Exclusive | Struggling Santa Monica’s sudden bakery boom – with $7 croissants and 45 minute waits in line

The early bird gets the croissant.

While many Santa Monica businesses are struggling to keep their doors open, a handful of wildly popular bakeries are bucking the trend — drawing pastry obsessed customers out of bed before sunrise and selling out of their buttery creations by lunchtime.

The city’s latest success story is Matilda, which is whipping up pastry pandemonium since opening a few weeks ago near the Santa Monica Airport. The bakery has been drawing crowds of eager customers, with some arriving well before opening at 8 a.m. to score one of its coveted croissants.

Head baker, Francois Pied, told the California Post that the first three weeks have been nothing short of chaos.

The team had anticipated a low-key debut, staffing the bakery for what they though would be a relatively quiet soft opening. Instead, customers came pouring in. Matilda is now churning out roughly 500 baked goods each weekday and as many as 1,000 on weekends.

These buttery treats don’t come cheap, with a classic croissant setting customers back $6, sandwiches $17, and baguettes $6.50.

But even hefty prices tags, long waits, and copious quantities haven’t been enough to satisfy Santa Monica’s growing appetite for artisanal pastries. Matilda’s has been selling out as early as 10:30 a.m., leaving the team scrambling to increase production.

The hype has gotten so out of hand that customers are reportedly waiting in line for up to 45 minutes — only to sometimes reach the counter and discover croissants, cookies or baguettes are already sold out.

The situation even prompted Matilda’s to issue a public apology to its growing legion of fans on Instagram.

“To everyone who has stood in our line,” the bakery wrote in a post. “We see you waiting on the sidewalk on a Saturday morning, some of you after driving across town, and we see your face when you reach the counter and the shelves are almost bare.”

The extraordinary demand has left the fledgling bakery in an unusual predicament: having to apologize for being too popular. While plenty of Santa Monica businesses would kill for customers willing to wait nearly an hour to spend their money, Matilda’s is racing to figure out how to feed them all.

Pied, who arrives for work at 2:30 a.m., said the shop has recently acquired another piece of baking equipment that should help the team produce more pastries throughout the morning.

The secret to Matilda’s success starts with the ingredients. The bakery uses high-quality organic grains and opts for flour from smaller mills rather than mass produced. Combined with slow fermentation — some pastries take up to four days to prepare — the result is a croissant that has already won over some of LA’s pickiest aficionados.

Among them is Andrew Cheeseman, who arrived at Matilda’s and got in line at 7:50 a.m. on Wednesday morning. Cheeseman told The Post he’s been on a decade-long mission to find the best croissant in LA, sampling nearly every bakery worth trying.

“This place wins,” he declared. “It’s the butter. Other places are able to do the crunchy outside. They’re able to get the fluffy, even-textured inside. It’s great, but this place has the butter thing mastered, and that finishes the whole thing.”

Cheeseman said part of the appeal of visiting newly opened bakeries is getting in before they become “inundated.”

Another early bird, Kristin Dossetti, arrived at Matilda’s at 7 a.m.

The owner of the French-inspired restaurant Zinque, Dossetti said she first heard about the bakery through buzz within the local food community. She stocked up on treats, leaving with four croissants, one ham and cheese sandwich, a baguette, a chocolate chip cookie, two chocolate croissants and a guava danish.

And Matilda isn’t the only bakery in town rolling in dough.

Across Santa Monica, Petitpain et Chocolate is making waves as the tiny new bakery window on Pico Boulevard from the team behind cult-favorite Petitgrain Boulangerie, located a few minutes away on Wilshire Boulevard. The new outpost opens at a bleary-eyed 6:45 a.m., but that hasn’t stopped hungry locals from lining up for freshly baked $7 chocolate croissants and pricey-but-worth-it baked goods. On weekends, as many as 40 customers can be found lined up outside the tiny shop.

“Petitpain is not so much an expansion as that’s where the bread is baked,” owner Clémence de Lutz told the California Post.

The location, which opened in September, houses a separate production kitchen that allows her team to make breads, jams and other items they couldn’t produce at Petitgrain.

“We were really excited to be able to offer our breads that are baked there, and put in a coffee program at this cute little window,” she said. “What we want to do is to be a neighborhood spot, not necessarily like a big destination.”

While the two bakeries are separated by less than a dozen blocks, de Lutz considers them part of two distinct neighborhoods. Petitpain is just a short walk from Santa Monica High School, with students stopping by for morning pastries and matcha drinks before class.

De Lutz credits the bakery’s loyal following to more than just its buttery baked goods. “We’re really not in the product business, we’re in the hospitality business,” she said.

She and her bakers start shaping pastries and such at the ungodly hour of 1 a.m., staggering production until 6 a.m. to ensure freshness.

“Every time you come in, you’re never going to get a pastry that’s more than 45 minutes old,” De Lutz told The Post. “We want to greet you and give the freshest product we can offer, rather than just pushing it all out.”

The bakery frenzy comes at a precarious time for Santa Monica’s broader business community. The beachside city has been grappling with increasing retail vacancies, rising operating costs and a wave of restaurant closures that have left one-bustling corridors dotted with empty storefronts.

A recent RAND Corporation analysis released earlier this year found that 11.2% of retail space in Santa Monica is vacant — higher than neighboring cities like Beverly Hills, Culver City and West Hollywood.

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