Rose Street Patisserie

Croissants, tartines and a case of French cakes

The case runs on French fundamentals: viennoiserie in the morning, tartines built on the bakery's own bread, French cakes and dessert pastries through the day, and the ice cream and sorbet this branch added when it opened. Savoury cooking is deliberately narrow, and the tartine carries most of it, the open-faced format that ties the bread programme to breakfast and lunch. Bread runs underneath all of it, baked in the same French tradition, and it is what the tartines are built on and what most regulars leave carrying.

Rose Street opened at the corner of Snelling and Selby in mid-summer 2018, the Saint Paul sister to Patisserie 46 in Minneapolis, where John Kraus built the reputation for French bread and pastry that this shop inherits. Bread Lab, the production and training arm, sits behind both.

A corner room in Merriam Park

The setting is a modern room at a busy Merriam Park intersection, working at neighbourhood scale: breakfast, lunch and something sweet rather than formal dining. Most of the decision-making happens standing in front of the display case, which is where a patisserie of this kind is made or lost. The house line, Authentically French, Minus the Airfare, is a fair statement of the ambition, and the invitation to slow down matches the pace of the room.

This is a distinct branch, separate from Patisserie 46 in Minneapolis and from the later Rose Street Cafe in the old Schmidt Beer Hall, so what you find here is the patisserie range rather than a wider restaurant menu.

What to take

Start with a croissant, since lamination is the clearest test of the kitchen and the item the Minneapolis original made its name on. Add a tartine if the visit is doubling as breakfast or lunch. French cakes and dessert pastries are the better move for a table at home, and the ice cream and sorbet are the warm-weather answer at this address.

The seasonal calendar is worth tracking: a Galette des Rois in January, Thanksgiving baking in the autumn, Mother's Day in spring. The house belongs to Relais Desserts, the association of French pastry makers, which is the clearest signal of where its standards are set. Everything else follows from that: French technique, a display case, and a neighbourhood that treats it as its own.