French Bakery Coming to Center City

Center City is awash with restaurants of all types, satisfying every craving from down-home comfort food to haute cuisine and everything in between. The busiest part of Philadelphia has a thriving restaurant scene, and it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new place to dine or drink. One of the newest additions to the Center City food scene, J’aime French Bakery, offers scrumptious sweets and pastries with a continental flair.

This picture from J’aime French Bakery’s Facebook shows a sampling of the treats that the bakery will have to offer.

J’aime French Bakery is the brainchild of French expat Bastien Ornano, aged twenty-seven. Ornano was born and raised in France but fell in love with the United States during his time as a high school exchange student in California. His dream was always to open a French bakery somewhere in the country, but he knew he had to raise money first. So he went to college and got his MBA and spent two years doing “the corporate thing” with an IT company, stashing away his cash. He didn’t want to wait too long to follow through on his bakery dreams, Ornano explains, because he never wanted to get to a point where it was too late for him to actualize his plans. He enrolled at Lenôtre in Paris and just graduated in January of this year.

Philadelphia was one of a handful of American cities that Ornano was considering for his bakery, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer, including Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Dallas. Philadelphia had the most going for it, however: Ornano’s father saw a documentary on the city and urged him to open a bakery there, and the deal was sealed when Ornano made a love connection with a young woman from the City of Brotherly Love. He then met up with a Realtor who connected him with the space on 12th Street south of Walnut, the former Cafe 12 in Washington Square West.

According to the Inquirer, “J’aime will sell La Colombe coffee, viennoiserie (such as croissants), pastries (such as fruit tarts, eclairs, madeleines, merveilleux), quiches and sandwiches for lunch, sweet crepes, and a small bread line (baguettes, mostly).” Ornano hopes to be up and operating by September.