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One of San Francisco’s most famous patisseries is coming to Palo Alto.
Since 2015, Arsicault has been baking its buttery and flaky croissants in the city. Now the bakery, which launched to fame after Bon Appetit Magazine declared it the best new bakery in America in 2016, has plans to bring its pastry prowess down the Peninsula near California Avenue.
With an expected opening in September or October, Arsicault is projected to arrive around the same time as Croissante, another French patisserie with plans to expand to the former space of nearby Antonio’s Nut House.
For Arsicault CEO Armando Lacayo, opening a bakery in Palo Alto is a full-circle moment. Lacayo moved to California 15 years ago for a job managing mutual funds and lived in Palo Alto during that time. He grew up in France and moved to America for school, building a successful career in finance before launching Arsicault, named after his great-grandparents who owned a bakery in France 100 years ago.
He joked that switching from banking to baking is easy: “You just drop a letter.”
Lacayo didn’t grow up with a penchant for baking – it was a desire for a proper croissant that motivated the career switch.
“When I first came to the U.S., I couldn’t try a good croissant, so I decided to make it myself,” Lacayo said. “It took 15 years to make a decent croissant.”
A decent croissant takes a lot of patience, he said. The dough has to be warm enough to manipulate it, but not warm enough that the yeast starts to react. Instead of a typical two-turn croissant, Arsicault’s is made with three turns, resulting in a flakier croissant. Lacayo also noted that high-quality ingredients make all the difference and that pastries are baked throughout the day, meaning croissants are often still warm for customers.
Lacayo said that many skills he practiced working in finance he finds applicable to working in the bakery business.
“When I managed money, my last job, we would tell our clients, ‘We strive to be OSD: objective, systematic and disciplined,’” he said. “It’s the same thing in baking. We have to follow the process. We have to have discipline. We have to do it systematically. But at the end of the day, we also have to be objective.”
The upside to baking? If you mess up a batch, you can always make another one. (“You cannot really do that with other people’s money,” he noted.)
Arsicault’s style is rooted in the traditional. About 15 pastries are offered at one time, with new additions a rarity – Lacayo said he’s not trying to reinvent the flavor wheel. Chocolate croissants are made with exactly 30 grams of chocolate in each, and other croissant flavors include ham and cheese, almond and chocolate-almond. Besides croissants, expect scones, cookies, quiches and sandwiches on housemade baguettes.
“I only make things that I like very much myself,” he said. “So I’ll never make a cupcake … I’ll never make a cheese Danish.”
Arsicault Bakery is one of the retail tenants of 388 Cambridge, a new 36,000-square-foot mixed-use development that broke ground in September 2024. Arsicault will primarily be a takeout bakery, with little to no indoor seating; although an outdoor patio will have around 12 to 20 seats, according to Lacayo.
As for future expansion, Lacayo assures that “there’s no world domination plan,” and that the focus is to maintain quality.
“My goal is to make people happy, to put a smile on people’s faces, which is difficult when they have a croissant in their mouth,” Lacayo said.
Arsicault Bakery, 388 Cambridge Ave., Palo Alto; Instagram: @arsicaultbakery.Beginning fall 2026, open daily from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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