Madeleine de Proust Patisserie

Madeleine De Proust is a bakery dedicated to madeleines – the small, shell-shaped sponge cakes that originated in France. The Insta-turned-real bakery is by former Attica head pastry chef HyoJu Park and her chef-partner Rong Yao Soh. They’ve respectively worked in the kitchen at Seoul’s two-Michelin-starred Mingles and London’s Galvin at Windows, which had a Michelin star when Soh was there.

Here, you’ll find a dozen different types of the seashell-shaped bakes, with their signature bump, all made with differently flavoured batters, fillings and toppings. That might be a pistachio number filled with pistachio paste that’s made in-house from stone-ground pistachios and house-made raspberry jam, before being dipped in white Valrhona chocolate. Or tipsy arabica, a coffee madeleine filled with a ganache made from Market Lane coffee, whisky and Ecuadorian cacao, and topped with coffee cream that’s indented and torched to look like its bean of origin.

The duo developed a meticulous approach to culinary arts in some of the world’s best kitchens, evident in their fastidious process here. According to Soh, it took them three to four hundred test batches to perfect the signature madeleine bump. The delicate brushes used to top the madeleines with gold leaf, glazes and other finishes are imported from Japan, as are custom-made madeleine trays.

The shop’s interiors, designed by IF Architecture, take influence from both Australian milk bars and French patisseries. There’s a black and white checkerboard pattern on the floor, a display case that would be at home in any Parisian boutique, and milk-bar-style plastic strip curtains that divide the main shopfront from the kitchen.

As for the name? It’s inspired by a French expression used to refer to sensory memories of childhood, a concept famously described by novelist Marcel Proust in his work Remembrance of Things Past.