Has anybody else noticed lately that La Madeleine, our favorite Dallas-based French cafe chain restaurant, has been feeling just a bit more... French?
One day a few weeks ago, I dropped by a La Madeleine for a quick but delicious dinner. As I entered, one of the servers behind the counter cheerily greeted me with "Bonjour!" After I placed my order for a Chicken Friand, she told me "Merci!" while adjusting her beret. I made a trip to the ladies' room and I learned from the wall of French lesson tiles that 'avoir du chic' means 'to have flair and panache.' I noticed French vocabulary words were playing over the speaker and another tile on the back of the restroom door said 'Au Revoir' as I left. Vintage French posters lined the walls.
I was pleasantly surprised with the decidedly more French experience. I've never been to France, but La Madeleine's brand position is a restaurant that brings France to the masses, to places like Dallas, Texas, to people like me. It's an accessible, approachable, convenient French experience. You order and get your food as fast as the mini French lesson you get in the restroom. La Madeleine has always had a nice atmosphere with a French feel, but I can tell the company seems to be more fully embracing its French-ness by thinking about each and every touchpoint (from the greeting to the uniforms to the restrooms) and finding a way to inject some French flavor into it.
The restaurant has even changed its identifier from La Madeleine Bakery-Cafe-Bistro to La Madeleine Country French Cafe. I like that. It's so much more specific to La Madeleine's unique position. Not as many restaurants can identify themselves as a 'country french cafe' as a 'bakery-cafe-bistro' hybrid.
The one area I felt like the rebranding was weak is that La Madeleine's new visual brand aesthetics seem to take it away from the quaint French feel that's being added within the other aspects of the brand. Check out the new
website -- with the clean white and swirly floral embellishments, it looks like a stylish, modern French 'bakery-cafe-bistro.' To me, the previous website (see screenshots) looks more like a cozy, quaint 'country french cafe' than the new brand look and feel does. Maybe it could've used an update on the organization or usability, but I think the look of it expressed the brand more than it does now.
Other than that, good job La Madeleine. Or should I say... Bon travail!