The other day I walked past Patisserie Valerie on the corner of Broadwick Street and Marshall Street, in a shop that used to be a potter’s. ‘This isn’t really Patisserie Valerie,’ I thought to myself. What I had always taken to be a proper name (of a place in Old Compton Street, after its move from Frith Street, where it had been bombed in the war) had now become a common noun (a chain).
Luke Johnson, who runs Risk Capital Partners Ltd, the owners of the Patisserie Valerie chain, is not entirely to blame for this, since a few branches had opened before he took it over in 2006. And to tell the truth, I didn’t much mind Valerie becoming a chain, since I’d stopped going to the real one, in favour of Maison Bertaux or sometimes Amato.
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