Maison Matho is a French neighborhood café located in the Melrose Hill area and specializes in authentic French sandwiches, pastries, and coffee.
Chef Daniel Matho started the business about four years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic. His mission was to bring authentic French food to Los Angeles.
“The vision for it was really to bring the food from France that I miss. Our specialties are fresh-baked pastries and bread with which we make sandwiches. We make all the bread and pastries in-house, and then most of our preparations are also made in-house,” he explained. “Sometimes, if it feels like traditional foods as they travel across the world, they kind of lose a little bit of their authenticity. I try and stick to what I grew up with.”
Matho grew up in the French town of Grenoble in the Alps. It borders Switzerland and Italy.
“My passion for cooking started at a young age,” he confessed. “My mom’s a great cook. I remember watching cooking shows when as a kid, instead of watching cartoons. I started when I was 19.”
Matho’s mom is American who hails from New York. About eight years ago, he decided to make the move across the pond. While apprehensive at first, he hasn’t regretted the decision on bit.
“Opening my own place has been the goal since the very beginning,” he said. “Being the owner and the operator, and just being the only person in charge, has always been a goal.”
When walking into Maison Matho, the smells immediately transport you to France.
One thing he missed from back home was the style of sandwiches. He said the ones in the United States didn’t have the right balance between the bread, butter and the quality of the ham. He decided to rectify that at his own establishment.
Here, guests can indulge in a jambon beurre, which is a Parisian-style ham, butter and cornichons sandwich on their baguette. The in-house-made baguettes are sourdough-based.
“It’s very simple, very classic,” he explained. “But, I feel it’s greater than the sum of its parts.”
There’s also Daniel’s Favorite, which has prosciutto di parma, butter and cornichons on a baguette.
“It’s a little more decadent than the ham and butter sandwich. This is the one I would get when I was growing up,” he said.
The sandwiches don’t stop there, with Matho expanding his palette.
“In America, people love eggs for breakfast, so I needed an egg sandwich. What better than a classic rolled omelet with Comte cheese inside, basically bringing that dish into the sandwich form?”.
As a shoutout to L.A., Matho made sure to include a French Dip seeing as the City of Angels is the home to the food.
If you’re vegan, don’t worry about it! The chef says he always makes sure there’s a vegan option on the menu. For Maison Matho, he has a carrot salad French Dip, which can be dipped in a carrot Dijon vinaigrette with smoked black cardamom.
When looking at the menu, there’s no shortage of pastries and croissants. All made in-house, the croissants are baked with French butter and rolled out by hand. All of the baked goods are made fresh every single day.
“We don’t hold on to the pastries for over a day,” he stated.
To pay homage to his hometown, Matho included pink praline on the menu in the form of sweets and coffee.
“Pink praline is a specialty from my region. They are candied nuts that are coated in sugar, flavored with orange blossom and vanilla,” he explained. “One of my favorite things growing up was the pink praline brioche…I really wanted to recreate that here, because it’s something that nobody else really does. We make the candied nuts in-house and then chop them up, fold them into our brioche dough, and then bake that every day to go with that.”
To go along with the pastry, he created a pink praline latte, which is an espresso latte flavored with orange blossom and vanilla. To make it Instagram-friendly, he made the milk pink by incorporating beet water.
“Everybody loves to take a picture of it, and it looks really cool,” he gushed.
Whether you like coffee, sweets or a sandwich- Maison Matho has something for everyone.
“That’s also one thing I’m very proud of, is that we are, I feel, proficient in those three areas. It’s a first step for me. It’s my first business, and for now, it’s going very well, and I do have dreams to grow from here,” he said.
Matho said L.A. has definitely embraced his eatery, and it has attracted the local French community as well.
“That’s one other thing that brings me a lot of joy, which is that the French community does show up. One of the greatest things you can do with food is to bring back memories,” he continued. “If it’s a French person looking for a childhood memory, if it’s someone from here who wants to get the flavor that they had when they had that trip to Paris. That’s what we’re going for.”
This segment of California Cooking aired on Episode 191.