Update April 18, 2012: This restaurant is now closed and replaced by Harvest Gastro Pub in BGC.
Have you ever wondered what is the true taste of a French croissant?
The authentic croissant is crusty on the outside, soft like a pillow inside and, best of all, it’s not oily. (Although Mila said it should be flaky not pillowy. See a Parisian Croissant by MM.) The secret of the French croissant is in the baking technique and the special European oven used to bake it. Also, raw butter is used (instead of margarine), which gives it flavor and blends perfectly with the bread itself.
Now Manila can enjoy French breads and pastries from Alexandre, the first authentic French Bakery and Cafe — named after its French owner.
Croissant aux Amandes (Almond Croissant) Grande – (P75)
The Almond Croissant is what most people are raving about. The almond filling is based on a secret recipe from Alexandre’s family. It actually tastes like yema. We initially ordered one to try it, and before we could reorder some to take home, the next customer bought and wiped out all the remaining inventory.
Croissant aux Amandes & Chocolat (Almond and Chocolate Croissant) Grande – (P85)
The chocolate with almond is also OK but we prefer the plain Almond instead. All the bread types are cooked onsite fresh daily, starting at 7 in the morning. The leftover bread at night are donated to charity.
Alexandre Signature Tarte Tatin served with homemade vanilla ice cream – (P190)
I vowed to go back to taste the Tarte Tatin. I think it is best to order this fresh from the oven and not settle for the ones that are displayed on the counter for a long period of time. (Have you tried this?)
The trendy but warm ambiance is complemented by the friendly waiters and the uber-friendly French owner, Alexandre. We’re glad we decided to eat dinner here last night for our weekend birthday celebration. The menu is limited to healthy salads, sandwiches and crepes — Alexandre Menu | Drinks Menu.
Salad de Monaco (Shrimp Salad) served with a basket of French bread – (P390)
The restaurant prides itself on serving healthy and organic food with fresh ingredients. Alexandre’s favorite salads are the Shrimp Salad and the Cheese Salad with Camembert.
The greens were sourced directly from Tagaytay, with fresh avocado and shrimps bought fresh everyday from the market. It tasted “healthy” — a bit bland, with the avocado as the source of its flavor. The greens were a bit tired and tasted frozen.
To justify the overpriced salads (which range from P320-P390), a basket of classic baguette, rye bread, and walnut or raisin bread is served with it. Enjoy the taste of real French bread that is crusty outside and soft and chewy inside. They don’t add any sugar, butter or oil to make the bread in Alexandre, which gives it a unique and healthy taste.
Vive La Pizza (Served on Baguette) Petit – (P140)
For the kids, we ordered the basic pizza topped with tomato sauce, cheese and (oregano?). This was a sure hit with them.
Le Cirque (Chicken) – (P150)
The chicken sandwich is simple — with just tomato, lettuce and light mayonnaise. You can order additional mayonnaise if you want to have more flavor in your sandwich. Alexandre is still working on sourcing organic chicken from a farm in Tagaytay.
The friendly servers and baristas in Alexandre. Thanks for the warm service! 🙂
Croissant au Beurre (Butter Croissant) – (P50)
After eating this bread from Alexandre, I will never settle for anything less than this authentic butter croissant. 🙂 (My French Baker days are over…)
Alexandre has cool lounge chairs where you can sit, hang out and chat with friends.
Cappucino – (P100)
Update 1/19/2011: The coffee has improved and I was wrong about my initial impressions about the coffee.
The cappucino was served lousily without the proper froth because of the milk. It is forgivable, considering they just opened 3 days ago and are still stabilizing their operations. They should have good barista training, like how Starbucks or Coffee Bean would do it.
Crepe Nature (Crepe with sugar & butter) – (P80)
Alexandre is proud to serve organic crepe using an Oat brand.
Crepe au Chocolat (Chocolate crepe served with homemade vanilla ice cream) – (P190)
Of course, Filipinos love chocolate and ice cream on crepes! 🙂
It is always a precious moment every time we see Joshua saying, “Wowowow!”
Thanks to Alexandre for taking the French Bakery/Cafe to a higher level of quality in Manila!
The P250 Steel Calling Card of Alexandre… I want one too!
Overall, the baked goodies, bread and pastries are awesome! The coffee needs to be improved, though. I can’t wait to see the lounge opening in front of the restaurant with a cobblestone street. 🙂
Alexandre
31st St. cor. 1st Avenue
(near Grand Hamptons)
Fort Bonifacio, Taguig
Alexandre Facebook Page
7am – 10pm Mondays to Saturdays
Directions:
From Buendia flyover going into Fort Bonifacio, turn right after Jollibee and turn on the first right. This is 31st Avenue. You should see Alexandre in the middle of Mini Stop and Dunkin Donut Cafe.
There is parking on the next block. You can park in front of the restaurant at night. You can also get special parking inside the building if you request from Alexandre in advance. 🙂
P.S. It would be awesome to have breakfast here on my birthday. 🙂
Hi Anton,
Just send me a mail if you want to have breakfast @ Alexandre with me one of those days (early morning (!). My treat !
Wow, looks good. I’ve got to try their Almond Croissant. The best almond croissant I’ve had so far was from Vietnam (haven’t been to France yet hehehehe)
read david lebovitz, who, i think, writes the BEST food blog amongst those who are american and live in paris – he’ll tell you that the french really has lousy coffee and that he has yet to come across knock-out coffee in paris…
Hello anton!
