Dello Mano is a small business family. We don’t take too many breaks but when we do,we make them worth the wait and we definitely plan our travel to eat — we plan every itinerary around renowned restaurants, buzzy bakeries, and sought-after street food we’d like to try. Our Paris jaunt was especially challenging to plan; with so many can’t-miss spots crammed into each square kilometer of the City of Light, it was tricky to narrow down a manageable number. There was one place I knew we couldn’t strike from the list: Rose Bakery, an English-inflected patisserie that has been a jewel in the boulangerie and cafe-studded crown of the Ninth Arrondissement since it was established in 2002. Since then, as we visited Paris,  the Rose Bakery had also opened a satellite store in Le Marais district – as it eventuated just a short skip from where we were staying.

Rose Bakery – Paris

Rose Bakery – Paris

I’d been dreaming of paying a visit to Rose Bakery ever since I read founder Rose Carrarini’s Breakfast, Lunch, Tea: The Many Meals of Rose Bakery, which is just as much a memoir about the trials and tribulations of starting a restaurant as it is a cookbook. So much about Rose Bakery’s story resonates with Dello Mano. Both of our bakeries were founded by husband-and-wife teams who were motivated by a deep-set devotion to food, despite their lack of restaurant training in the strict sense. (The Carrarinis worked in the fashion industry before starting their first London restaurant; we worked for multinational food brands.) Furthermore, the Carrarinis had the bravery and foresight to open an English bakery in a city more interested in macarons than Victoria sponge, just as we started Dello Mano at a time when the Australian attitude towards brownies was indifferent at best. Despite all predictions to the contrary, Parisians went as crazy for Rose’s Eccles cakes as Australians went for our Luxury Brownies.  There is a kind of kindred spirit among all the people that follow their food dreams.

Inside Rose Bakery – Paris

There was one recipe in the cookbook that I was particularly drawn to: the quiches. According to the cookbook, quiches are husband Jean-Charles’ domain; he beats together a balanced blend of cream and egg, stirs in perfectly-paired ingredients like smoked salmon and dill or broccoli and leek, and bakes it all together in little square tart shells. The photographs in the cookbook looked impossibly gorgeous: geometrically flawless little squares, craggy with protruding fillings, the egg a shade of yellow so delicate you can almost taste the creaminess. We had been thinking about incorporating some savouries into our Dello Mano offerings, and Rose-inspired quiches seemed like a perfect choice. The trip to Rose Bakery would be research, then, and any amount of indulgence entirely justified.

When we arrived in Paris, as I mentioned earlier, we were charmed to find that Rose Bakery happened to be just one street over from our apartment. A real bonus given the apartment was one of the worst we’d ever booked! Bien and I have been booking apartments online for over 10 years – optimistic at heart, we’d always faired very well. Not on this occasion.  A third floor apartment, old dilapidated and the floor seriously on an angle that was close to 90 degrees as you left the door and moved inside! — Fate though was pulling us in the direction of those quiches. We made the bakery one of the first stops in our culinary itinerary. Though it was hard to look past the beckoning cakes and crumbles and — yes — brownies, we made a beeline for the quiches. They stood stacked like well-laid shortcrust bricks above the salad case, the top layer tilted to proudly display their savoury fillings. We ordered one of every attractive flavor and found a seat among the slim metal tables set up on the sidewalk. There, I wielded my fork and knife (utensils which admittedly elevate any pastry-eating experience), cut off a generous chunk, and took the first bite of the quiche of my dreams. I still haven’t forgotten that taste, and for years I have longed to enjoy it again.

Mushroom Quiche at Rose Bakery- Paris

Rose Bakery Quiches stacked on display – Paris

French Tart at Dello Mano

The perfect opportunity to offer a delicious, delicate  quiche came in the form of our new  Dello Mano shop at New Farm. Our courtyard there in Merthyr Village  an evocative Parisian scene of French rattan bistro chairs shaded by fiddle-leaf fig trees, demanded a full brunch menu with both sweet and savoury offerings. Quiche was an obvious option. In the months leading up to the New Farm opening, we worked and reworked our quiche recipe until we hit upon a version that although not the same , evoked a beautiful reminisce of the day we visited Rose Bakery. As we developed the recipe, we found ourselves moving towards a more traditional, French-style savoury tart, and so we decided to call them that on the menu.

Dello Mano French Tart or Quiche now available at both stores and also by order.

We now offer three varieties of French-style Savoury Tart at our New Farm and Tattersalls Arcade Dello Mano store  locations: Spring Vegetable ( gorgeous twists of shaved root vegetables), Mushroom with Truffle Oil & Thyme, and the classic, bacon-studded Quiche Lorraine. Enveloping these fillings is a beautiful, handmade shortcrust pastry, handled lightly for maximum tenderness. In keeping with the slow-food tenets we’ve followed since the beginning, we use all free-range eggs  delivered fresh from the farm to our door and local vegetables, which we have delivered straight from the market to our kitchen door. We bake our quiches into elongated rectangles, available sliced into individual servings ( dine in or take away)  or whole for a family-sized take-away. The whole quiches are also a great alternative to pizza for parties or other catered events.

Dello Mano Asparagus French Tart – available by order.

We invite you to join us for brunch to try our French-style Savoury tarts, as well as our more traditionally Australian Savoury pies and sundry light bites. If you get a hold of the Carrarinis, tell them they’re invited, too.

Dello Mano Store Locations:

New Farm – Shop 4 83 Merthyr Rd. ( Merthyr Village Shopping ) New Farm  Tel: 3358 2801

Tattersalls Arcade Shop , Shop 8, Tattersalls Arcade, 215 Queen St. Mall Brisbane Tel: 3210 1168