Brenda Ische describes the look as Marie Antoinette meets Alice in Wonderland. She has assembled thousands of pieces of furniture and decoration for the bakeries, Axios reported, and when Amélie’s planned its move to a new NoDa building she had sixty more chandeliers ready, sourced from thrift stores around Charlotte and hung on chains long enough to clear fourteen-foot ceilings.
The blue stripes, the mismatched chairs and the Parisian theme are the parts of Amélie’s people recognize on sight. The part they remember is that for years the flagship never locked its door.
It started with a bakery that failed
In 2006 a French bakery called Marguerite’s opened on North Davidson Street with the idea of a gathering spot where people could watch puff pastry being laminated and play board games over espresso. It closed within a short time, Southern Living recounted, but the idea fit the neighborhood. In 2008 partners Greg Hardee, Bill Lamb and Lynn St. Laurent, who had worked at Marguerite’s, bought the space and opened it as Amélie’s French Bakery & Café. Ische, a partner, created the look. Frank Reed is the chief executive and a co-founder.
The flagship at 2424 North Davidson, technically in Villa Heights at the edge of NoDa, became known as a bakery that stayed open around the clock, every day of the year, and it built a Charlotte institution on that: gallery crawlers, artists, third-shift workers and students filled the room at hours no other cafe kept. BuzzFeed put it on a list of bakeries around the world to visit before you die. The company grew from it to locations at Park Road, Carmel Commons, Uptown, Rock Hill and Atlanta.
The hard years and the move
The record includes difficult chapters, and this story does. In July 2020 former employees accused the company of unfair labor practices and community members called for a boycott, Axios reported; Amélie’s apologized and laid out steps to improve. The pandemic closed indoor dining at every location that year and shut the Uptown bakery in November. In August 2019 the company had announced a move of the flagship to a 7,800-square-foot former art gallery at 136 East 36th Street, and in January 2021 it canceled that plan and was released from the lease.
Then it moved after all. The original bakery served its last croissant at 10 p.m. on April 22, 2022, and the new flagship opened at 7 a.m. on April 28 in the same 36th Street building, beside the light rail stop and across from the warehouse where Ische assembles her chandeliers and the company keeps its offices. This is an emotional time for us, Reed said, filled with memories, but we are happy to stay in NoDa less than a mile from our flagship. In some ways, a company spokeswoman had said of the move, we’re not really leaving. We’re just moving down the street.
The company’s growth was fast for a bakery. Within a decade of opening it had bakeries at Park Road Shopping Center, in Uptown at the Two Wells Fargo building and at Carmel Commons in south Charlotte, then Rock Hill and Atlanta, each dressed by Ische from the same warehouse. The Uptown bakery closed to the public in November 2020, and Reed said the following January that the company hoped to reopen it; the pandemic had forced every location to end indoor dining that March and build outdoor seating instead.
What you actually order
The salted caramel brownie has been the best seller for years. The croissants, macarons, fruit tarts, éclairs and petits fours fill the cases, and the savory side runs soups, quiche, sandwiches and tartines. The room is what it always was, only bigger: chandeliers, an Eiffel Tower, a private patio, meeting and party space, and windows into the bakery.
The 24-hour era belongs to the old building. Hours at the 36th Street flagship have varied since the move, and a visitor planning a very late night should check before going. Southern Living named the bakery the best in North Carolina in 2023.
The new flagship’s landlord, Aston Properties, had renovated the former gallery for months before the first plan was canceled, and the bakery took the space after all when the original building’s owner began selling parts of the block. Knowing the landlord was selling portions of it, a company spokeswoman said in 2019, the bakery wanted to be certain it stayed in NoDa, where people loved it and helped it grow. Bill Lamb, the owner quoted in that announcement, said the community had supported the bakery for almost eleven years on North Davidson, always pushing it to be better.
Why it matters
For more than a decade Amélie’s was the only place in Charlotte to be at 4 a.m. that was not a bar or a hospital, and a city that closes early found out what it was missing. The bakery gave the neighborhood a late-night living room and gave the city a design vocabulary imitated in every cafe with a chandelier since.
It has also been through the things a Charlotte institution goes through: a labor reckoning, a pandemic, a landlord selling the block. The chandeliers moved a mile. Ische, presumably, has more.