Thank you thank you once again talaga,sa mga blog mo na ganito nkakatulong ka!really…
Thank you dun sa info about mickey’s na may french cheese and im so happy today pag check ko,nag blog ka about ALEXANDRE french bakery! at last,may authentic croissant and baguette kame mabibili.Alam mo bang dito sa France,pinag aaralan kong gumawa ng bread pra lang hindi mamiss ng hubby ko yung mga tinapay dito. Thank you tlga! I LOVE YOUR BLOG
Haha, this made me laugh. OK I’ll lower my expectation then 🙂
You’re Welcome Divina 🙂 Just sharing our awesome discoveries to people…
Happy birthday, Anton, and may you have many more AWESOME birthdays to come! Ako sana magtre-treat sa iyo, kaso nasa kabilang dulo ako ng daigdig. Next time na mapadpad ako diyan, treat kita.
I got this email from Mila and reposting it with her permission…
Hi Anton!
I was looking through your post about the croissants at Alexandre, the place looks very spiffy, but the food probably still needs time to settle. Hot chocolate that tastes like watery cappuccino is not a good thing. Especially when you can get good thick hot chocolate in so many places in town.
What I wanted to comment, but can’t on your site because of some weird technical thingy with blogs here in China (censors, don’t ask) is that croissants should be flaky inside, not pillowy. If you go to Marketmanila’s recent posts about Paris, go look at the layers in the croissant from Pierre Herme. Butter, thin layers of dough folded over and over and over and over on top of each other.
If there’s one thing I hope Alexandre tries to make, since it’s trying to be so french, is kouign amann, a fantastic pastry from the region of Brittany. Think flaky, buttery bread (like a croissant) then add caramel to it. The only place making it in Manila is Jipan, and several friends and I have been buying their stock out (they only make 20 pieces a day). The ones in France are even better but Jipan’s will do.
In the meantime they should revamp their hot chocolate!
Take care, hi to the boys and hugs to Rache,
Mila
Thanks Naz, sige I’ll take up your offer when you are back here in Manila 🙂
TO: ALL MEMBERS OF THE BLOG
FROM: ALEXANDRE
We thank you all for your comments as they are all appreciated, good and bad. We have just opened our store less than a week ago and Meralco has not yet given us our power so it is very difficult to run our oven all the time and produce what was intended to. We are forced to use only one deck oven and from time to time in order to stay open yet the feedback from both Filipinos and the expat community has been overwhelmingly positive.
It is however important for me to address the critics as I feel it is just for me to do so.
1. Critic – Prices of our salads are overpriced: Our prices for our salads are based on a study of all restaurants from the area and none of our salads we feel were above the range found in Bonifacio. Our shrimps are not frozen and ingredients are fresh so we cannot reduce the prices and thus, compromising its quality.
2. Critic – the restaurant feels like a child-unfriendly establishment and we always have to “tip-toe” when the gf of the owner is around: While I personally took offense with this critic, I feel obliged to reply to it.
We wanted to put everything we had into delivering an outstanding and luxurious interior for our clients and of course if children are running wild and stepping on top of glass coffee tables and sofas with their shoes, it is a little scary for us to witness this but not once have anyone from Alexandre said anything, on the contrary we showed respect, constraint, and not even knowing Anton was a food writer we offered complimentary pastries as we have for most of our clients. We do ask parents to try to have their children respect property of others. I love children I spend many hours in orphanages so we are certainly not against children but it does hurt us when some are a little unruly and parents are allowing this to happen.
3. The critic about lacking attention to serving a diluted Mocha is noted and while no excuse will be presented, it is our soft opening and we have addressed this issue accordingly.
4. The cappuccino was served without proper frost and we do not know how to serve coffee.
It is also unfair to post this critic without the correct explanation I gave Anton during his visit, an explanation which was conveniently omitted on this blog. Our milk supplier did not deliver the milk that day and we had to use a different milk which caused lack of frost. This will not happen again. However, it must be noted that not one client, even the italians who are coming every morning since the opening for their cappuccino are complaining, on the contrary they are telling us our cappuccino are the best.
While I surely appreciate all feedback, I also believe the owner of the restaurant has a right to respond to the critics and as they all say, there is always two sides of a story and thanks to your blog and your honest approach to reporting we are all able to communicate effectively and continue to improve both our customer service and our food quality.
I thank you for your time and attention. As always you and your loved ones are always welcome.
Sincerely,
Alexandre
I brought a box of croissants for our office merienda and it was a hit! Never had croissants so good before.
I’ve never come across a crossaint that’s flaky on the inside. And I would venture to say, there’s no such thing. This is from the vantage of someone who has traveled through Europe.
Yeah,mee too..i’ve never heard of “flaky” croissant on the inside..The people who knows best what is the best croissant taste are those who live in FRANCE… like me 🙂
a nice croissant in france is flaky on the outside but very tender or pillowy on the inside,and smells goood butter…
Anton, have a hard time looking for the date. Pwede po nyong lakihan?
Huh? Di ba inyo rin ang marketmanila?
I just tried this last Saturday and the desserts were all FABULOUS!!
OMG!!
hi anton,
been reading your blog for a year now and glad you’ve found out about alexandre. you’ve got to try the pizzas at alexandre! it’s fairly new, they launched it a few weeks ago but my gosh, try the margherita pizza! me and my fiance have been craving for it eversince we tasted it. let us know your thoughts. 🙂
Talaga? Sige, I'll try their pizzas one of these days…
Do you need staff at alexandre the fort ?
i would like to apply to help my study in finacial support thank you 🙂
i can’t wait to try this place out!! oooh i love pastries!!
why did this place close down? 🙁
They lost money and had to move out of the country. Check out Alexandre.ph for the official shutdown message.
Anton