A baker’s counter run by a chef trained by Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Ducasse sells its vanilla millefeuille for €3.90. It is at Steenbokstraat 37, in Zurenborg, at Domestic, the bakery of the French chef Julien Burlat and his wife Sophie Burlat, who for years ran the restaurant Dôme in the same neighbourhood. Domestic now has three addresses in Antwerp: the bakery in Zurenborg, a tea room at Lange Gasthuisstraat 5 in the centre, and a small eatery at Markgravelei 95. The bread is made by the master baker Michael Saelen, by traditional methods.

From Saint-Chamond to Zurenborg

Burlat was born in Saint-Chamond and trained with Gagnaire in Saint-Étienne before working for Ducasse in Monaco, for Dominique Bouchet at Le Crillon in Paris and for Bernard Pacaud at L’Ambroisie. He came to Antwerp for Sophie. The French critic Gilles Pudlowski, who wrote about Dôme in December 2011, put it more romantically: Burlat had been won over by love for his wife. The couple renovated the domed building at Grotehondstraat 2, put up in 1893 as the Café du Dôme to designs by Joseph Bascourt, and kept its name. Sophie ran the dining room. Pudlowski paid €39 for the lunch menu and €78 for the tasting menu, and wrote of frogs’ legs with liquorice and scallops cooked à la plancha.

Across the street, Burlat’s friend from Saint-Étienne, Julien Bobichon, who had cooked for Alain Passard at L’Arpège, ran the fish bistro Dôme sur Mer. By 2017 the Burlats had handed Dôme on: Frédéric Chabbert and Evangeline Chabbert took it over that year, and Michelin gave it a star in its next guide. There is a neat symmetry in the handover. Chabbert also cooked in Ducasse’s kitchen in Monaco, so the building passed from one Ducasse alumnus to another. The Chabberts have since turned the rotunda into La Brasserie du Dôme, and its menu says where the bread comes from: Domestic.

Steenbokstraat 37

The Zurenborg shop is the original and the largest of the three, and it sits on the edge of Zurenborg and Berchem, about 250 metres from the Dageraadplaats tram stop. Zurenborg itself was built mostly between 1894 and 1906, on what had been farmland. Le Fooding, the French guide, singles out the marble counter. The bread is French in style and made with organic heirloom wheat flours: baguettes, pistolets and the house speciality, the tourte de meule. The viennoiserie is made with good butter, and the croissants come plain or filled with cream, chocolate, raisins or pistachio. There are raspberry and lemon tartlets, and a small grocery shelf with JusRé soups and juices, Rhoeco spices, Yurrita sardines and bars from Chocolat des Français.

Le Fooding’s reviewer, Alma Caroni, picked out the vanilla cream millefeuille above everything else on the counter and called it “superb”. It is listed at €3.90. Le Fooding gives the bakery’s hours as 7:30 to 16:00, and until 14:00 on Sundays. On Mondays it does not open at all; the bakery’s own website covers the three Domestic shops.

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The tea room in town

Elle Belgium called Domestic the chicest pastry shop and tea room in Antwerp as early as 2018. The tea room at Lange Gasthuisstraat 5 is the version for the old centre, open from 8:30 to 18:00 and closed on Sundays and Mondays. Its best-known item, according to Le Fooding, is the papkoek, the Flemish custard bun. The counter adds sourdough quarter loaves, brioche, savoury rolls with cheese and bacon or olive, pastry rounds with raisins, pistachio or matcha, almond croissants, rijstevlaai, the Belgian rice tart, éclairs, lemon tarts, madeleines and canelés. The crèmekoek, filled with vanilla crème pâtissière, is the one the guide recommends. The same street holds the Botanic Sanctuary hotel and its collection of restaurants, at number 41, where Michelin lists the brasserie Bar Bulot.

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Burlat has not stopped cooking for others. Elle reported in 2018 that he designs the menus for the Zannier hotels in Megève, in Cambodia and in Ghent, where the group runs 1898 The Post. He is also unsentimental about the old order of professional kitchens. Asked by Elle what Top Chef had done for the trade, he said: “It created new vocations. Before, kitchens were in the basement.”

More restaurant chefs should open bakeries, and Domestic is the argument for it. The prices are those of a neighbourhood bakery, with every Le Fooding listing in its under-€15 bracket, while the training behind the counter runs through Gagnaire, Ducasse and L’Ambroisie. The earlier version of this page dated the bakery to 2016, sent Sophie to train at a pâtisserie called Maison Ducobu and recommended a za’atar and feta sourdough; none of that could be confirmed, so none of it is here. The marble counter, the millefeuille and the Monday closing could.

Readers who want the restaurant as well as the bread can follow it across Zurenborg to the Dôme in Zurenborg, now a Parisian brasserie. The bread on the table there is from Domestic.