What is JL Patisserie?
JL Patisserie is a French bakery in a strip center at 7342 E Shea Boulevard, Suite 108, on the northeast corner of Shea Boulevard and Scottsdale Road, the busiest intersection in the Shea Corridor. It opened in March 2019 in a 1,200-square-foot space that is mostly kitchen, with a few bistro tables outside, and within four years it was on the James Beard Foundation’s national list of outstanding bakeries.
The initials belong to Jenna Leurquin, who was 26 when she opened it. She grew up in Belgium, came to Boise State on a golf scholarship and studied finance, then went to Paris to train in both cuisine and pastry at Le Cordon Bleu. In her early twenties she worked as a consultant for French food companies, walking into kitchens to tell people twice her age to change their methods. She married Scott Stiewak, a golf teammate from Arizona, moved to the Valley, spent two years as head pastry chef at Silverleaf, and then started baking in a commercial kitchen for the Peoria farmers market, where customers kept parking outside the kitchen hoping to buy direct. The storefront followed.
The case is classic French with a few hybrids: sourdough-leavened croissants plain, chocolate, pistachio, almond, ham and Gruyère; cruffins whose fillings change weekly; pain aux raisins, kouign-amann, cinnamon rolls, 13 flavors of macaron, eclairs, tarts, cakes, quiche and baguettes. Leurquin uses European butter and treats sugar, in her phrase, as a spice. There is coffee, a take-home Bake Collection, and baking classes taught only here.
It is for anyone within a few miles who wants a real croissant, and since October 2025 for a good many people who drove across the Valley after watching her on their phones. Our verdict: the best French pastry in Scottsdale, made by a chef who is also a very good businesswoman, in a room too small for its fame.
Buying pastry at JL Patisserie
Go early, midweek. The Scottsdale shop bakes a finite amount and sells out, often by early afternoon, and since the crowds of October 2025 it has added Tuesday to its Monday closure, giving the staff two days to prep. Hours have shifted over the years (10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekends at opening), so check the website for the current week. Weekend mornings bring a line, which New Times notes is useful time to decide what to buy. It is counter service; take a box to go or sit at the patio tables or the small dine-in area added in the 2022 expansion.
Order the croissants first. The pistachio croissant, filled with Italian pistachio paste and tinted green by it, is the bestseller and the pastry at the center of the 2025 argument. The chocolate croissant got a 9.2 from Keith Lee, who compared it to Paris. The savory side is the ham and Gruyère and, in fall, a turkey, Brie and cranberry croissant that New Times singled out. The cruffin, a croissant baked in a muffin tin and piped with cream, rotates through flavors such as black forest, white chocolate raspberry and black sesame with strawberry cremeux; it is the one that left Lee speechless and scored a 10.
Then the rest of the case. The pain aux raisins is a tight spiral of laminated dough that New Times called a Best Bite. The kouign-amann, the glazed cinnamon roll, the chocolate coconut pecan scone, 13 macarons from Earl Grey to rose lychee, eclairs, tarts, cakes and seasonal fruit specials. Quiche and a few sandwiches handle lunch. Bread, baguettes especially, runs out early. Prices are not published in the press we found; a pastry and coffee runs well under $15 a head.
Take some home. The Bake Collection sells frozen croissants, cinnamon rolls and breads to finish in your own oven, a Leurquin idea for getting the smell of a bakery into a house with kids. The classes, macarons, eclairs, croissants and baguettes, stay at the Scottsdale shop even now that production has moved to Phoenix, and private sessions book for bridal parties and corporate groups.
Getting there. The center sits on the northeast corner of Shea and Scottsdale Road, across from the corner where Sushi on Shea served for thirty years. The lot is small and shared; on a Saturday morning park on the Shea side and walk. The Phoenix shops, at 4700 N Central Avenue and 2601 S 24th Street, are the overflow option if the case here is empty.
The bakery that beat an influencer
Scottsdale had never had a serious French patisserie before Leurquin. The city’s bakeries were American: Sweet Dee’s on Stetson Drive, the grocery-store cases, the resort pastry kitchens that trained people like her. A Belgian with a Cordon Bleu diploma and a Silverleaf résumé choosing a Shea Boulevard strip center in 2019 was, in that context, a bet that the Shea Corridor’s affluent households would pay for lamination done properly. Phoenix New Times called it “haute couture” in its first year and noted the French being spoken at the outside tables.
The early years were harder than the write-ups suggested. The pandemic arrived a year after the Scottsdale opening and three months after the Phoenix cafe; supply chains broke; egg prices spiked. Then, in February 2023, the James Beard Foundation named JL Patisserie a semifinalist for Outstanding Bakery, the national category, a rare Arizona entry (see our note on James Beard and Michelin in Scottsdale). She got the call on a ski trip and said she felt she had already won. New Times followed with Best Pastries in 2024 and 2025, and a third location near Sky Harbor opened in March 2025 with seating for 50 and the production kitchen.
Then came October. On October 7, 2025, an influencer posted a review calling the coffee sour, the quiche too eggy and the pistachio croissant full of fake ingredients. Leurquin had declined her request for a paid collaboration and then for a comped meal, and on October 9 she posted a reply: a walk through the kitchen, the tub of Italian pistachio paste, the pallet of European flour, the sourdough starter, and the screenshots. It drew 62 million views on TikTok, coverage from People and Today, and weeks of lines at all three shops. The reviewer apologized and went dark. Later that month Keith Lee, the most-followed food critic on the platform, flew in unannounced, scored the cruffin a 10, called it one of the best bakeries he had ever visited, and handed over $4,000, half for the roughly 30 staff and half for the next hundred customers’ orders.
What the record does not say is whether the surge held into 2026, the shop’s current hours week to week, or any published prices. The story of the 2020s in Scottsdale food is partly the story of restaurants and phones, and this is the clearest case of a small business winning that exchange.
Honest assessment: the croissants are the best in the city and the cruffins are worth a detour, and both were true before any of this. The space is cramped, the coffee is secondary, and sellouts are routine, so a late-afternoon visit will disappoint. For a weekend morning on the Shea Corridor, with a box to go, nothing in Scottsdale comes close, and the shop earns its spot on our list of the best coffee shops in Scottsdale on the strength of what goes next to the cup.