Grilled cheese dazzles at Pearl bakery

Bakery Lorraine goes beyond its famous macarons

If macarons were the only reason to visit the three San Antonio locations of Bakery Lorraine, that might be enough. Light as a feather and rendered in the colors of a street artist’s chalk box, their big flavors such as lavender, Earl Grey and Dreamsicle belie their one-bite size.

But toss a macaron into Bakery Lorraine’s bigger pond and watch the ripples expand to reveal fresh bread, danish and croissants, then a coffee bar and a sandwich operation broad enough to encompass breakfast and lunch.

The ripples were set in motion by chef-owners Anne Ng and Jeremey Mandrell and business partner Charlie Biedenharn when Bakery Lorraine opened on Grayson Street in 2012 then moved to the Pearl in 2014. Since then, they’ve added Bakery Lorraine locations at The Rim, in the Medical Center area as well as an outpost in Austin.

Ambition tastes good. Success tastes even sweeter.

Best sandwich: Bakery Lorraine’s soaring warehousestyle space at the Pearl is a thoroughly grown-up pastry shop and coffee bar, all blond wood and polished concrete floors, and a bakery case filled with elaborate little opera cakes and oversize cookies to match coffee cups that take both hands to lift. But there’s still room to be a kid again with just about the best grilled cheese sandwich I’ve found in San Antonio ($12 with chips and a pickle).

Built on freshly baked sourdough bread cut wide and thin,

it was butter-toasted on the flat-top and layered with three perfect cheeses: fontina for power, raclette for funk and goat cheese for luxury plush. Get a side bowl of deep-red tomato soup with twang and texture, and you might as well be 12 years old at your mom’s table.

Other sandwiches: Bakery

Lorraine puts a French-pastry spin on the onion-breath grandeur of an everything bagel with an everything croissant, then piles that croissant with smoked salmon, dill cream cheese and pickled red onions ($13.50 with chips and a pickle). Texturally, the yielding, flaky croissant proved to be a better fit for good smoked salmon than the hardknock bite of a bagel. It’s less messy, more polite and still delivers that trifecta of carbs, cream and smoked seafood silk.

But Bakery Lorraine let me down with a chicken salad sandwich on a croissant ($12.50 with chips and a pickle). I liked the sultry tarragon aromatics of the chunky chicken salad, but there wasn’t enough of the “salad” part, the mayo that binds the best chicken salads, and it fell away in chunks with every bite of a rigid croissant that shattered rather than flaked.

The croque madame sandwich isn’t quite a unicorn in San Antonio, but it’s rare enough that any sighting’s an event. Bakery Lorraine’s rendition ($13.50 with roasted potatoes) was built on good sourdough, toasted and filled with ham and cheese, then topped with a perfectly poached egg and a luxury hotel robe of Mornay sauce, a lush bechamel base with a cheesy French accent (but in a good way.)

Photos by Mike Sutter/Staff A smoked salmon croissant sandwich is piled with cream cheese and pickled red onions on an everything-spiced croissant.

Clockwise from top left, a side salad, grilled cheese, chicken salad, tomato soup, smoked salmon, and a croque madame.

The perfect grilled cheese offers fontina, raclette and goat cheese on sourdough.