Food We Love: Butter Crunch at Honore Artisan
Honore Artisan is the only bakery in town that makes kouign amann
By Allison Austin Scheff December 31, 1969
This article originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of Seattle magazine.
Pastry snobs from all over the city and beyond make regular pilgrimages to Honoré Artisan Bakery (Ballard, 1413 NW 70th St; 206.706.0435) to taste its kouign amann (pronounced KWEEN yah mahn), and with eminently good reason. I got my first taste of the round, buttery Breton pastry two years ago, when the handsome shop opened its doors on a then-sleepy stretch of Ballard’s NW 70th Street. (Honoré’s neighbor, the equally pilgrimage-worthy Delancey, has changed all of that, at least at dinnertime.) The subtle caramel flavor of this delicious beauty—featuring alternating layers of croissant dough, butter and sugar—is accented with a bit of crunchy sea salt across its burnished, bronze top. Kouign amann—literally “butter cake” in the Celtic language of Brittany—is a thing of wonder: a humble pastry, but so much more for $2.25. And Honoré is the only bakery in town that makes it.
Published November 2010