photo by jon w. sparks
La Baguette manager Gene Amagliani, bistro manager Elizabeth Jackson, and assistant manager Hadley Butler with their iconic chicken salad on a baguette and spicy tomato soup combo.
Chicken salad on a croissant and spicy tomato soup are a match made in heaven — and also at La Baguette French Bread and Pastry Shop.
That combination “is most likely one of the favorite things, time and time again, for anybody who’s ever come here for lunch,” says manager Gene Amagliani.
Customers can order the chicken salad on a baguette, wheat, or rye bread, but the croissant is what most people want, he says. “The croissants we are making here come from scratch. It’s an all-butter croissant.”
They make their tomato soup daily. “We sell gallons of it every day,” he says. “It’s a very popular item.”
Ditto the chicken salad. “We sell pounds of chicken salad every day,” says Amagliani. “We’re making that every day as well. We cook the chicken here on-site. We don’t buy pre-cooked chicken. We season it. We make chicken salad with it. And it’s just fresher than what you’ll find at some places.”
The soup, which has “a little kick” to it, and the chicken salad weren’t always made the same way years ago, when La Baguette had several locations around town, Amagliani says.
“At one point, everybody was making their own soups. So, Mr. [Paul] Howse, my father-in-law, got everybody together — everybody who made their own little variations of it — and we decided on which one was best.” The winner was the spicy tomato soup still being served to this day, he says.
They did the same with the chicken salads. “This was very early on, in the late 1970s,” he says, “and they finalized the recipes and we continued with them all these years.”
The La Baguette at 3088 Poplar is the original location, dating back to 1976. “Everything was always made here: croissants, Danish, bread,” Amagliani says. “Several European people actually started it. They brought in a French bread baker and a French pastry chef because there was nothing like that in Memphis. I guess they longed for the European style of pastries and crusty bread and what have you. They brought in those folks and they were here for several years and actually trained some of the people that are here now.”
He continues, “It’s my understanding that when the place first opened we had French bread, croissants, and the full selection of both cold pastries and breakfast pastries. We made eclairs from scratch.”
They began serving lunch at the old Erin Drive location sometime in the late ’70s, he says.
As for their most popular sweet pastry, Amagliani says it’s La Baguette’s almond croissant. “It’s a croissant like you would have with the chicken salad,” he says. “It’s sliced and it has frangipani [almond paste] in the center of the croissant. And then it has some frangipane smeared on top and almonds put on top of it. That is our most popular dry pastry.”
La Baguette is located at 3088 Poplar in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza.
