Let it be said: Pastry chef Michelle Hernández has boldly claimed the title of San Francisco’s queen of canelé, the hard-to-perfect Bourdeaux pastry considered a benchmark of a skilled pastry chef.
A great canelé requires beeswax to line the very expensive fluted copper mold, two days of R&R for the batter, and scientific precision to get the exterior properly caramelized. But after years of perfecting the temperamental two-inchers, Hernández is confident she makes the best in town.
All signs point to the fact that she is correct. In the brand-spanking-new location of her second Le Dix-Sept Pâtisserie, which opened in Potrero Hill over the weekend, Hernández hands me one of the dangerously dark nubs and directs me to take a bite. The crunch is audible. The burnt sugar sticks to my teeth, melting into something pleasantly bittersweet, just a hair’s breadth from burned. Watching the pleasure spread across my face, Hernández asks me then to regard the bread pudding-like, faintly rummy interior, which displays the desired honeycomb pattern. As a whole, it tastes like some kind of divine alchemy.
This is the result of creating thousands upon thousands of canelés over time and never once tiring of them. “I’m always like, yeah, that’s good,” she says about their crispy-creamy, hard-won glory. “Every single time.”
Hernández has sold canelés from her first Le Dix-Sept, located in the thick of the Mission District, since she opened it in 2020. She debuted with Francophile bragging rights. After moving to Paris in 2008 to pursue Le Grand Diplôme at Le Cordon Bleu, she stayed on for years, working in Michelin-starred restaurants, cooking on both the savory and sweet sides. (A collector of canelé molds, Hernández has even been to Normandy to buy direct from the artisans at the famous Mauviel factory.) She returned to San Francisco to start Le Dix-Sept, selling her pastries at the Noe Valley Farmer’s Market and helping Dandelion Chocolate introduce a chocolate canelé.
Her first shop — where Hernández has been selling everything from wedding cakes to almond tarts with passionfruit to buckwheat brownie cookies with sesame and cacao nibs — hasn’t come without struggle. As an independent entrepreneur, she had to scrape together funds via her own savings and Kickstarter in order to open amid a pandemic. She also admits that the shop’s location at the gritty intersection of 18th and Mission streets, has been “challenging.” And then there’s the fact that she’s had to bake everything out of a commissary kitchen in Bernal Heights and then lug it to her storefront. Until now.
Her new bakery puts an end to all that. Set on the ground floor of a swanky condo building at the base of Potrero Hill, next door to La Connessa (a sweeping Italian restaurant from the group behind Spruce), Hernández’s patisserie space now has a full kitchen, which means she can make all of her desserts for both locations on-site.
Dressed in a black Bowie tee, ripped jeans, and a braid, plus a septum ring piercing her nose, Hernández belies the major feminine energy of the space. She has delightedly hung chandeliers with gold accents and painted everything else a wispy lavender — even the walk-in refrigerator door gets the same treatment. She has a display shelf full of pretty local products like coffee from Lady Falcon, mugs from Bowl Cut ceramics, and hair clips of the moment from Jenny Lemons.
In the kitchen is a sampling of different varieties of pears, including Bosc and Comice. She’s trying them out for a rose-vanilla bean cake with caramelized pears, mascarpone, and a brown sugar Swiss buttercream. Hernández also has a dough sheeter now, which means she’ll be selling orange-blossom pistachio croissants. And because she expects a lunch crowd, there will a sandwich on housemade focaccia with a roating selection of Fishwife tinned fish, sun-dried tomatoes, and preserved lemon.
Like everything in San Francisco, getting the doors open has taken time — a grueling total of three years. In the middle of talking about the build-out, her dad texts her. “We’re celebrating his remission from a rare cancer,” she says, apologizing for her brief distraction. “It puts all the delays we had with the construction into perspective.” Right now, Hernández is just happy to be here.
- Website
- ledixsept.com