Opera Patisserie

Located near the site of our lunch destination is the once majestic El Cortez Hotel . According to my navy man dad, the El Cortez was the tallest building in the San Diego skyline in the early 1960's. I just had to get this shot (taken while we were leaving actually) since the jacaranda trees were in bloom downtown. Here's another article about the El Cortez. We parked on Ash.
Opera Cafe & Patisserie is located on Fifth & Ash downtown and has been open for about 3 months, according to the owner (a friendly fellow) with whom we chatted. It's a cute place!

The dessert case (that's TC's hand):

More goodies...

Bread on top of the dessert case:

There was also a shelf with jams, flavored olive oils and vinegars (I think):

More on this later...

These looked really tempting:

As did these:

Yikes! This is blurry. We already had waters with us (cheap ass that I am) but we ordered an Orangina ($2.25, d'oh!):

There were about 12-14 tables; about 4 or 5 were bistro height. The room was pretty deep with restrooms located in the back. The framed print has a woman wearing a necklace of mini pastries.

Their decadent chandelier:

The counter area. All the food is prepared there and heated in an oven. You can see 6 placards hanging. Their lunch menu is fairly simple - only 2 variations of 6 items - quiche, croques, croissant sandwiches, ciabbata sandwiches, french style pizza and one other item that I can't remember right now.

Some PR on the tables:

According to the owner Thierry, Opera opened about three months ago. They have a warehouse in Kearny Mesa that does desserts but it's not open to the public. They do orders to hotels. This placejust got written up in the San Diego Reader last week but I had been wanting to go here ever since I found out it opened up. Why? Because of one of their specialties - macarons (not macaroons, even though it's spelled that way on their take out boxes). Here's a link to the article .

Here's the photo that Thierry took of us. Bert had the ciabatta with prosciutto, fresh basil & tomatoes, and mozarella cheese ($6). All of our entrees were served with a spring mix salad with a light vinaigrette dressing (I actually ate it, so it had to be good, considering I dislike vinegar based dressings). I had the croissant sandwich with ham and gruyere cheese ($5.50) and lastly, TC had the French style pizza with mozzarella, fontina and provolone cheese ($4.50). With the exception of TC, who only ate 2/3 of her meal (since she is but a wee young 'un), we felt that the portions were just right. We didn't feel too full nor did we full underfed.

A close up of Bert's ciabatta sandwich. The bread was really good, very crisp on the outside but not chewy and leathery.

Bert ended up getting a shot of espresso as well:

My croissant-wich. The only thing I didn't really like was that the ham was still cold but the outside was warmed up. It was a bit disconcerting to taste the coldness of the meat. Maybe it's supposed to be that way? I liked it well enough to eat it though. The croissant was nice and flaky and cheese covered!

TC's French style pizza.

The waiter brought us a complimentary plate of a macaron trio: cappuccino, pistachio & pecan caramel flavors.

Here's that dessert selection you all saw earlier in the post. We had to have desserts, so I got this assortment ($11) from the wondrous dessert case of high caloric delights. Bert and I mostly polished off this mini assortment. I'll try my best to describe the top row (left to right) - lemon tart, buttercream cake, chocolate cream puff with chocolate mousse filing (TC ate that one), and some sort of dark chocolate cake. The middle row had a strawberry cake, mini tiramisu, and an mini apple strueusel (their words from the website - I thought it was a mini 'strudel'?). The bottom row consisted of a chocolate tart (TC also devoured this), passionfruit cake, a caramelized pecan tartlet and a mini tiramisu. If you click onto the Opera website and click on 'minis', you can get more detailed individual descriptions of all of these items. Here's a cross section of the mini tiramisu:

I also bought a couple of boxes of their macarons ($7.50 each) assortment. There are a dozen in each box. You can see macaron is spelled incorrectly on the box; I wonder why? Macaroons are totally different from macarons!. I bought one box of the standard flavors

The standard flavors are at the top. And by the way, the flavors are NOT combined as it might seem to be listed on the box: Chocolate & Cappucino. They are separate!

Here's the other box, but this time with "exotic" flavors as described by our waiter who also helped me at the dessert case:

"Exotic" flavors on the bottom row. The passion fruit flavored macaron was really heavenly!

Here's the raspberry:

Next, the chocolate. And by the way, we all sampled half of the first box. I didn't eat all this by myself, although....I probably could, but after seeing that Bodies - The Exhibition, would think twice about doing!

Pecan caramel...

The shell was so crackly and light...The filling so soft and oozy with sugary goodness.

TC's favorite - the pistachio:

I think we'll be going there again...and very soon!