Is Bouchon Bakery finally ready to start?

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So what’s been the holdup with Bouchon Bakery in Beverly Hills? Thomas Keller announced in January that he would be adding the popular patisserie, hopefully by March. But with that deadline right around the corner, so far nothing has happened -- though it looks like that may finally be changing.

It’s all because of a sink, Keller says. “The city [of Beverly Hills] says we need to have a three-compartment sink in the bakery for dishwashing,” he says, but there just wasn’t room for it in the space as it was designed. Besides, the Bakery space is adjacent to the Bouchon bar, which has such a sink, and just downstairs from the restaurant, which has a whole dishwashing setup.

Furthermore, the Bakery will only be serving food, not cooking it -- that will be going on upstairs in the pastry department. The most cooking that will happen in the Bakery is making coffee. “I understand needing a dishwashing sink for cleaning utensils, but we’ve hardly got any utensils,” Keller says.

Apparently, though, things have been worked out. The architect found room for the sink in a passageway and Keller says that construction on the Bakery should begin in a couple of weeks and that it will begin serving pastries six weeks after that.

-- Russ Parsons