Pastry Celebrity Dominique Ansel Will Send Off His London Bakery With ‘The Last Cronut’

Pastry celebrity Dominique Ansel will sling cronuts in London no more, with his eponymous bakery in Belgravia and Covent Garden cafe-restaurant both closing, according to Big Hospitality. But he’s not leaving without one last flaky, hyped, Instagram-bait hurrah: The Last Cronut, which is not a short your boyfriend wrote on YouTube, is filled with a duo of ganaches: milk chocolate banana and peanut butter.

Ansel, whose U.K. operations are run on a licensed basis, is withdrawing from the city in the wake of coronavirus lockdown, which will have been particularly damaging for the Treehouse, his Covent Garden restaurant which only launched in February 2020. Its location, coupled with a menu veering gracefully from 70s vol-au-vents to balayage sticky toffee pudding, made for a restaurant that would have been heavily reliant on a footfall which, right now, simply does not exist.

The closure of the bakery, for which he is most famous, is perhaps more surprising, given its gearing towards takeaway, but it was also reliant on high volumes of eager visitors ready for trompe-l’œil desserts and the croissant-doughnut mashup so singular that he registered it as a trademark. It opened in 2016.

While a return to London has not been ruled out just yet, both locations will close at the end of August.