Tous Les Jours (Portage)
My kids are creatures of habit when it comes to breakfast. My daughter prefers Starbucks. My son ALWAYS wants Dunkin’.
B wanted to get up early to skate on Tuesday morning at Wings Event Center before we headed to a competition in Wisconsin on Wednesday. As soon as we got in the car, he asked if we could get Dunkin’. I was going to try to get him to go someplace else but I figured it wasn’t worth the argument. I got him Dunkin’ then headed home.
I dropped him off and still had about an hour before I had to be at work. I decided I was going to get the breakfast I wanted to get.
Tous Les Jours is a South Korean based chain of French-Asian bakeries. There are over 1000 stores worldwide, mostly in South Korea. There are four here in Michigan with the newest one having opened up on South Westnedge and Idaho Avenue in Portage. The French-Asian fusion bakery opened up back in May in what used to be a Medewar Jewelers.
I was really confused when I walked in for the first time because, as I learned, it’s all self serve. A very confident man walked in right behind and pushed past confused me to grab a tray and a pair of tongs off the table next to the door. This is important. You will need both if you’re planning on actually getting anything.
The store is divided in to two areas. The front area is where all of the baked goods are. There are big glass cabinets with rows of French pastries.
The back of half of the building is cafe style seating. You can grab a pastry and a coffee and sit for a while like you would at any other coffee shop.
I figured out what was going on and grabbed a tray and a pair of tongs. I had no plan. I just started looking. I knew I wanted a croissant so I grabbed one of them out of the large pastry case. I also grabbed a Churro Twist Donut.
Behind this big glass pastry case is a holding cabinet with hot sandwiches. I love a good breakfast sandwich and spotted a bacon, egg, and cheese croissant so I reached in and grabbed one of those as well.
There is also a large display case with sweets including a wide variety of macarons. This is not self serve. You’ll need to ask for someone to pull what you need from here. It was still 8:00 in the morning so I wasn’t in a sweets mood yet. I’ll have to head back for that at some point.
When I was done looking around the store, I figured I had more than enough for breakfast on my tray. I ended up with a croissant, a Churro Twist Donut, and a BEC croisssant.
I headed up to the counter to pay. This is also where you can order drinks but I’m not a coffee drinker. The lady working the cash register bagged up the three items and put the tray and tongs in to a bin to be washed and reused. The cost of my breakfast on this day was just under $15.
I headed in to the office to eat. I didn’t try to eat in the car because I knew I would make a mess with pretty much everything.
I started with the plain croissant. The best place to get a croissant is a French bakery, right? This thing was light, flaky, and buttery. My main experience with croissant’s is from Pillsbury and this is, obviously, not that. My daughter loves a good bakery croissant….if I can ever get her to do something different for breakfast, she would love this.
The Churro Twist Donut was next. This thing is essentially a cinnamon sugar cross between a churro and a donut. It has the crunchy outside of a churro but the soft inside of a donut. They also have just a regular cinnamon sugar twist donut but my guess is this is way better.
I was getting kind of stuffed but I had to try this bacon, egg, and cheese croissant. It’s the same soft, flaky, buttery croissant but it’s sliced open and stuffed with soft scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, and bacon. The menu says it also has mayonnaise on it which seems weird to me but thinking back now, there was something else in the eggs that I couldn’t place. That was probably it. It was fine though…even though mayo sounds weird to me on a BEC sandwich. This is definitely something I would go back for.
I saw the huge lines for Tous Les Jours when they first opened and I decided to wait for a while and let things die down a bit. Very glad I did because the set up can be a little overwhelming at first. I was in there on a day when there were only a few other people in the store and I still felt slightly overwhelmed. I got it figured it out now so that will make the next trip a whole lot easier.
SW Michigan Dining 