Aux Pains de Papy
Mathieu Esposito starts baking at 1am, and Time Out calls the result
arguably London's most authentic French bread.1
Why go
This is a one-counter French bakery on Gray's Inn Road, five minutes from King's Cross, and the whole case for it is the man starting work in the middle of the night.12 Time Out describes the baguettes as consistently crisp on the outside and squishily decadent on the inside
and ideal sandwich-building material
, which is the right test for a loaf you are buying on the way somewhere.1 The baguette ran 1.20 when that was written.1
Order this / avoid
- Order: a baguette, and then, in Time Out's words,
make sure to grab a pastry on your way out or you'll be really sad later
.1
What locals & experts say
- Time Out, in its best-bread piece: Esposito
gets up at 1am every day to produce what's arguably London's most authentic French bread
, and the baguettes areconsistently crisp on the outside and squishily decadent on the inside
.1
Good to know
- Hours are not published in anything reachable here, and a bakery's day starts and ends early.
- No website. The business publishes a Facebook page and no domain of its own.
- Getting there: 279 Gray's Inn Road, King's Cross tube and rail.2
Verdict
could-visit — Mathieu Esposito gets up at 1am to bake, and Time Out's verdict on what comes out is that it is 'arguably London's most authentic French bread', crisp outside and soft enough inside to build a sandwich on. That is the entire reason to walk to a corner of Gray's Inn Road that nobody walks to otherwise, and at 1.20 for a baguette when the piece was written it is the cheapest thing in this slice by an order of magnitude. The same writer says to take a pastry on the way out. What holds it here rather than higher is scale and record: one small counter, no published hours, no venue website, and one paragraph of independent writing about it. Buy bread on the way to King's Cross.