This year's pastry calendar for restaurants

Bringing your restaurant or patisserie to life online is a daily challenge. To remedy this challenge, restaurateurs can arm themselves with the French calendar, which is packed with sweet occasions to use to liven up their establishment's social media .

Taking advantage of national events, religious and cultural celebrations and international customs is a great strategy for stimulating your business and reinventing your culinary offerings to maximize traffic and build customer loyalty. These key dates provide an opportunity to imagine new customer experiences, offering diners a unique dining experience.

Sweet delicacies are excellent communication and marketing tools for restaurants. Pastries and sweets can be enjoyed at any time of day. In particular, they can be used to attract customers at off-peak times, after school or at breakfast.

Celebrating an emblematic cake during certain festivities can also become an additional source of revenue. Each year is marked by great sweet moments, each representative of a French or international tradition. Each of these events becomes an opportunity to produce and promote an iconic gourmet sweet that consumers will be delighted to taste. It's a matter of sprinkling a little sugar on the menu and brightening it up especially for the occasion, but also, why not, adapting the atmosphere and flavors inherited from these traditions. Gourmet treats and sweets provide an opportunity for small, strategic events that will boost brand awareness and sales.

But what are the most opportune moments? In this article, we take a look at the sweet moments of the year that restaurateurs can use to create exceptional gourmet offers.

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January 6 - The galette for Epiphany

The start of the new year necessarily begins with Epiphany, the traditional Christian feast featuring the authentic galette des rois filled with frangipane. It's a popular family holiday that provides an opportunity to make your culinary offering more special and intrigue customers by revisiting the traditional galette recipe.

Many confectioners also use the occasion to launch exceptional marketing campaigns. The bean hidden inside the galette can be the perfect opportunity to let your imagination run wild and spoil your luckiest customers. This year, famous pastry chef Eric Bernier teamed up with the Objectif Horlogerie brand to offer the sale of an artisanal galette in exchange for the chance to win a prize related to the world of watchmaking. Partnering with a brand can be an excellent way to gain visibility with the brand's customers, as well as boosting sales of its galettes.

February 2 - Chandeleur pancakes

Originally a Christian feast, Chandeleur has become a tradition in France. The culinary emblem of this tradition is the delicious crêpe, which is flipped several times in the frying pan before being eaten by several people.

This can be an opportunity to adjust your lunch and dinner menus for the day. It's also a good idea to offer an afternoon snack to encourage gourmets to come and enjoy a tasty crêpe accompanied by a hot drink.

With its wide range of recipes, the crêpe can also be the subject of a cooking workshop based on an original and atypical recipe, or simply the learning of a gluten-free crêpe recipe - very much in vogue at the moment.These events are an opportunity to forge a strong bond with your community. It's also possible to invite an influencer to take part in this type of activity at his or her restaurant. This type of partnership gives high visibility to the establishment, which benefits from the influencer's notoriety to raise its profile.

February 14 - Valentine's Day cakes to share

Originating in Roman tradition, Valentine's Day is a day for celebrating love. Flowers and candlelit dinners are the most common ways of expressing love for a loved one. It's also an opportunity to invent a tasty dessert to be shared between lovers.

This year, Café Pushkin has invented a bouquet of sweet-tart roses to share with your loved one for Valentine's Day 2019: the Rosa Pushkin. Many Internet users were intrigued by this sculptural dessert and posted photos of their tasting experience. In the end, this sweet dish was an excellent communication tool for the café.

March 3 - Madeleine for Grandmother's Day

A tradition since the late 80s, Grandmother's Day is celebrated on the first Sunday in March. What better way to spend this holiday than with the whole family? Sweet treats are often the order of the day, with brunches and gourmet snacks that bring the whole family together.

So why not take advantage of this multi-generational celebration to promote cakes that have stood the test of time, such as the famous French toast or Proust's famous madeleine. The latter is the perfect medium for communication. Why not, for example, dedicate an Instagram post to this pastry rich in memories and ask Internet users what is the best one they share with their grandmother?

March 5 - Mardi Gras

Originally a Christian festival preceding the start of Lent, Mardi Gras today is a tradition that calls for a special atmosphere: a carnival associated with convivial customs where the custom is to dress up and parade around your neighborhood or town.

The emblematic delicacies of this national holiday are pancakes, doughnuts and waffles, easy to enjoy on the go. Each region has its own culinary tradition. The day of the parade can be a good time to adjust your commercial offer to attract participants.

