Vegan Bakery in West Village: Délice de Bernay Croissants

Délice de Bernay bakes every croissant with homemade vegan butter, and a plain one costs $5 at the counter of 178 West Houston Street, where the door sits on the Bedford Street side. If you typed vegan bakery near me anywhere between Hudson Square and Washington Square, this is the fully plant-based French pâtisserie you want: the bakery opens at 8 am daily, closes at 9 pm, and shares its address with Délice & Sarrasin, the vegan French bistro behind it.

What separates it from the city's other plant-based counters is the French training behind the laminated dough. Head pastry chef Laurent Dupal worked at Ceci-Cela, the SoHo pâtisserie known for its croissants, before teaming up with Christophe Caron. Nothing here is a muffin-and-cookie case with a vegan sticker. The menu reads like a Paris boulangerie: chocolatine, pain aux raisins, mille-feuille, roulés, madeleines, and an opera cake built from oat sponge, coffee buttercream and dark chocolate ganache.

Start with the viennoiserie. Beyond the $5 butter croissant, the chocolatine runs $5.50 and the almond croissant, filled with almond cream and covered in toasted almonds, is $6.50. The pain au chocolat à la pistache, wrapped around dark chocolate and pistachio butter, costs $7, as does the pain aux raisins with pastry cream and rum-soaked raisins. The labels list allergens in shorthand, so SF means soy-free and NF means nut-free, useful if someone in your group avoids either.

The hybrids are where people stop and photograph the case. The croissant éclair, $7.50, layers flaky dough with silky cream and an éclair-style chocolate glaze. The cookie-dough croissant, $8.50, bakes chocolate chip dough right into the pastry. For something bigger, the four roulés are French butter snails at $10 each, filled with hazelnut and dark chocolate, apple butter with coconut caramel, almond butter with walnuts, or cherry butter. One roulé easily feeds two people with coffee.

Gluten-free eaters are not left with a single sad cookie. The macarons, $3.20 apiece, come in rose, lavender, blueberry, passion fruit, strawberry, apricot, banana chocolate and lemon, and all are marked gluten-free. So are the $6.50 lemon almond cake, the $10 moelleux au chocolat with its molten center, the $7.50 cheesecake and the $6 salted raspberry cookie. Shell-shaped madeleines cost $2.20 each, the cheapest thing on the board and a good add-on for the walk home.

Savory options turn a pastry run into lunch. The truffled croque monsieur, $12.50, uses koji ham, plant-based cheese and béchamel with black truffle oil. The quiche of the day is $7.50, gluten-free and soy-free. At the top of the menu sit two showpieces: the Petrossian croissant, $20, with cream cheese, capers, dill and plant-based caviar, and the Tournedos croissant, $19.50, stuffed with shredded plant-based filet mignon, garlic butter and shaved truffles. Those two are splurges, not breakfast staples.

An honest note before you order. A HappyCow reviewer posting in October 2026 called the pain au chocolat greasy and less fresh than expected, while praising the macarons. That matches a pattern at many bakeries: plain chocolate pastries suffer most by late afternoon. If you arrive after lunch, skip the chocolatine and pick the croissant éclair or a slice of fraisier, $9.50, whose cream and strawberries hold up better than laminated dough sitting under glass.

Timing matters more than lines here. The best window is 8 to 10 am, when trays are full and the weekend brunch crowd for the bistro has not arrived. Saturday and Sunday from late morning, the restaurant fills with crêpe and croque orders and the pastry counter gets busy too. Weeknight evenings are quiet, since the bakery stays open until 9 pm, later than most Manhattan pâtisseries, which makes it a rare after-dinner dessert stop.

Whole cakes need planning. Large versions of the opera cake and the fraisier cost $85 and are special order only, as are the $80 Forêt-Noire with kirsch-soaked chocolate sponge and the $60 giant mille-feuille. If the pastry case is thin when you show up, walk to the back: Délice & Sarrasin opens at 11 am and serves sweet crêpes such as La Lolotte, with roasted bananas and dark chocolate, for $14.

Inside, the setting is small and very French. HappyCow lists indoor tables plus a front patio and a back patio, and the bakery is essentially the front room of the restaurant. When the opening was announced in September 2025, VegNews described plans for Prussian blue walls, gold moldings and antique chandeliers. Expect a mix of regulars: neighborhood parents grabbing madeleines for a stroller ride, NYU students splitting a roulé, and visiting vegans who planned their whole morning around a croissant.

The backstory explains the name. Délice & Sarrasin, the family-run vegan bistro, built its reputation on plant-based boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin and escargots made from oyster mushrooms, with meat substitutes crafted from yellow split peas. Chef Yvette Caron trained at Le Garenne in the south of France. Délice de Bernay opened on September 13, 2025, after co-owner Christophe Caron, a vegan, told VegNews he wished he could enjoy Dupal's pastries every day.

Make it a West Village morning. Film Forum, the nonprofit cinema at 209 West Houston Street, sits across the street and screens repertory classics and documentaries, so a croissant before a matinee is an easy pairing. Then wander north up Bedford Street, one of the neighborhood's quietest lanes, past Commerce Street's curve to Grove Street, and loop east to Father Demo Square on Carmine and Bleecker, where benches face the fountain and the church of Our Lady of Pompeii.

Practical notes: the address is 178 West Houston Street, New York, NY 10014, with the bakery door on Bedford. The bakery runs 8 am to 9 pm daily. The restaurant serves 11 am to 10 pm. The kitchen is fully plant-based and every wine is vegan, but the restaurant is not BYOB. Delivery reaches Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens through their online ordering. Who will love it: anyone who misses real French viennoiserie, gluten-free friends, and dessert hunters after 8 pm