By Nino Gugunishvili

Though relatively young as a brand, Pâtisserie Le Gâteau, founded in 2012, quickly became popular among locals for its cakes, pies, pastry, sandwiches, and own-baked low calory bread. Celebrating this success, Le Gâteau has transformed itself from a simple pâtisserie into a café-restaurant offering a full assortment of  Italian cuisine to its customers. GEORGIA TODAY met with Le Gâteau founder Davit Anjaparidze to find out more.

Tell us about the history of Le Gâteau

From the very start when deciding to open Le Gâteau, we had pastry lovers on our minds. Le Gâteau is a family business and we wanted to offer high quality pastry products to our clients, something that was quite rare at the time.  Although the brand is constantly developing, initially everything started with pâtisserie, centered on our slogan “Pleasure in Sweetness.” We got in touch with the Confecioners Association President in Israel and started bringing all the necessary equipment from Italy and France. In 2016 we decided to change our direction and invited Georgian chef, Gia Gachechiladze, who worked in Italy for almost 20 years (we can say he’s one of the best chefs, one who can do literally anything!) and added more Italian dishes to our menu, which is now available at all Le Gâteau branches in town. In addition, we’re now offering lunch menus at our Pekini branch.

Le Gâteau as pâtisserie alone was already popular. What made you decide to expand?

Customer demand. Apart from delicious pastries, people who were coming often asked for a salad, or sandwich or soup alongside the sweets. When we added pizza to our menu, which became an instant hit, and so we decided to combine the concept of pâtisserie with a restaurant.

How competitive is Le Gâteau on the market?     

For the five years that we’ve been on the Georgian market, we’ve gained numerous loyal clients. Of course, the competition is fierce, but we’re holding our niche with the high-quality products we offer and we’re growing: our Kazbegi Avenue branch is the largest now, and we plan to expand further.  We believe it’s one of the best places to have business meetings, accompanied with the delicious food served.

For our confectionery, we import all the ingredients from Europe and for our dishes, we regularly taste and select new, high-quality products. When Le Gâteau was founded, we invited foreign specialists to selected and then train our Georgian staff of pastry chefs and bakers and even now, we offering training opportunities to our employees, to help them learn about the latest trends and novelties in the sphere.

Le Gâteau has approximately 100 employees, as all our products are made locally. Our pastry bakery is on Abashidze Street, where you can find Le Gâteau’s famous cakes.  90% of our own produced bread is without yeast and that’s also something that Le Gâteau can be proud of, as well as our coffee, which we make with a special, seven-stage water-filtering system we installed in all our branches. Our customers often say that it’s very tasty.  

What would you note as the major challenge for your business?

The Lari rate is probably one of the remaining major challenges. We depand on Euro and on imported products, and the growing prices are of course problematic as we then have to increase the prices on our products, too.        

What are your aspirations in the long-term? 

Le Gâteau is a Georgian brand, and although its focus is on European cuisine, as ambitious as it may seem, I would say that entering other markets outside Georgia would be an interesting goal for us to achieve in the future.

Any personal recommendations what to taste at Le Gâteau?

I would recommend tasting our shou and cheesecakes from the Le Gâteau pastry line and from Italian cuisine, I would recommend the ravioli or fettuccine, but to be honest, it’s quite difficult to choose from all the tasty dishes we offer.