March 24 - European Artisanal Ice Cream Day

With the start of spring, the warm weather is back, and the European Artisanal Ice Cream Day can be the perfect excuse to sample delicious sorbets before the heat of summer.

Adding an ice cream creation to your menu to mark the start of spring, while at the same time nodding to this quirky holiday, is a great way to bring visitors to your restaurant and put a smile on more than one's face.

April 22 - Easter Monday

With its Christian origins, Easter is a time of chocolate delights and egg hunts. This year, Déborah Levy and Sarah Harb, the two young creators of Les Fées Pâtissières pastry shops, have capitalized on this convivial habit and organized a giant egg hunt in the area around their establishment!

Easter is an opportunity to mobilize your community, to make them dream or to entertain them. It's the perfect opportunity to stand out from the competition. It can also be an opportunity to create a dessert featuring chocolate flavours. Four o'clock gourmets and lunch or dinner guests will be delighted!

May 26 - Mother's Day

Celebrated on the last Sunday in May, Mother's Day is a key date for imagining an event to liven up your restaurant and change the dishes usually on offer. A very popular and cherished tradition, it's an opportunity to showcase a sweet delicacy that represents the love mothers are shown by their children.

That's what Dalloyau pastry chef Jérémy Del Val came up with when he teamed up with seven perfumers from IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances) to create a box of 12 macaroons with six different fragrances.

May/June - The sweet treats of Ramadan

Ramadan, the famous Muslim fasting season, is being introduced and celebrated in France. To celebrate this tradition, Maghrebian delicacies take center stage: gazelle horns, chebakias, baklavas, roses des sables and briouats combine the sweet flavors of honey, almonds, dates and sesame in a variety of recipes based on the culinary cultures of the different Maghreb countries.

This fast can be an opportunity to diversify your menu and introduce delicacies from around the world to your regular clientele.  

June 16- Amazing pastries for Father's Day

Just like the celebration of mothers, Father's Day is also an opportunity to eat out with your father. Why not put the spotlight on a sweet dessert featuring dads, as Strasbourg's prodigious pastry chef Thierry Mulhaupt has done.

He pays homage to all dads by making a pair of moustaches on his cakes, or praline cigars, which delight young and old alike!

June/July: Tour de France

Created in 1891, the famous Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race - forerunner of the Tour de France - gave birth to a culinary emblem we know well: the prodigious Paris-Brest. This buttercream cake has a hole in the center in the shape of a bicycle wheel.

Now that the race has not existed since 1951, it has become the sweet icon of the Tour de France. Paris-Brest is a very popular pastry in France, so why not showcase it during the Tour de France?

October 31 - Halloween candy

An American tradition, Halloween has crossed the Atlantic to conquer Europe. Today, it's celebrated in France too, as children go door-to-door in disguise after dark. It's the sweets that bring the little ones to life during this festival, with its orange hues reflecting the onset of autumn. Sprinkling or reinventing your dishes with the most popular and notorious candies can be an excellent way of attracting the curious or lovers of Halloween atmosphere and decor.

November - Thanksgiving Pudding

Celebrated on the^4th Thursday in November in English-speaking countries, Thanksgiving is a tradition born of American history. It features one of America's most famous sweet treats: Pecan pie, which is packed with maple syrup mixed with whole pecans. Other emblematic tarts include pumpkin pie and warm, crisp apple pie, accompanied by a scoop of ice cream or Chantilly cream.

In the UK, Christmas Pudding is the emblematic Thanksgiving dessert. Prepared several months in advance, it's made with dried and candied fruit blended with winter spices such as ginger, cinnamon and cloves.

This Anglo-Saxon event, characterized by its sweet treats, can be a way of attracting Anglo-Saxon customers who are curious to share a meal in a French establishment, or of introducing French customers to a holiday celebrated beyond our borders.

December 25 - Christmas

A Christian tradition, Christmas is traditionally served with the famous Yule log. This dessert honors the large wooden log that was put on the fire on Christmas Eve. Originally in the form of a sponge cake filled with buttercream, the log is now revisited and reinvented in a variety of forms, such as the frozen log.

It's an opportunity to offer a unique creation that will delight even the most unconventional customers. And why not organize culinary workshops to learn how to make a pastry log, along the lines of those organized by the pastry house Lenôtre?

Conclusion

These great pastry moments punctuate the year with sweet treats inherited from various traditions. Whether you want to keep the original recipes or reinvent new ones according to culinary trends and the seasons, the choices are numerous! Clearly, these dates are an excellent way to get your establishment and cuisine noticed, by livening up both your social media and your restaurant during these festivities.

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