Pâtisserie Mélanie has announced its impending closure in San Diego's North Park after less than two years, but is SDG&E truly to blame?
Although Pâtisserie Mélanie’s North Park café debuted in May 2023, the business itself traces back to early 2018, when Dunn, a former high school English teacher, began selling French pastries baked from her live-work space under San Diego County’s cottage food laws. After years of training in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu, Dunn set out to bring the kind of viennoiseries she fell in love with abroad to San Diego, quickly earning local acclaim and early media praise.
In 2019, Dunn and Schwarz leased the 1,500-square-foot corner space at 3750 30th Street with plans to expand into a full-scale Parisian-style café. What followed, according to court filings and public reporting, was a years-long delay caused by utility upgrades that the couple says should have been routine. Electrical and natural gas work tied to the project ultimately took more than three years to complete, pushing the opening well past its original timeline and into the height of the pandemic era.
Those delays are now at the center of an ongoing lawsuit filed in 2024 by Pâtisserie Mélanie against San Diego Gas & Electric, alleging that the utility’s handling of the project caused severe financial harm. According to the complaint, the prolonged wait resulted in more than $3 million in monetary damages, including building expenses, equipment costs, rent paid on an unopened space, and lost revenue. With punitive damages and attorney’s fees included, the total amount sought reportedly approaches $18 million.
The lawsuit, which remains active in San Diego Superior Court, accuses SDG&E of gross negligence, prolonged periods of inaction, miscommunication, and providing incorrect information that compounded delays. SDG&E has stated publicly that it does not comment on pending litigation.
By the time Pâtisserie Mélanie finally opened its doors in 2023, the bakery entered the market carrying years of accumulated debt and exhaustion. Despite strong early buzz and a devoted customer base, the shortened lifespan of the storefront left little room to recover financially from the delays that preceded it.
Inside the café, guests found a refined yet approachable menu of classic French pastries, including croissants, kouign-amann, pains aux raisins, macarons, tarts, and cakes, along with coffee, tea, and a rotating brunch offering. The space quickly became a neighborhood fixture, particularly on weekends, and many customers expressed surprise at how soon the closure announcement arrived.
Complicating matters further, Dunn and Schwarz have also filed a separate legal action against a contractor involved in the build-out, alleging substandard workmanship and additional delays that required hiring a second firm to complete the project. That case, like the SDG&E lawsuit, remains unresolved.
While the owners have not explicitly cited the lawsuits as the reason for closing, the timing has reignited broader conversations in San Diego’s restaurant community about the outsized impact utility delays, permitting hurdles, and infrastructure bottlenecks can have on small, independently owned businesses.
For many longtime supporters, the closure feels less like a typical restaurant failure and more like the final chapter of a project that never fully recovered from forces outside the owners’ control. As North Park prepares to lose one of its most distinctive bakeries, the unanswered legal questions surrounding SDG&E and whether earlier resolution could have changed the outcome remain very much alive.
Pâtisserie Mélanie will serve its final customers through Sunday, February 8, at 3750 30th Street in San Diego's North Park. For more information, visit patisseriemelanie.com.
Originally published on January 30, 2026.
