Thierry Mulhaupt

Thierry Mulhaupt, a Colmar native, opened this shop -- his third boutique -- in his home city in 2007, in a fully renovated Art Nouveau building near where sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, creator of the Statue of Liberty, was born. The shop sells Mulhaupt's design chocolates, pastries, pain d'epices and jams, but it also carries a piece of Colmar confectionery history that predates his own career: the Mandarinette, a specialty Edouard Merklen created locally in 1938, which Mulhaupt still makes rather than letting it disappear with its original maker. A small tea salon sits inside, with terrace tables set out in summer for pastries and a coffee or tea taken on site rather than to go. The shop operates at the intersection of Mulhaupt's own contemporary chocolate and pastry work and a deliberate act of local preservation -- keeping a nearly ninety-year-old Colmar specialty on the case rather than replacing it with something newer. Its location adds to that sense of continuity: steps from Colmar's historic center and the Bartholdi birthplace, in a building whose Art Nouveau architecture was restored rather than gutted for a more generic shopfront. Open Tuesday through Saturday, the boutique functions as both a working patisserie-chocolaterie and a small sit-down tea room.