NEW YORK — The Lady M Cake Boutique, which opened this weekend, is striving to be the Cartier of cakes, offering up perfectly round European-style confections in a white, narrow space on East 78th Street, just off Madison Avenue. Instead of nostalgic treats topped with messy dollops of icing, these flawless items are fit for sophisticated taste buds only.
“The taste is very delicate, very high end; it’s not as sweet as your average cake,” says president and chief executive officer of Lady M, Hideyuki Niwa, a former financier who started the business when he noticed an absence of good cakes in Manhattan. “You think of Payard and Fauchon and that’s about it. So I thought, ‘Maybe we could make a new brand successful?’”
To that end, there’s Lady M’s signature treat, the trademarked Lady M Mille Crêpes, a layered cake made up of 20 handmade crêpes separated by creamy custard. “You can count them. We may be off by one, but that’s about it,” Niwa says. “Nobody’s heard of this cake. We want to make it a common name — a bit like when you think of cheesecake, you think of Junior’s. Well, why not create Mille Crêpes, and everyone who eats it will say, ‘Ah, Lady M, Mille Crêpes.’”
Other standouts include the Miroir Caramel, a chocolate sponge cake topped with caramel mousse; Gâteau au Citron, an enormous puff pastry sandwich filled with lemon-flavored cream cheese, and Gâteau aux Marrons, a takeoff on the Mont Blanc, a popular French dessert covered with spaghetti-like strips of chestnut cream. All the cakes are kept behind glass on a 24-foot refrigerated display, complete with a cake-cutting station and trays of sandwiches, pastries and chocolates. Prices for the cakes range from $5 for a slice to $70 for a Tarte aux Fruits, and some of the standard-sized cakes can be shipped nationwide.
The shop, which has six two-person tables in the back, also will serve coffees, teas and champagne. “The objective is to provide an atmosphere where people feel that it’s different and unique,” Niwa says, adding, “The fact that we have all Baccarat chandeliers, no cake shop goes to this extent.”
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Despite all the health-conscious New Yorkers out there, Niwa is confident he’ll find plenty of consumers eager to indulge. “I don’t think people have really tasted what a delicious cake is,” he says. “I recommend you cut down on everything else, but always make room for the desserts.”