The Lamination Survives the Filling

The croissant is a French form defined by its lamination, and La Levain fills it with local desserts.

That is the signature move and the risk in one. The Bo Bo Cha Cha Croissant folds the local dessert, yam and sweet-potato cubes and coconut mochi, into a laminated croissant, and it is the kind of thing that goes wrong easily. A croissant is defined by its layers: the lamination, the clean separation, the shattering crust, the open crumb. Fill it with a wet, heavy, local-dessert filling and the lamination can collapse into a croissant-shaped vehicle, a soft enriched dough pretending to be a croissant because it is holding a viral filling. The question at La Levain is whether the lamination survives the local fillings, or whether the novelty wins.

Chef Wythe Ng has real pastry pedigree, eighteen-plus years and a Keong Saik Bakery co-founding, and the bo bo cha cha proves the technique holds. The bakery, on Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar since 2021, runs a counter of fifty-plus pastries, the local-flavour laminations sitting alongside the classics and the viral items. So I went looking for whether the lamination could hold, and the bo bo cha cha is where I checked.

A genuine croissant under the local filling

The first bite of the Bo Bo Cha Cha Croissant was the test, and the lamination held.

The layers separated cleanly. The crust shattered. The crumb was open: a genuine croissant, not a croissant-shaped vehicle for the filling. And the bo bo cha cha sat inside that genuine lamination, the yam and sweet potato's earthy sweetness and the coconut mochi's chew all carried by a real croissant rather than a soft dough collapsing under the weight. That is the harder thing, and it is where the technique pedigree shows. A lesser baker fills a croissant with a heavy local dessert and the filling wins: the lamination softens, the layers compress, the pastry becomes a delivery system for the novelty. Ng's lamination was strong enough to hold a wet, heavy filling and still be a croissant.

The local flavour sat in a genuine croissant, and that distinction is the achievement. The bo bo cha cha is a local-dessert reference, a recognisable Southeast Asian sweet built on yam and sweet potato and coconut, and the easy version of this idea is to put that filling in any soft pastry and call it a croissant. La Levain put it in a real croissant, the lamination intact, so the local flavour and the French form coexist rather than one overwhelming the other. The technique carried the bo bo cha cha without letting the croissant slump into a container for it.

Where the novelty wins

The Crookie is where the novelty finally pulls ahead of the form.

Cookie dough and chocolate chips baked into a croissant: a viral item, fun, photogenic. But the cookie-dough filling and the chocolate weighed down the lamination, and the croissant became more a vehicle for the crookie concept than a croissant in its own right. Where the bo bo cha cha sat inside a genuine lamination, carried by the form, the crookie's heavier, denser filling started to compromise the layers. The croissant softened under it. The lamination gave way to the concept. The most viral items are where the technique starts to lose to the novelty.

That contrast is the bakery's internal line. The bo bo cha cha is the local-flavour lamination done right, the filling inside a genuine croissant. The crookie is the viral item done for the post, the filling heavy enough to compromise the form. A diner should order toward the laminations where the technique holds and treat the crookie and the onigiri croissant as the viral novelties they are, where the form gives way to the concept. The bakery is at its best when the lamination survives the filling, and at its weakest when the filling wins.

The friction

The friction with La Levain is the gap between the technique items and the viral ones.

The viral items, the crookie and the onigiri croissant, lean novelty over technique, the heavy fillings compromising the lamination. A diner should order the laminations where the technique holds, the bo bo cha cha and the hojicha mochi, over the viral items where it gives.

The other friction is the range. Fifty-plus pastries spread the focus, and a bakery doing that many things risks doing the signature laminations less consistently than a tighter operation would. The bo bo cha cha proves the technique. The breadth dilutes it.

The third is the price. At $6.50 and up for the filled laminations, the croissants are premium, justified by the lamination holding a heavy filling but steep for a diner expecting bakery prices, especially when the queue is added to the cost.

What the bakery is for

La Levain is the rare local-flavour bakery where the lamination survives the filling, the Bo Bo Cha Cha Croissant putting a local dessert inside a genuine croissant rather than a croissant-shaped vehicle. Wythe Ng's technique pedigree holds the French form under the local fillings. The viral items, the crookie among them, are where the novelty finally wins, and the breadth dilutes the rest.

The Bo Bo Cha Cha Croissant, a wet local-dessert filling carried by a lamination strong enough to stay a genuine croissant, was the pastry that proved the technique survives the novelty. A pastry chef who fills croissants with local desserts and keeps the lamination strong enough that the local flavour sits in a real croissant, rather than overwhelming it, has done the harder version of the viral local-croissant.

So the lamination holds up under the filling, which is what I came to find out, and the bo bo cha cha showed me it does, right up until the crookie, where the filling finally wins.