Il Valentino is a modern bakery and coffee shop on Pearse Street. It is beautifully designed and you can see the mark of an architect on this project. It serves home-made bread and cakes and sells its breads around Dublin in delis. We made the trip especially, passing by two good bakeries on the way, in the expectation of finding an even more fantastic bakery in a corner of the world where you would least expect ton find one. This we thought will be good.
We bought a loaf of Italian bread, a roundell with the authentic coffee coloured flour dust on top, a croissant and 2 chocolate eclairs.
We excitedly ate the pastries in the car but much to our disappointment, the croissant was floppy and tasted more like those you bake from a tin; the chocolate eclairs were soft and flabby and while the dark chocolate was good quality, a chocolate eclair needs to have structure, a certain crispness and the chocolate has to be creamy so it melts into the choux pastry in your mouth.
It is probably obvious that buying french pastries in an Italian bakery is not sensible but if Il Valentino wants to be taken seriously as a bakery, it should stick to its roots and concentrate on its breads. The loaf we bought was good and even better when we toasted it the next day and ate it with mashed sardines and a drizzle of olive oil.
The coffee shop is small but serves very good coffee.
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