NYC's Petit Chou Makes Pastries That Look Too Good To Be Real Until You Taste Them

Located on the top of Manhattan's East Village neighborhood, Petit Chou calls itself a French-inspired bakery, focusing especially on choux pastry, which it describes as "light, crispy, with a tender interior and a perfectly hollow center," making them ideal for filling and topping with various creams and flavors. The bakery's display case rivals that of a Parisian patisserie, filled with eclairs and viennoiserie that look almost too perfect to be real. Petit Chou's Instagram page is filled with images of pastries baked to a deep golden brown, with so many fine layers of laminated dough that you might think they are the work of AI art rather than the perfectly honed skills of a team of bakers.

Petit Chou's menu features standard pastries like croissants, danishes, and cinnamon rolls, but it also boasts more creative items. Standouts include a tiramisu cream puff, which has two layers of chocolate choux pastry filled with both coffee cream and coffee jam, stacked with a layer of mascarpone whip, and a double chocolate croissant, with infinite layers of laminated chocolate dough in a cylinder, baked with standard chocolate batons inside, then filled with chocolate cremeux. 

The bakery also has savory items, like a breakfast croissandwich with scrambled eggs, bacon, and American cheese inside of two slices of bread-shaped croissant dough, a perfect play on New Yorks's famous bodega sandwich the BEC (bacon egg and cheese), or a scallion cream cheese danish, a perfect square of laminated croissant dough dusted with everything bagel seasoning and topped with scallion cream cheese. 

In addition to small, perfect-looking pastries, Petit Chou offers small four-inch cakes, a wide variety of brightly colored eclairs and macarons, and larger eight-inch cakes that are all equally stunning. Petit Chou's rotating menu usually features seasonal specials, like pumpkin danish, apple pie puff, and pumpkin cookie butter cake in the fall, and has also seen gorgeous spins on the traditional French bûche de Noël, like a gingerbread pear version with gingerbread cake, chantilly and vanilla creams, and pear compote, in the winter.

Reddit users on the FoodNYC subreddit love Petit Chou, with one user saying, "Petit Chou is one of my favorite bakeries in the city – everything I've had is excellent, love their chocolate chip cookies, croissants...but the pistachio eclair has my heart." Fans on Instagram agree, with one user calling the pastries "works of art," while another commented that the pastries "taste even better than they look." And based on their flawless looks, the taste must be off the charts. Reviews on Yelp echo these sentiments, with one user's review saying, "Petit Chou is definitely an underdog, and a jam. The head chef's executions on the éclairs are bold and delicious."