Le Pain [Mimi's World Tour]

Bakery: Le Pain (르빵)
Address: 74 Myeongdong-gil, Myeongdong 2(i)-ga, Jung-gu, Seoul
Website: n/a 
Style: Korean 
Price: $$-$$$ 

Located in the basement/shopping mall area of the Myeongdong Catholic Cathedral, Le Pain could have so opted for a more fun and appropriate name, but nonetheless, it's a fairly small bakery with an open-concept kitchen area and an island right in the middle of the light, airy space with a limited selection of more gourmet, pricier baked goods among the many types of artisan bread. Unlike many Seoul bakeries, a weekday afternoon saw this space pretty much empty with the exception of a few last loaves of bread and two or three sweet buns. I actually assumed it was ready to close since there really was so little there, but closing time was - according to online information - more than five hours away. Do they keep baking? Do they simply close once they run out? Surely you can't keep a bakery open for five hours with what they had.... O_O

Items had labels (Korean only) and prices, but given how little there was left, items were pushed off to one side and not in their original place, making it even harder to figure out what was what.

 Not quite sure what to pick, I went with what I recognized as the "new item" featured on a poster outside the bakery - given I've seen pictures online from 8 months prior of the same poster, I can conclude it's not really that new. Oh well. This happened to be the chocolate pastry ("빠티시에 쇼콜라"; 3500 won) The dissected image showed a crusty chocolate bun cut open to reveal a chocolate cream filling surrounded by a custard cream filling dotted with chocolate chunks. In truth, it looked more complex than it tasted; perhaps because there wasn't enough of either filling to really distinguish that there was so much going on. Good crusty top, but the texture of the bun could have been better. Same goes for the pastry as a whole.

Rating: **1/2