Relaunched Pâtisserie Mélanie broadens its offerings with dinner service this week

It’s been nearly 10 years since Melanie Dunn walked away from her job as an English teacher at Crawford High School in San Diego with the goal of opening her own French bakery.

The result was Pâtisserie Mélanie, which exploded in popularity after she and her husband, writer and English teacher Axel Schwarz, opened their petite shop in Hillcrest on Valentine’s Day in 2018. Everything Dunn baked — Parisian-style handmade, all-butter croissants, elegant Viennoiserie and more — sold out within hours.

The quality of her pastries was unquestionable. Dunn had spent the previous three summers learning the art of pastry at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. But it was hard for Dunn and Schwarz make a profit on pastries alone.

Melanie Dunn inside her Pâtisserie Mélanie in North Park.

So in 2019 they closed the bakery, with plans to quickly open a larger bakery-cafe in a newly leased location in North Park that would offer not only pastries but also gourmet coffee service and a lunch menu. They signed the lease in January 2020 and two months later the pandemic arrived, scuttling their plans for three years.

Finally last spring, the 20-seat Pâtisserie Mélanie opened in the North Park space at 30th and Gunn streets offering pastries, coffee, hot sandwiches, quiches and tartine. And on Wednesday, Dec. 6, the shop’s hours expanded to include dinner service five nights a week.

“We’ve been doing very well since we reopened, but our goal is to be known for more than just croissants,” Dunn said.

The new dinner menu — with six starters, six entrees and six desserts — includes dishes like salmon in beurre blanc, coq au vin, beef Bourguignon and cassoulet. There’s also a selection of French red, white, rosé wines, Champagnes, apertifs and beer by the glass.

“We really see ourselves as that old Europeans-style cafe that you go to in Vienna or Paris. You go in for your morning coffee and a pastry and then that rolls into lunch and then into dinner, and in some places in Germany and Austria it becomes a bar. It’s an all-day place,” she said.

Coq au vin and French wines at Pâtisserie Mélanie in North Park.

Dunn said her dinner menu reflects who she is as a chef. She may be French-trained in techniques, but her heritage is Filipino and Irish. She grew up in Hawaii, where her family has lived for generations, and has spent the past 20 years in Southern California. As a result, her dinner menu reflects the dishes she and Schwarz enjoyed eating while living and dining in Paris and other European cities for three summers, infused with the rich flavors she grew up with in Hawaii and the bounty of produce and artisan ingredients and seafood available here.

An example of this fusion of flavors is her salmon dish, with a touch of yuzu fruit juice in the butter sauce and a garnish of California-grown blood orange bites. And her endive salad is served in a silken tofu dressing with a splash of soy sauce and finely cut slivers of fresh red and green apples.

“I’m the voice asking myself is this French? Is this something I’d see on a menu in Paris. I say yes,” Dunn said.

Axel Schwarz is the co-owner of Pâtisserie Mélanie in North Park.

Dunn ‘s dinner menu also features dishes that capitalize on her pastry skills, like a salmon croûte, vol-au-vent and an artichoke-spinach bechamel appetizer that are all made with her housemade puff pastry. She’s also making laminated brioche bread for dinner service.

Her favorite part of the menu is the lineup of what she calls “prestige” desserts, usually only found in fine-dining restaurants because of the labor required, such as a Paris-Brest praline and almond pastry, and a verrine saisonnière, which is a chilled layered dessert that includes seasonal orange panna cotta, Earl Gray marmalade, dark chocolate mousse, espresso gelée and a cacao nib tuile.

The exterior of Pâtisserie Mélanie in North Park.

To make the dinner service happen, Dunn said she has hired a couple of cooks from Animae restaurant, who have helped her execute her vision and brought along ideas of their own on design and plating. She loves having a team around her now, since the life of a pastry chef — her usual daily wake-up time is 4 a.m. — can be isolating.

Dunn said that the three-year shutdown was hard on her and Schwarz, who have a 7-year-old daughter, but it gave her time to refine the menu, hire a staff she loves and build public anticipation for the return of Pâtisserie Mélanie.

“There was a lot of pent-up desire for what we’re bringing to North Park. And we also had a small customer base who followed us,” she said. Already, 50 percent of our customers are regulars and the other 50 percent are walking in for the first time. Walkability in North Park is really good right now. We’re excited for the future.”