San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. cafe serves up a dreamy slice of Paris
Maison Nico is a stunning, all-day French bakery for pâté en croûte and buttery croissants
Downtown San Francisco is a funny place to find paradise these days. But amongst the drab, looming towers (in Warship Gray) and still-empty hotels (in Beaux Arts Beige) there shimmers a vivid firmament of pink ambrosia. It’s a heaven of sorts: a gustatorial Eden composed of croissant and pastry, of weepingly fragrant orange flower brioche and Proustian madeleines, delicately constructed lobster gelees and bawdy, burly pâté en croûte — all of a glowing, riotous quality and uncommonly deft execution.
It took the pandemic to get us here, some strange inversion of reality in which acclaimed fine-dining chef Nicolas Delaroque — of Michelinlauded, semi-eponymous restaurant Nico — might reinvent himself as the ringleader of a stunning all-day épicerie. The term refers to a sort of catchall French establishment that draws on various traditions in grocery, baking, pastry and a light-yet-satisfying lunch. At Maison Nico, this means elegant pastries and elaborate savories; distinguished wines and Chartreusespiked cappuccinos; and growing crowds hoisted atop pastel-pink bistro tables along the shop’s corner of Montgomery Street.
Paris-born Delaroque and his wife and partner, Andrea Delaroque, conjured Maison Nico out of the stress and disruption of 2020. It is a “restaurant pivot” of the highest form, the very pinnacle of the trope — a slice of Paris with extra butter in the literal shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid.
Nico, the restaurant, closed in the early days of the 2020 pandemic. Maison Nico, the épicerie, opened in October of that cursed year; the Delaroques knew that fine dining in San Francisco would be upended indefinitely, but financial realities meant they couldn’t walk away from the space.
“We simply didn’t know what else to do,” recalls Delaroque, who had no real prior pastry or bakery experience to speak of outside of French culinary school. Prior to opening his own restaurant, Delaroque cooked for Dominique Crenn.
“All of this — this pivot, this Maison Nico — it has been a matter of try and fail. But it is very rewarding now to see it well-received.” Nicolas Delaroque, owner, Maison-Nico
But sometimes stress results in ingenuity; the Delaroques found hope in the idea of a new concept, the germ of which had been born at an earlier version of Nico, back when the restaurant was located in Pacific Heights. At the bar, the team served pâté en croûte as well as a terrine. Perhaps a daytime version of these items — with help from a small pastry team, allhands-on-deck style — might connect with the small community of those still living in and around the Financial District?
Those tentative early pivot days proved pivotal, and Maison Nico began to draw a growing crowd of daily regulars. The shop’s benchmark became its croissant, that most elemental of all French pastries. (“Croissant was definitely the idea we knew we can’t miss,” says Delaroque, “because if we can’t make a good croissant there’s no point.”) But a growing following for brioche feuilletée , cookies and especially Delaroque’s elaborate pâté en croûte began to form around the cafe’s Instagram.
There is a thriving, boisterous subculture for this particular dish on social media. Once synonymous with French peasant cuisine, the visual appeal of pâté en croûte is now the stuff of 10,000 hashtags. It helps that pâté en croûte is kind of weird: various meat pastes are held together in a forced terrine with nuts and fruit, often coated in a layer of flavored gelatin aspic, and all of it encased in pastry crust. It looks gorgeous on the internet and provokes a strong reaction from all who encounter it — mostly positive, but sometimes trepidatious, which only gins up the algorithm more. Delaroque is a bona fide celebrity within this world, earning a finalist spot at the 2022 Championnat du Monde de Pâté-Croûte (yes really) in Lyon and drawing global praise online for his mastery of the form (flame emojis and French praises abound).
