Théo Miel
Head baker · mornings
Third generation. Runs the deck oven and refuses to write anything down.
Since 1978 · Rue des Amandes
One oven.
Three generations.
Odette Miel arrived in Chicago with two suitcases and a notebook of her mother's recipes. The bakery she opened was nine feet wide. Forty-eight years later the shop is bigger, the notebook is falling apart, and the oven she bought secondhand is still the only one we trust with croissants.
Real butter ✳No fondant, ever ✳Fruit in season only ✳Nothing frozen ✳Real butter ✳No fondant, ever ✳Fruit in season only ✳Nothing frozen ✳
The long version
A bakery is a daily argument
With the weather, with the flour, with the clock. Dough behaves differently in a wet July than a dry February, so nothing here is ever quite the same twice. We measure by feel as often as by scale, and the recipes in the notebook are more like suggestions with strong opinions.
What doesn't change: butter at 83% fat, flour milled on stone forty miles west, eggs from a farm we've bought from since 1994, and vanilla we buy whole and split ourselves. It costs more. It tastes like it costs more.
- 1978
Odette Miel opens a one-window shop with a secondhand Lyon deck oven.
- 1991
Her son Bernard adds the laminating bench and the Friday kouign-amann.
- 2004
The marble chocolate table arrives. Bonbons become a permanent fixture.
- 2016
Théo takes the morning shift; the ferment goes from one day to three.
- 2026
Eleven bakers, sixty-two recipes, same oven.
The people
Eleven bakers, four you'll meet
Ines Abara
Pastry chef · entremets
Trained in Lyon and Osaka. Glazes every entremet by hand on the family turntable.
Wole Adeyemi
Chocolatier
Tempers on marble at 5 a.m. Claims he can hear when it's ready.
Sasha Petrov
Viennoiserie
Three-day ferments, copper trays, zero patience for shortcuts.
How we work
Slow, small, and finished
- Small batches. Nothing is mixed in quantities bigger than one baker can lift. It's inefficient and it's the point.
- Made this morning. No holding cabinets, no par-baking, no yesterday. What's in the case was made hours ago.
- Nothing wasted. Unsold pastry becomes twice-baked almond the next day, or goes to the shelter on Randolph by 7 p.m.
- Paid properly. Everyone on the floor is salaried, and the tip jar is split evenly at close.