Le Macaron French Pastries

As fans of Parisian pastries, including macaron cookies, we’re willing to go out of our way for authentic macarons (including Ladurée’s), and genuinely thrilled to find any place closer to home (such as the French-Vietnamese bakery at Brodard) with a variety of good-to-great options. So it brings us no joy to say that Le Macaron French Pastries – at least the 2025-vintage Tustin location of this chain with over 50 franchised stores – doesn’t meet that “good-to-great” threshold.

The small space at Tustin’s outdoor shopping center The District at Tustin Legacy looks just fine as patisseries go, using almost all of its public space for pastry display cases and employee working space, while relying on a single two-person high-top indoor table and some common outdoor seating to accommodate guests. There are roughly 20 macaron flavors to choose from at $3 each, including “Flavor of Orient,” Colombian coffee, mint white chocolate, and champagne, as well as giant-sized macarons (called “small macaron cakes”) for $8.72, and a variety of eclairs for around $4.50. A half-dozen gelatos and coffees are also available.

Le Macaron’s issue: with rare exceptions, nothing we ordered was particularly good. The highlight was a pistachio “macaron cake,” which had combined a rich, authentically pistachio colored outer shell with an artificially green and fruit-pasted red center that wasn’t exactly what we’d expected, but at least had more than single-note depth of flavor and texture.