After a brief reset between April and July to acquire more equipment and dial-in recipes, Maison Nico reopened properly this summer, fully dedicated to its new identity. Today the kitchen at Maison Nico buzzes with a petite brigade of chefs, plus counter service and a small team downstairs. A larger oven and proofer were acquired, and daily recipe testing and experimentation continues apace, led by Nicolas Delaroque alongside pastry chef Alena Rozanski and pastry sous-chef Kelly Teramoto. Andrea Delaroque helps with daily operations, and Vanessa Yap Einbund produces the shop’s social media presence.
“Now that we’ve reopened it’s really picked up,” says Andrea Delaroque. “We have a growing neighborhood crowd, and people keep coming back for the food, or discovering us for the first time on Instagram.” It helps that downtown San Francisco feels as though it is slowly, surely, coming back to life and is perhaps best traversed at this very moment with a croissant in hand.
Part of what sets this place apart is the sheer diversity of its daily offering, something that the Delaroques find as fundamental to the experience.
“Epicerie is an idea we borrow from France … really it’s like a little bit of everything,” says Nicolas Delaroque. The shop’s tasteful glass displays evoke a high-end watch store, except these jewelry cases thrum and vibrate with a caloric symphony of pumpkin Parisian flan; chocolate and espresso croissant-muffins; chestnut croissants; duck and pork Pithivier (a kind of pie) rich with Grand Marnier, Port wine and Swiss chard; caneles and madeleines aplenty; seasonal choux changing with the
(apple and cardamom one month, passion fruit curd the next); pain au chocolat; peach tarts in the summer; almond croissant in the autumn and more — always more.
Savories are the main event here, always changing and evolving with the seasons and whims of Maison Nico. On one visit you might find pâté en croûte of duck studded with pistachios and set beneath a layer of pear aspic; or chicken and lobster in sauce Nantua (a sort of crayfish béchamel) held together by a delicate pastry crust; or a pork, chanterelle and apricot terrine set with cumin, cognac and white wine. There is typically the option to order my personal favorite, the deceping tively simple and beautifully green jambon persille, in which creamy ham is layered in a terrine of parsley and wine, as simple and French as any dish can be, and utterly perfect on a baguette with a dollop of good butter.
Some of the shop’s earliest offerings, including the brioche orange flower pastry that so moved me on my first visit, have yet to reappear. Ever the perfectionist, Nicolas Delaroque and his team are still working to dial in the brioche pastries that so charmed me on those original visits. “We’ve had an issue of consistency,” he says, “and we’re still working on new things — it is a process.”
But other, newer offerings startle at the Maison, includweather a Paris-Brest, originally offered only on the weekends and now available daily. Traditionally a wheel of patè a choux filled with fragrant praline cream, in the hands of pastry chefs Rozanski and Teramoto the addition of fresh Santa Barbara pistachios creates a subtle, lovely sweetness, ever so slightly tinged in a shade of pastel green.
The single most notable offering at Maison Nico is perhaps the simplest: pâté grand-mère, quite literally “grandmother’s pâté,” which for the French is something like a culinary birthright. Every last épicerie in Paris makes this, and so do many butcher shops in the United States. It is a deceptively facile dish, composed of pork, chicken liver and a blend of spices. In Nicolas Delaroque’s version, there is an ethereal complexity, a platonic ideal — perhaps from the spices, imported via French purveyor Maison Malnou, or maybe from the quality of the pork, or the gentle hint of sweetness from Delaroque’s choice to caramelize the chicken livers.
Or it could be that in its simplicity, this dish functions like a distillation of the concept itself, in which a chef of Delaroque’s caliber would focus on cooking in such a humble way, resulting in a product that feels effortlessly natural and meant to be, despite the fact that a great deal of effort has gone into it every step of the way.
“All of this — this pivot, this Maison Nico — it has been a matter of try and fail,” he says, with characteristic French fatalism. “But it is very rewarding now to see it wellreceived.”
Oui chef, but the line is out the door most mornings, and the guests keep arriving from near and far. When the pastries and the pâtés are this superb, then surely — bien sur — the reward is now ours.
Maison Nico. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. 710 Montgomery St., San Francisco. maisonnico.com