I found a great new bakery.  Really, I just stumbled up on it.  Well, stumbled might not be the right word because it's at the corner of Rakovski and Neofit Rilski. Anyhow, the name is Sofi: French Bakery and it's brand new.  Yep, they've been open for no more than a week.

[caption id="attachment_1472" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Sofi Bakery Croissant "]<a href="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/dsc01218.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1472" title="Sofi Bakery " src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/dsc01218.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="375" /></a>[/caption]

After dinner with friends, we stopped in and I bought a pastry.  Well two but I didn't really want to share this with you until I realized that I had to for the rest of my post to make sense. <!--more-->Oh, so here's the thing: I ate one right away.  It was very tasty.  For sure I'd recommend the current roll which is the one pastry I've eaten thus far from the shop.  When I took my coat off at home, I was covered with pastry flakes--yep they are that good.  I ate it and flakes all over myself.  I don't regret it at all.

The flaky pastries alone are well worth the trip to this shop.  However it looks like they have a great selection of what look like great loaves of bread and a good selection of French pastries.

More than any of this the shop has a lovely store front with big glass windows, well lit display cases and a friendly staff.  As you may know, a friendly staff anywhere in Sofia makes my a loyal customer. The staff tonight were great. They were closing up and wanted to go home but let us look at everything. They heard us speaking in English and started talking to us in English. Wowsa, who does this?! Hardly anyone in retail does this in Sofia.  I am not saying that they should or that they have to--far from it. I actually like getting to use my Bulgarian but in this case they were friendly and interested enough to engage us right away.  Also, if you're buying breakfast pastries at 8pm at night they're half off--I guess that requires that there are pastries left to sell at the end of the night.

The thing is based on how delicious my first pastry was and how good my croissant looks, I would be surprized if in a couple of weeks the shop has any pastries left at the end of the day. This plus their excellent customer service and relatively reasonable prices (from less than 2 leva to 3 leva for fancier pastries) suggests to me that this shop is off to a good start.  Fingers-crossed at least.