Every February, there’s a stampede to get hold of B. Patisserie’s Lunar New Year specials — and it’s no different for the year of the horse. Preorders (opens in new tab) for Chinese-inspired pastries opened last week on Tock, and the accompanying announcement on the bakery’s Instagram was flooded with 2,582 likes. There has been FOMO angst about the new savory boxes selling out for the first week of pickups.
But in good news, B. Patisserie is no longer the only game in town. European-style pastries infused with Asian flavors are everywhere in San Francisco. Breadbelly, Jina Bakes, Bake Sum, and Sol Bakery have helped make ube and red bean feel as familiar as frangipane and chocolate. I’ve fallen hard for a pandan-coconut canelé from the pop-up Zoulé (opens in new tab), a kinako-dusted mochi croissant from Jina Bakes, and a coconut scroll from Grand Opening.
Still, amid the Asian pastry craze, let us praise B. Patisserie co-owner and chef Belinda Leong, the city’s undisputed black-sesame godmother.
Since opening the Lower Pacific Heights bakery in 2013 with French baker Michel Suas, Leong has riffed on milk-tea cakes and pomelo parfaits, almond jelly and mango tapioca. Most famously, she infused Chinese flavors into the flaky layers of her iconic kouign-amann (or KA, if you’re cool like that).
I caught Leong in the calm before the annual sugar storm. Soon enough, she and her team will begin arriving at the bakery at midnight to start preparing for Lunar New Year. If this holiday is like the last one, she has a lot of KAs ahead of her — about 20,000 of them.
During most of the year, B. Patisserie is a very European bakery. What was the impetus to launch the Lunar New Year specials in 2014?
Well, our customer base is like 60% Asian. When we started, my manager was Chinese, and it was her idea. We started to think about all the desserts we could create. And being Chinese myself, I love Chinese desserts as opposed to American or French.
Where did your flavor inspirations come from?
Childhood. I grew up in the Richmond but went to school in Chinatown until I was in eighth grade. My parents have a store there called Wycen (opens in new tab), where they sell Chinese sausage. My uncle used to own a restaurant there called Oriental Pearl, where we’d go and get mango pudding. I also loved the glutinous rice balls with black sesame in syrup — so that was the first one that we started with. And we were like, how can we do a black sesame version of a kouign-amann?
B Patisserie’s 2025 Lunar New Year kouign-amann | Source: Lauren Saria
So you come from food-industry stock.
Yeah, when I started doing pop-ups 14 years ago while I was still working at Manresa [the three-Michelin starred restaurant in Los Gatos], I was baking in my parents’ factory in San Leandro.
What new items are cooking up this year?
We’re doing a play on nian gao, a brown-sugar glutinous rice cake, which is traditional for Chinese New Year. I make sure to say it’s “our version,” because people might compare it, and I hate that. Our take is more like a butter mochi.
I hear you’re doing a savory box for the first time.
Yes, we’ve never done it. It will include a kouign-amann made with Yank Sing’s hot sauce, which is one of the best, but it hasn’t been available for like 10 years. We’ll also sell the hot sauce.
What does it feel like to see so many pastry chefs using Chinese flavors now?
It’s really cool because it’s my culture, but everyone’s doing it with their own style. Even my friend Nico [Delaroque] from Maison Nico is — we worked at Manresa together. I saw he did a galette de rois with black sesame. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool! I hadn’t seen that idea.”
What did your parents think when you started all this?
They were like, “Are you crazy? You sell that mango pudding for $8?” And I was like, “Yeah, people buy it.” But you know, it’s funny. Compared to other bakeries, we’re still pretty inexpensive.