At No Crumbs you can find everything from bread with trahana to rice pudding croissants
As head pastry chef at London’s Pantechnicon (home to the famous Café Kitsuné, with its trademark fox-shaped cookies and quality matcha drinks), Lisa Kermanidou makes pastries with French bases and Japanese influences.
“Some products have a Japanese influence, some Greek, but most of them are a little ‘tricked’,” says Kermanidou. Among them are some of her signature sweets that emerged from her creative journey at Kitsuné. One example is her own version of pain au chocolat, which doesn’t settle for two simple chocolate bars but wraps an entire brownie in handmade puff pastry (!). Another is the croissant with almond cream, enriched with matcha tea and bergamot confit, which they bake at No Crumbs every weekend. A regular on the menu is a croissant filled with rice pudding and salted caramel with miso – an interesting combination, which I would have liked better if the rice grains were homogenized with the cream. The "flasque", however, which is reminiscent of Basque cheesecake and Parisian flan combined, has a caramelized surface and a velvety texture that lingers.
Both the “sausage pie” (with croissant dough, Frankfurter sausage, teriyaki béchamel and Japanese-style BBQ glaze) and the croissant with mushroom, truffle béchamel and gruyere are too lavish for me. I was more pleased with the classic, fluffy and crispy croissant with the nice honeycombing and the rich flavor of the Normandy butter they use in its preparation. The –also classic– petit fours with vanilla and the chocolate “black forest” cookies with cherry are addictive.
“There have certainly been a lot of new bakeries and pastry shops opened in recent years. Both in Athens and London. That’s true. It’s something that happens for various reasons, including the fact that a bakery is not as precarious a business as a restaurant,” says Kermanidou when I ask her about it. “I think it’s an interesting trend, though. There’s room for everyone. Especially when it comes to good, sourdough bread, which was missing from Athens,” she adds. All of No Crumbs’ breads are made with natural, slow-ripening sourdough. The aromatic wholemeal bread with caraway seeds and the fluffy and soft bread with trachana stand out.