When Copains - a French bakery chain - set up shop in London recently, it made all sort of headlines.
Those headlines weren't anything to do with the fact it's an entirely gluten-free bakery, or that it was a French import, or that the interiors make it look like a high end jewellery store rather than somewhere you go to pick up a sandwich on your lunch break. In fact, they weren't anything to do with the food at all. All the headlines seemed to be about the prices, and how high they were. Copains chose to set up its two London branches of Copains in parts of London - Covent Garden and Islington - already known for their high prices, which shows just how expensive Copains' wares must be in order were to generate such media outrage.
Copains is a bit more of an established name in Paris compared to London, having opened in 2021 expanding to a fair number of branches in Paris, Brussels and beyond. Over the summer, I spent a couple of days in the French capital, and stopped by Copains a few times to pick up breakfast or lunch (finding branches of a coeliac- and vegan-friendly bakery chain across Paris came in really handy when I was wandering across the city!) When I got home, I stopped into one of the London branches too, to compare the difference across either side of la Manche.
First up, there's no way around it, yes, the prices are high. For a fancy dessert, you're looking at around €13 or the equivalent in pounds. For a pastry, more like €7. Even a black coffee is €5. It's really not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
But were the high prices worth it? Let me run you through what I ate in London and Paris, and give you my honest review.
Before I start talking about London vs Paris, it's worth checking out the Food Standards Agency's hygiene ratings for Copains. At the time I went, they were 0 for the Covent Garden branch and 1 for the Islington branch. The ratings go from 0 (the worst) to 5 (the best), so both are rated as needing significant improvement. I'll be honest, I didn't know that at the time when I was eating the food at Copains, so hopefully there'll be a much higher rating by the next time I drop by.
I think some of the best things that I tried in both London and Paris were the tarts - yep, those €13 tarts. I tried the Elea, a pecan tart; the shady, a pistachio tart, and Gisele, the raspberry tart (all the items at Copains go by a human name, for some reason. Who doesn't love an anthropomorphised dessert?)
I'd love to drop a beautiful image of any of those tarts, but I can't, because one of the problems with Copains is that there isn't really anywhere to eat inside, it's more of a buy-and-takeaway place. Which is fine, but I've found that every time I bought one of those beautiful pastry items, I get it to my destination only to find that that beautiful dessert is now a bunch of shattered shards of pastry and smears of cream in a fancy box (and the boxes are very fancy indeed). Here's the best I could manage:
They taste gorgeous and they're clearly high end - crisp shortcrust pastry that almost defies its gluten-free-ness, mounds of cream, pastes of fruit or nuts, and all those sort of fancy creams and inserts that you'd expect from a fancy French patisserie. There's some impressive ambition there, and I can't fault the taste - all the tarts I tried were great. I could have easily split the Shady with someone else, so the portion sizes aren't bad either. There isn't anywhere else selling vegan and gluten free patisserie like Copains right now, so I guess I'll be emptying my wallet for the foreseeable.
Onto the less fancy side of Copains - viennoiserie and cakes. I tried a slice of the Vanessa carrot cake and, alas, I didn't love it. The textue wasn't appealing - a bit on the dry and dense side. The frosting was pretty good, but there just wasn't enough to combat the desert-like nature of the cake.
I tried two of the viennoiserie - the Angelika cinnamon babka and the Redwan pistachio croissant. Copains changes its menu every so often, taking some items off the menu and adding in new ones.
Recently, the chain decided to remove the babka and keep the croissant. If I'd have been in charge, I would have made the opposite decision - the Angelika was bouncy, sweet, and full of cinnamon. And how often do you see a vegan babka, let alone a vegan gluten-free one? I bought the babka twice, I enjoyed it that much. The Redwan was fine, but the pastry could have been better- too brittle, too hard - which is a bit of shame when 90 percent of the croissant is that pastry. It was fine, I'd eat it again, but for £6.50, I'd want a kickass croissant, not just an OK one.
Onto the savouries! More hits, more misses. I checked the menu a couple of days before we visited, and there was the promise of a tofu sandwich (the only vegan sandwich option). This is good news. I like tofu, and I'm very happy to eat it in a sandwich all day. Only when we arrived, the tofu sandwich had been swapped out in favour of a vegan feta and avocado bagel. I have never met a vegan feta I like (sorry, vegan feta lovers), so I was already primed to not enjoy this. If I did like feta though, I'd also be disappointed, as the ratio of cheese to avocado is way off - there's a few modest crumbles of cheese to a vat of avocado. Don't eat this bagel before a big date or a job interview - the avocado is so voluminous any attempt to bite down on it will shoot a jet of fatty green mush onto your face and clothing. Then there is the issue of raspberries. I guess they're in there for a bit of a contrast - a tart-sweet flavour to cut through the fattiness of the avocado. Fair enough. I don't know it was a combination that I really enjoyed, and I enjoyed it less because there was a handful of raspberries, so biting into the bagel was like playing raspberry Russian roulette - I just didn't know if I was going to get a good bite or a bad one. I didn't finish my bagel and handed the remaining half on to Mr Flicking the Vs, who was very happy to demolish it, so your mileage may vary. If I tell you it was over €11, your mileage may vary even more.
My favourite couple of savoury items were maybe the ones that seemed least exciting at first glance - a vegan quiche and a loaf of bread. I love quiche. If I see it on the menu, I'm ordering it. I used to buy the Higgidy vegan quiche on the regular before coeliac disease put paid to that. So, despite the nearly €8 price tag (yep, you read that right, that's EIGHT EUROS FOR A SMALL QUICHE), I decided to buy one.
(A quick note about the photo above - the quiche doesn't come with a small half-moon taken out of the pastry. That was me taking a bite before getting my phone out, sorry!) Was it worth the €8? Well, it tasted great, the veggies were well roasted, the not-egg filling was soft, and I couldn't taste the cheese, so that was a win. I really enjoyed it. I can't find another commercially available vegan, gluten free quiche, let alone one that was really tasty, I would totally buy this again.
If you're looking for a bargain though, you need to look at the breads. You need to ignore the loaves that are nudging nearly €20, and look at the baguettes, which are about €2 or £3. There are two versions, with quinoa flour or buckwheat flour. I tried the buckwheat one and loved it - a sort of dense, very savoury loaf that's great for sandwiches, or just cutting a bit off and slathering in vegan butter, and eating over the kitchen sandwich before anyone notices you and wonders why only half a loaf is left.
So, is Copains really worth the high price tag? Well, some of it really is, and some of it really isn't. I'd say dodge the loaf cakes and bagels, try the viennoiserie and see what you think and snap up the vegan patisserie, quiches, and baguettes. If you're coeliac, this place is definitely worth checking out - just go after payday.
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