The Experience
In 2024, the James Beard Foundation nominated Sam Greenhalgh for Best Chef: Southwest. This would be remarkable at any restaurant in a city of 75,000. It is genuinely extraordinary when that restaurant serves breakfast and lunch. Forêt FLG opened in 2021 on South Beaver Street, a corner in downtown Flagstaff that had seen various short-lived tenants. What Greenhalgh built there rewrote expectations about what a daytime restaurant could achieve in Northern Arizona.
The name means "forest" in French, and the concept is French-inspired in the truest sense: not a theme-park recreation of a Parisian cafe, but a genuine application of French baking and cafe technique to an Arizona context. The laminated croissants — requiring multiple days of preparation to achieve their layered, butter-rich structure — are produced in-house and represent some of the finest pastry work in the state. The croque madame, eggs benedict, and avocado toast are the menu's reliable anchors; the house-made gelato is made from scratch daily and has its own devoted following.
Forêt is open Wednesday through Sunday from 8am to 3pm and does not take reservations. The queue forms before the doors open on weekend mornings, particularly during Flagstaff's popular summer and fall seasons when Phoenix residents escape the valley heat. Come early, or come mid-week. The indoor-outdoor seating creates a genuinely pleasant extended morning — the kind of place you plan to spend an hour and leave three hours later, having eaten extremely well and consumed twice your intended allocation of espresso.
What to Order
The croissants are non-negotiable. Order at least one plain and one almond; the lamination and butter content are what distinguish them from every other pastry available in Northern Arizona. The croque madame is the kitchen's most complete savoury expression — a bechamel-enriched ham and cheese sandwich with a fried egg that is both entirely classical and exactly right. The eggs benedict draw consistent praise and the avocado toast is the kind that converts skeptics.
For the espresso programme: the beans are sourced with the same care as the food ingredients, and the extraction is precise. If you only visit Flagstaff once, the combination of a Forêt croissant and a flat white is the best coffee-and-pastry experience available in the city by a significant margin. The house-made gelato, available from opening, requires no excuse to order before noon.
Best Occasion: Solo Dining
Forêt FLG is one of the finest solo dining experiences in Northern Arizona. The bar seating faces the open kitchen, which gives alone-at-table diners something genuinely worth watching rather than the dead wall or blank window of a lesser cafe. The daytime format removes the social pressure that solo dining can carry in dinner restaurants. The queue is worth it, the croissants justify the early alarm, and an hour at Forêt with a coffee, a pastry, and a good book is one of Flagstaff's most satisfying rituals. The staff are warm without being intrusive. The gelato after a long solo hike in the ponderosa pines is one of Arizona's small perfect pleasures.