Well, I do éclair

If you’re a dessert person — and who isn’t? — Serendra has become the place to be. Charming little stores now sell everything from designer cupcakes to cheese rolls and macaroons, but amid this plethora of baked goods, one shop-front in particular caught my attention because it reminded me of the store windows at Galeries Lafayette.

The art on the walls was so French and so was the name: Gourmandise Patisserie. (“A gourmandise is someone who appreciates fine food and drink,” explains chef-owner Sunshine Puey Pengson.)

Step inside and you find out that Gourmandise specializes in that most Parisian of treats: the éclair. (FYI, an éclair is like a cream puff, traditionally filled with custard and glazed with caramel, but elongated and glorified.)

Now, the market being what it is, it takes chutzpah to dedicate yourself to something so niche, but Sunshine is one-half of a culinary couple that is anything but faint-hearted. She and her husband, chef Roberto Pengson, set up modern fine-dining restaurant The Goose Station a few years back. At “the Goose,” as she calls it, experimentation is always on order, and Rob gets an idea for a new restaurant concept practically every day.

Sunshine, meanwhile, spent six months in Paris studying pastry and taking a master’s course at Escoffier, and fell so much in love with the City of Lights that she wanted to bring a piece of it back home with her.

Fun, femme, French: Artist Robert Alejandro designed the interiors, staff uniforms, and packaging of Gourmandise. Photos by FERNAN NEBRES

“I wanted to do something French and Parisian. It’s like the Ratatouille cartoon,” she laughs. “When you’re in Paris, you just get carried away by the experience. You’re so inspired when you’re there.”

She lived on Rue Montorgueil, which is a famous market street, and right beside her apartment was Patisserie Stohrer, one of the oldest patisseries in the city. “They had really good coffee éclairs, and their fruit tarts with the small strawberries were just really, really delicious.”

In almost every neighborhood or street-corner patisserie she says you’ll find éclairs, but the most common flavors are chocolate and coffee. “Ladurée even has pistachio and rose-flavored éclairs, but it’s really Fauchon that modernized it. They have an éclair weekend once  a year where they sell 30 different flavors, including savory éclairs like smoked salmon, cream cheese, and foie gras.”

Not surprisingly, Sunshine loves éclairs, but there was no one here that did them the way they do in Paris: “They do the traditional Dulcinea ones, which is just the chocolate and custard inside, and I figured there were so many things you could do with éclairs.”

So she came up with her own French pastries for Gourmandise, concocting nine éclair flavors: chocolate, praline, coffee, lemon, Mont Blanc, peanut butter and jelly, raspberry-dulce de leche, salted caramel, and apple-fig and foie gras; five tarts: apple, lemon meringue, peanut butter caramel, Gianduja, and passionfruit cheesecake;  and a matcha yuzu opera cake.

Topped with colorful glazes and decorations like sugar flowers, Gourmandise’s éclairs look almost too pretty to eat, but once you sink your teeth into this delightful pastry, you may never be satisfied with plain old cream puffs again.

Though chocolate will always rule and all variations must be tried at least once, in my opinion, I happen to prefer savory over sweet, so I immediately gravitated towards the éclairs that contrast salt with sugar, like the salted caramel, raspberry-dulce de leche, and most especially the apple-fig and foie gras, which for me is heaven housed in choux pastry.

“We started out with our favorite flavors, thinking The Goose Station is kind of famous for its foie gras cone, and so I wanted to make an éclair version of that,” Sunshine says. “It’s a torchon that we cure with Grand Marnier, salt and pepper, then we just mix it with a little bit of cream and that’s it, so it’s 90 percent foie gras.”

The tarts and cake are also exquisite — both in taste and looks. While the Gianduja chocolate tart is the bestseller, I love the lemon meringue, and the inspiration for the opera cake was Japanese pastry chef Sadaharu Aioki, who has shops in Paris that Sunshine would visit while she was living there. “He did French pastries with Japanese flavors, which I love, so that’s where idea came from.”

Though these are the constants on the menu, Sunshine, who, like her hubby, finds much fun in R&D and does it at their commissary in the south, aims to create new flavors and products every few months, in tune with the season and the holidays. They’ve added a blueberry cheesecake éclair and most recently a carrot cake one with cream cheese frosting. Soon they’ll have a 10-layer salted caramel chocolate cake, since Sunshine noticed it’s currently Manila’s “it” flavor.

Those on the lookout for unique gifts for foodie friends won’t find more lovely presents than Gourmandise pastries. Artist Robert Alejandro of Papemelroti designed the store down to the staff uniforms and gorgeous packaging, where each box size features a different motif.

“A friend of a friend posted his sketches on Facebook,” recalls Sunshine. “Looking through them I said, ‘Wow, if I ever opened a patisserie, I want this guy to design it. Fast forward to this year and I decided to push through with it. I sent him a message on FB and said, ‘Hi, I’m a fan of your work. Can I please meet you?’ So we met up and hit it off so well.’

She wanted it to be very Parisian but told him the patisseries in Paris were either very classic and traditional or very modern. She wanted to fall somewhere in between, and the shop also had to look chic and feminine.

“The packaging to me was very important because I wanted for someone to receive it as a gift and be very excited to open it, to see what’s inside,” Sunshine says. “People collect them as well. I have a lot of customers who tell me that they use the box for other things, which is great.”

Sitting at one of Gourmandise’s outside tables, me savoring an éclair with a cup of the house Nespresso coffee, we talk about Serendra’s metamorphosis into a pastry hub. “I think it’s nice,” she muses. “People will think if they want desserts, they’ll come to Serendra, have a variety of places to choose from. Hopefully they’ll get something from each of us.”

I ask Sunshine what the French quote painted on her wall means, and she obligingly translates: “‘Of all the passions, there is nothing more respectable than gourmandise.’”

A lot of gourmands in Manila would agree.

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Gourmandise Patisserie is on the ground floor of Serendra (in front of Gaudi restaurant), Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. A box of six éclairs costs P540, while a box of 12 goes for P1,080.