French Bakery Near Me in Culver City: Sweet Wheat's Corner Boulangerie

Sweet Wheat is a French boulangerie on a corner of Culver Boulevard in downtown Culver City, at number 9341, run by two brothers from the Val-de-Marne outside Paris. It opened on August 18, 2025, as the sequel to their Redondo Beach shop, and it keeps unusually long hours for a bakery: Toast lists 6:45 am to 7:45 pm every day. If your french bakery near me search starts anywhere between Palms and Mar Vista, this is the shop with a terrace and an all-day kitchen.

Romain and Alexandre Lecat started training as bakers at 16, Le Petit Journal reported in April 2026, always intending to open their own place. Before that happened they spent ten years in Miami working in restaurant consulting. Their first Sweet Wheat opened in 2021 at 1430 South Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach, at the tail end of the pandemic, as a grab-and-go counter that grew on word of mouth rather than marketing.

The split of work is clear. Alexandre stays on the floor with the bakers and the production schedule, while Romain handles the administration, finance and expansion plans, he told the paper. Their slogan is The flavor of France, and Romain said early tests with local flour could not reproduce the taste they grew up with, so they found a French mill willing to supply them. The paper describes everything as made on site with 100 percent French flour.

Customers on the Westside had been asking for a second shop, but the brothers had a short list of non-negotiables, Romain said: a corner lot, very easy access and, above all, parking. The space that fit had been left empty by Shake Shack. Le Petit Journal photographed them inside on February 26, 2026, and described a large shop styled like a Parisian bistro, with most of the weekday crowd coming from offices nearby and a lunch rush that spills onto the terrace.

Romain framed the whole project around the neighborhood bakeries of their childhood, where everything is made on site every day with traditional techniques, and said they saw real demand for that kind of work in Los Angeles. The recipes stay classic French on purpose. Kneading, fermentation, shaping and baking all happen in the building, which is why the display cases are refilled through the morning rather than stocked once from a central kitchen.

The prices on Sweet Wheat's Toast ordering page are straightforward. A butter croissant is $5.75, and the pain au chocolat, almond croissant and kouign-amann are each $5.95. A small dark canelé is $3.95, and a single chouquette, the pearl-sugar choux puff Parisian kids eat by the bagful, is $0.95. A slice of Parisian flan costs $8.95. The baguette is $5.95, and the bakery says its breads ferment slowly over 48 hours.

Whole cakes are made to order and need at least 72 hours' notice through Toast, and catering orders need 24 hours. Walk-in pastries are first come, first served, so the widest choice of viennoiserie is in the first hours after opening, before the office crowd arrives. The long hours make this one of the few French bakeries in the area where an afternoon pastry run is realistic. Toast offers pickup and delivery as well as in-store orders.

There is a small discrepancy to know about. Toast shows the shop closing at 7:45 pm, while the bakery's own website says it closes at 8 pm. Either way, it runs much later than most neighborhood bakeries. The brothers also told Le Petit Journal they were preparing an evening menu with table service, naming French onion soup, boeuf bourguignon and hachis parmentier, because the rent requires using every hour of the day.

The first shop, at 1430 South Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach, is still open and is the smaller of the two. Our South Bay, the South Bay magazine, profiled the brothers there and quoted Romain describing their partnership as Alex is the hands, I am the head and together we share the heart. He recommended the bostock, the almond-topped brioche that uses up yesterday's loaf, which is worth asking about at either counter.

Romain told Le Petit Journal that opening in Redondo Beach in 2021 was lucky timing, because people wanted to go out again after lockdowns, and that the shop never needed much advertising. Four years later the Culver City opening was a change of scale, and the brothers now talk about franchising Sweet Wheat into other Los Angeles neighborhoods. For now, these two counters, one in the South Bay and one on the Westside, are the only places to find it.

Culver Boulevard is the spine of downtown Culver City, and the bakery sits within a few blocks of its landmarks. The flatiron-shaped Culver Hotel, at 9400 Culver Boulevard, opened in 1924 and is the best photo stop nearby. A little farther north on Washington Boulevard is the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and the E Line's Culver City station on Washington makes the bakery reachable by train from downtown LA or Santa Monica. Take a box of chouquettes for the walk.

Address: 9341 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232. Hours on Toast: 6:45 am to 7:45 pm daily; the bakery website lists an 8 pm close. Order ahead, schedule pickup or delivery at toasttab.com under Sweet Wheat Culver City. Whole cakes need 72 hours' notice and catering needs 24 hours. Croissant $5.75, kouign-amann $5.95, canelé $3.95, quiche Lorraine $10.95. Parking was one of the reasons the brothers picked this corner, and there is a sidewalk terrace.