After nearly a year closed, Pains d'Exclamation reopened in La Malbaie on April 25, 2026 under new local owners, with new equipment and the old recipes intact.
Some addresses belong to a town. Pains d'Exclamation, at the corner of Saint-Étienne and John-Nairne streets, was one of them. After nearly a year with its doors shut, the La Malbaie bakery reopened on April 25, 2026 at seven o'clock in the morning — with about twenty people already waiting on the sidewalk. A return long awaited, led by a new team but with memory intact.
A reopening backed by a circle of local entrepreneurs
The new company is led by Michael Simard-St-Gelais, president, with Alexandre Bergeron and a group of Charlevoix-based partners alongside him. They acquired the building in October 2025, after months of it sitting on the market. For them, the project was never purely real estate — it was about reopening a place that was missing from the town centre. "We went through stressful moments, emotional moments. A real chemistry built up," the president said on opening day. The months leading up to April 25 were spent on rebuilt floors, refurbished counters and a reconfigured layout.
New equipment, old recipes
The new owners invested in entirely new equipment, including a fermentation chamber ordered from Europe. That single piece of kit transforms a bakery's working life: it gives precise control over how the dough rises — a comfort that the previous setup did not allow. Beside the fermentation room stands a brand-new barista counter, occupying the space where the previous owner had installed a wine bar. Coffee now has a more visible place in the identity of the bakery, without overshadowing the heart of the house: the bread itself.
And the bread comes from the old recipes. The new team made a point of bringing back the specialties that had built the bakery's reputation — country loaves, baguettes, sourdoughs, viennoiseries. "Come back to the good old bakery you loved so much," the business wrote on social media the night before reopening. To anchor that continuity, several of the new hires are former employees from the earlier Pains d'Exclamation. The gesture matters: the memory of a workshop lives in the hands of the people who once kneaded in it.
The preparation phase ran for nearly six months. Between the autumn acquisition and the first batch of spring loaves, the owners had to redo the building's interior, calibrate the new fermentation chamber, track down old flour suppliers, and test every recipe in the new configuration. "After a lot of work, testing, adjustments, and above all passion, we are finally ready to welcome you," the business announced before the reopening. The phrasing captures the tone of the project: a return that was prepared, not improvised.
A space that becomes a meeting place again
The interior has been reorganised so that people can sit down again. The large communal tables — emblem of the original Pains d'Exclamation — are back where they belong, and the space now seats thirty-five. "We put the big tables back so that people would find that sense of closeness again," explains Alexandre Bergeron. In practice, it means you stop in between neighbours, you stay for a coffee while reading the paper, you bump into someone you weren't looking for. It is a way of running a town-centre business that is becoming rare elsewhere.
The address — 398 rue Saint-Étienne — is a five-minute walk from the river and a few minutes by car from Cap-à-l'Aigle. For anyone spending a few days in Charlevoix and planning to cook at home, this is the stop you make first thing in the morning, before heading down to the riverside walk along the Saint Lawrence, or before driving out to the trails of Hautes-Gorges National Park.
What this return says about La Malbaie
Pains d'Exclamation is one of those handfuls of businesses that do more than serve — they define a neighbourhood. Its closure in 2025 was felt as a tear in the fabric, not just a shuttered storefront but a lost meeting point. Its reacquisition by local entrepreneurs, with a substantial investment and an explicit commitment to the original recipes, is the opposite of a purely commercial project. It is a gesture of continuity, made with twenty-first-century equipment in service of loaves that smell the way they always did.
For visitors, it is also a good reason to plan that first morning in La Malbaie carefully. A few viennoiseries, a coffee, a long shared table to drop your bag on — the kind of starting point that colours the rest of the day. And if you stay longer, you can extend the morning by stopping at the other addresses that make Charlevoix's food scene worth the trip: the Comporte bakery, slightly further from the town centre, the Charlevoix cheese makers to fill a picnic basket, or the Flavour Trail to meet the artisans of the region.
A bakery that reopens, in a town centre that needed it, with a team that knows what it is doing: that is exactly the kind of story we like to tell in Charlevoix.
To rent three luxury chalets in La Malbaie (Cap-à-l'Aigle), Charlevoix, Charlevoix Chalets offers Le Littoral chalet with heated pool, sauna and spa, L'Embâcle chalet with heated pool and spa, and Les Thermes chalet with thermal zone. Book your stay online or call 418-476-1442.