Fruute Bakery - West Hollywood

There's a certain aesthetic cliché often ascribed to family-owned businesses.

We'd imagine such a bakery, for example, to feature haphazard décor and maybe a homey touch like gingham curtains.

But when the family comprises two daughters who work in fashion and branding, respectively, and Mom is a flavor savant, that cliché is quickly disabused.

Christina Santosa and her daughters, Yo and Sylvia, own Früute, a new bakery in West Hollywood. The bakery's diminutive tarts ($3 each) are developed and baked by Christina and gorgeously "styled" by Sylvia, and the enterprise is framed with Yo's minimalist branding.

Früute is a fitting name, for even the shop's "classic" flavors, like crème brûlée or salted caramel, are graced with fruit. The former is crowned with a torched wedge of apricot, and the caramel version is complemented by dried berries and a single fresh blackberry. These fruity additions, emblematic of all of the tarts we tasted, work in tandem with the base flavors–the apricot, for example, coaxing a different sweetness from the burnt sugar.

Früute's owners also have a line of "curious" flavors, in which wasabi and blood orange are merged. It's a welcome combination.

Früute, 8951 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood; 310-786-9983 or fruute.com