About us
One oven, one recipe book,
and a great many early mornings.
Maison Margaux is not a chain, not a concept, and not trying to be your third place. It's a bakery. We make good things with our hands and sell them to the people who live nearby. That's the whole business plan, and it has held up since 1986.
How it started
A recipe book carried across an ocean.
Margaux Laurent learned to bake in her grandmother's kitchen outside Lyon, on a wood stove that ran too hot on one side. When she moved to Portland in the eighties she brought almost nothing — a few photographs, a wool coat, and a flour-dusted notebook of recipes written in three different hands.
She opened a narrow shop on Rue du Marché with a single deck oven and a hand-cranked sheeter. For the first year she did everything herself: mixing at four, baking at six, serving until close, then scrubbing the bench and starting again. People came back. They told their friends. The oven, eventually, got some company.
What we believe
Four things we won't
cut corners on.
Real ingredients, named
French butter, stone-milled flour, single-origin chocolate, fruit from the Saturday market. If we can't pronounce it, it doesn't go in.
Time is an ingredient
Eighteen-hour ferments, overnight lamination, a starter we've kept alive for decades. You can't rush flavour and we've stopped trying.
Baked here, sold here
Nothing is frozen, shipped in, or finished off-site. The croissant in your hand was folded in the room behind the counter.
Neighbours, not customers
We know your order, your kids' names, and which loaf you want set aside. Leftovers go to the shelter two doors down — never the bin.
Along the way
A few mornings that mattered.
One deck oven on Rue du Marché. Margaux, alone, every shift.
Demand outgrew the deck. We knocked through the back wall.
Margaux's apprentice, Théo, took over the morning bake.
Same corner, same recipes, same unreasonable hours.
"We never wanted to be big. We wanted to be good, and to still be here in the morning."
— Margaux Laurent
Meet the person who lights the oven.
Behind every tray is a baker who's been awake since three. Here's the one who keeps Maison Margaux running.
Read about the baker