Papa d’Amour

French pastry turned toward Asian bread

Laminated dough coils around Kurobuta pork at Papa d’Amour in Greenwich Village, New York City, where Dominique Ansel works as chef on a Taiwanese-French bakery program. The gesture is familiar to his bench, butter held in layers, dough asked to stay even, but the appetite of the place is different from the French pastry case that made his name. Here the bread culture looks toward Taiwan and Japan: filled rolls, flavored breads, sandos, savory spirals, mousse cakes, and egg tarts carrying ingredients that belong as much to Asian bakeries as to a French pâtisserie station.

Ansel’s path to this counter runs through restaurant work, apprenticeship in France as both chef and baker, a community program in French Guiana, Pâtisserie Peltier and Fauchon in Paris, and the executive pastry chef post at Daniel in New York City from 2006. His ownership years began with Dominique Ansel Bakery in 2011 and widened into other workshops and bakeries before this opening in 2025. Papa d’Amour is named as a tribute to his two children and their Taiwanese and French heritage, which gives the project its private line as well as its public method.

Butter layers, scallion, basil, black sesame

The program depends on translation rather than decoration. French lamination gives the Kurobuta Hot Dog Spiral its flake and structure, while the form recalls the twisted, savory breads common across Taiwanese and Japanese bakery cases. The Scallion Basil Blossom works from a greener register: scallion and basil folded into a bread that keeps the savor of the original idea without turning it into a side note. In the Black Sesame Jam Jar mousse cake, black sesame moves through a French dessert structure, nutty and dark, held in a composed form rather than spread loosely across a pastry.

The Pretzel Salt Egg Tart draws another line across the bench, pretzel crust meeting egg tart filling. That is the discipline of the place: not fusion as a label, but a set of decisions about dough, filling, crust, and finish. The savory items carry as much weight as the sweet ones. Sandos sit beside rolls; seasonal drinks such as Yakimochi Hot Chocolate belong to the same appetite for texture, warmth, and memory. They show the method without needing a catalogue.

A bright counter built for the pass

The room is a small, bright bakery-café on University Place, set between Greenwich Village and Union Square, with the counter doing most of the work. The pace belongs to a neighborhood bakery rather than a dining room. Guests move in, read the case, choose a bread or pastry, and step aside while the next order comes forward. The sound stays conversational. The focus stays on the tray, the pickup, the cut surface of a roll, the sheen on a mousse cake.

There is little ceremony in the service model, which suits the food. A spiral bread does not need a long explanation when its layers are visible. A sando needs the bread to hold. An egg tart needs the shell to keep its line. In that sense Papa d’Amour feels closer to the bench than to the brand around it, a place where Ansel’s larger career is narrowed into daily production on University Place.

The personal line in the program

Papa d’Amour matters because its premise is not borrowed from trend language. Ansel built it around the French and Taiwanese inheritance of his children, then gave that inheritance the tools of a pastry kitchen: lamination, mousse, filled bread, crust, proof, cut, and finish. The next movement here is likely to come through the case itself, through a seasonal return such as Yakimochi Hot Chocolate or another bread built with the same cross-cultural hand. For now, the clearest signature is the Scallion Basil Blossom.