ZANIN / Pâtissier & Chocolatier La Potinière

The display case at ZANIN La Potinière is a pâtissier-chocolatier’s rather than a café’s: individual pastries, chocolates, macarons, ice creams and confectionery, arranged for choosing and carrying away. It is Maison Zanin’s Saint-Gervais-les-Bains boutique, one of four across the Mont-Blanc and Arve valley alongside Chamonix, Cluses and Sallanches.

A house built on chocolate and pâtisserie

Maison Zanin was founded in 1999 by Roland Zanin, Maître Chocolatier-Pâtissier, and the house tells the craft as something learned early: helping his brother prepare strawberries, cleaning baking trays, playing in the pastry laboratory with the smell of baking always in the room. That history sits behind the current range of pastries, chocolates, macarons, ice creams and sweets.

The Saint-Gervais boutique carries the same house standards as the rest of the group. Maison Zanin has belonged to Relais Desserts since 2013, the French collective of high-level pastry chefs. Beyond the daily case, the house builds bespoke pieces for birthdays, weddings, baptisms and communions, and works on corporate gifts, seminars and team events. Orders are made up at the boutiques, with a selection also prepared for delivery.

What sits in the case

Named pastries include Zaneige, with light white-chocolate mousse, Madagascar vanilla cream and raspberry confit; Picholaise, on a sablé base with chestnut cream and diplomate cream; and Colombier, pairing génoise with candied fruits.

Those constructions show a classical vocabulary at work: sablé for crispness, génoise for sponge structure, diplomate cream for lightness, nougatine for caramelised crunch, Madagascar vanilla chosen as one specific aromatic rather than a generic one. The chocolate work and the macarons run alongside them, with ice creams and assorted sweets completing the format.

Start with macarons and chocolate

Begin with the two categories the house is built on. Chocolates come first, given the Maître Chocolatier-Pâtissier title behind the name, and macarons sit directly beside them in the core range. Between them they say more about the boutique than any single pastry does.

Then choose a pastry by structure rather than by look. Zaneige is white chocolate, vanilla and raspberry. Picholaise is chestnut and diplomate cream on sablé. Colombier leans on génoise and candied fruit. For a celebration, the house builds pieces to order, which is the part of the operation that reaches past the window and out into the rest of the valley.