Paris Baguette Brings Freshly Baked Pastries To Arrowbrook Centre

HERNDON, VA — With the opening of the new Paris Baguette in Herndon, Alma Causevic Siddiqui’s decade-long dream of owning a bakery finally came true.

“I worked in construction for over 10 years and I enjoy baking,” she said, sipping coffee at a table inside the new bakery located at 2324 Silver Arrow Way. “Cakes, pastries, general cooking, I cook all kinds of different cuisines from different countries, especially Asian foods.”

Last summer, Siddiqui and her husband Farooq were in Chicago when they decided to get breakfast one morning at a Paris Baguette cafe.

“We liked all the products, from coffee to all the pastries,” she said. “I kept going every day. I was there for three or four days. We liked it so much that we got in touch with Paris Baguette’s corporate office and we started talking.”

Siddiqui suspects that the company found her experience in construction and her husband’s work as a CPA to be an appealing combination for a franchisee who would open and operate a new Paris Baguette location.

What the company liked about the couple was that Siddiqui had extensive experience in construction and her husband was a CPA.

“We have a really strong basis to be successful and to represent their brand,” she said. “We were assigned this territory. It took us some time to find this location. I love this particular space.”

Specializing freshly baked pastries, the Paris Baguette also offers salads, sandwiches and Lavazza coffee for takeout or for customers looking to dine in.

“Everything is made every morning,” she said. “Our bakers come in at 3 a.m. to prepare everything for when we open at 7 a.m. I stand behind all of our products more than 100 percent. We have a lot of different things to appeal to different tastes, from savory to sweet to fruit to chocolate too.”

The one thing that Siddiqui enjoyed the most about opening the restaurant was the opportunity to travel to Paris Baguette’s corporate headquarters in New Jersey to learn how to decorate and bake all the pastries and cakes they would be selling.

Every Sunday for five weeks, Siddiqui along with the five decorators and five bakers she’d hired, would drive up to New Jersey for the training. When the last class of the week ended on Friday, they would all drive back to Virginia, so that they could spend part of the weekend with their families.

“It was a really big commitment,” she said. “It was really hard, but at the same time, it was very rewarding.”

Located in Arrowbrook Centre south of the Dulles Toll Road, the new Paris Baguette cafe is accessible from Centreville Road and close to the Innovation Metro Station and the Village Center at Dulles. The cafe is open seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m