cake or a white chocolate and cranberry cookie. If bread is the priority, the house loaves are the whole project, long-fermented and shaped in the room behind the counter. Sandwiches change with the season, built on that bread and finished with homemade condiments. The Egg Mayo has been on since the first day; spring and summer bring a BLT with Caesar mayonnaise, autumn a squash version with Jura Tomme and a fermented hot sauce, and the list has also run to a sardine sandwich with brousse, a chicken BLT club, a sausage roll and a ham-and-cheese toastie.