French Pastry Is Just the Beginning

Where do they line up for breakfast in Beverly Hills? At a tiny French pastry and gift shop named La Provence Pa^tisserie.

Basically it’s a pastry shop, but the French-trained proprietor, Farshid Hakim makes baguette and the skinnier ficelle loaves as well as pastries. In this espresso-oriented age, he also blends his own coffees.

As befits a Beverly Hills neighborhood dive, his place offers bottled waters with quaint names and soft drinks fortified with medicinal herbs, but food and drink is not all that’s going on here. The place also sells antique-style bowls and candlesticks, postcards of French advertising art and paintings of dainty Parisians by an artist named Huldah. And novelties, such as a brand of bubble bath named Dirty Girl and a bread knife shaped like a loaf of French bread.

La Provence is a tiny place with just room for three or four inside tables, plus a handful more outside (in the parking lot of a mini-mall named Beverly Hills Plaza, not out on the street). No matter; a lot of business is takeout.

Except at breakfast, when the whole neighborhood seems to turn out. That’s when they’re ordering croissants, croque-monsieur sandwiches, eggs Benedict, omelets and scrambled eggs mixed with hip things such as Kalamata olives and feta cheese. The most arrestingly named breakfast dish is green eggs and ham--eggs scrambled with pesto and thinly sliced ham. It’s pretty good, distinctly greenish but not too heavy on the pesto. All the egg dishes come with slices of ficelle bread and fresh fruit, mostly melons and strawberries.

At lunch, which is served until the place closes at 7 p.m., you can get a quiche (supposedly--they’ve been out of quiche when I asked) or a soup, such as a thick puree of roasted root vegetables, served in a big porcelain crock. There are entree salads of mixed greens in vinaigrette topped with, say, poached salmon and dill or turkey breast sprinkled with sesame seeds. The turkey salad also incorporates mangoes and possibly some strawberries.

But the real action is the sandwiches, served (of course) on ficelle loaves with more bread and a mixed green salad on the side. The roasted pepper sandwich is delicious--the peppers accompany sliced cucumbers (and greens), making this a more pungent version of the old-fashioned cucumber sandwich. What the tiny menu calls caprese sandwich contains mozzarella but it’s dominated by a punchy puree of Kalamata olives.

More familiar sandwiches appear in a refreshing new light when you have them on a chewy ficelle loaf. The Black Forest ham sandwich with Swiss cheese and a sharp vinaigrette is great, the club sandwich of turkey, bacon and cheese even better.

La Provence’s turkey sandwich comes off more like a regular turkey san, and the salami sandwich is a bit like a smallish submarine on ficelle. The French dip sandwich (a shorter sandwich than the others) is all meat and comes with particularly flavorful dipping juices.

For dessert, there’s really only one choice--pastries. The pastry case you stare at as you wait in line is filled with muffins, quite good scones, puffy croissants, less puffy chocolate (and sometimes almond) croissants and twists of crunchy puff pastry, flavored with cinnamon or cheese.

It’s also likely to have some turnovers, such as apple-blueberry with a layer of pastry cream, and cookies. The florentine cookies are thickish shortbread topped with glazed sliced almonds and dipped in chocolate. Daisy-shaped butter cookies are filled with either wild blackberry jam or Swiss chocolate.

The other pastry case, the one facing the door, has more elaborate pastries, including cakes. The eclairs (chocolate, white chocolate or mocha) have far more filling than pastry; deep-dish eclairs, as it were. The chocolate mousse rests on a bit of cake and has a bit of raspberry flavor. My favorite is the oblong apple tart, where thin slices of apple seem particularly luscious on top of a layer of pastry cream.

The place is only open for breakfast and lunch, but it recently opened a take-home foods operation a door down, selling salads, brisket, rack of lamb and the like. So now Beverly Hills can have La Provence all day.

BE THERE

La Provence Pa^tisserie, Suite 110, Beverly Hills Plaza, 8950 W. Olympic Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 888-8833. Breakfast 6:30-10 a.m. Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday; lunch 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Saturday. No alcohol. Parking lot and street parking. All major cards. Soups, $4.50; salads and sandwiches, $5.95 to $8.50.

What to Get: roasted pepper sandwich, caprese sandwich, club sandwich, green eggs and ham, cinnamon twist, apple tart.