LEGO Icons 10362 French Café review

LEGO Icons 10362 French Café is an unexpected LEGO experience – truly excellent to build, but hard to make sense of beyond that.

With no minifigures (nor built to their scale) and no back of any kind, what is 10362 French Café and will it strike a chord with those looking for something different, or those coming into LEGO for the first time? Do we have our successor to the ever-popular Modular Buildings Collection?

Release: March 1, 2025 Price: £69.99 / $79.99 / €79.99 Pieces: 1,101 Minifigures: 0 LEGO: Order now

An AFOL in Paris

10362 French Café is nothing if not well-timed, if only for a glance across at the most closely-related Modular Buildings Collection, also in Icons. That subtheme has just marked 20 releases across almost 18 years with January’s 10350 Tudor Corner and is well-established in identity and ethos – so much so that we’re beginning to feel the limitations of its reach and potential.

Even if sets like 10350 Tudor Corner help drive modular buildings forward creatively, you may have noticed in recent reviews of such sets (and those very much borrowing from the same rulebook, like 21353 The Botanical Garden), that as a LEGO experience very little has been able to change over the years. Granted, it’s a series that has been successful for what it is, so why change? The issue is the level of techniques used within modulars appear to have a glass ceiling and a set space to work within, and it sometimes leaves us with a building experience that can begin to feel formulaic and simplistic in places. Compare a modular building set to the much newer, freer creative spaces within a LEGO Botanicals or LEGO Art set to see what we mean.

Which brings us to modular buildings’ close cousin, the Restaurants of the World collection, which begins here with 10362 French Café. It’s a chance to take everything good and interesting from what we may have built before in LEGO and apply it to a new set of design rules.

Those rules are most immediately different in the size of space that we are building within, offering a cross-section of the front of a building, and it is built upon a black-edged brick-built base that is very much in line with what we’ve seen across licensed themes for their more adult-targeted, display-orientated offerings.

You can see from a quick glance across the build too that there are a variety of techniques built into the model and, at least if only for a first impression, a lot more detail than a typical modular building could offer.

C’est une façade

The things that are interesting and can draw you into 10362 French Café, though, are also seemingly only achieved through a notable compromise. As mentioned, we are building a cross-section of the front of a building here, and that’s very much all we are building, for display purposes only, with the back to this thing placed firmly against a wall and never spoken of again. It’s a compromise that obviously allows a lot more pieces to be worked into a far more detailed front exterior to the build (for context, 1,101 pieces sits 147 shy of 2007 modular building 10190 Market Street, and roughly between a third and a quarter of the piece count that goes into more recent modulars with their multi-storey, interior-and-exterior designs) and for the budget to remain competitive (at £69.99 / $79.99 / €79.99 it’s open to a different market than the modulars).

On the one hand, this is a gamble from the LEGO Group. It’s a new creative concept that opens up all sorts of new design rules for what promises to be a new series of sets, but starts with a very clear and quite restrictive rule – it’s a façade. There’s no real interior to interact with, what you see is what you get, and from certain angles only.

On the other hand, it’s exactly what a new creative direction that is following on from something as striking and successful as the Modular Buildings Collection needs – strongly defined rules that establish this set (and any that may come in the same series) as something entirely different.

Why are we talking this much about the fact it’s a façade? Plenty of LEGO sets in the past have effectively been façades, across many themes, and to varying degrees of success. Even so, none have – to our limited recall at least – cut off the backside of the set so coldly and inaccessibly as 10362 French Café does. This is a hard-line back wall that is for nothing and for no-one. We’ve never seen it before, and whilst it is unusual to see in a LEGO set for how limiting it is in play, it does establish a unique definition for the set and any possible series of such sets to follow.

It’s a move that is echoed in the purposeful absence of minifigures from this set. We’ve heard before of the LEGO Group’s understanding that minifigures effectively ‘get in the way’ of the LEGO experience for a sub-section of fans and, whilst there are plenty of LEGO sets out there that get by without needing a little LEGO person to be included in them, few provide a build like 10362 French Café that leaves their absence so conspicuous. It is truly fascinating to build a scene that has the makings for a cute couple enjoying some table service from a French waiter only for such characters and story to be left out.

So much existentialistic talk of a LEGO set. Ah, but we are in France here…

Pas de Minifigures

How does the actual set shape up then? Right off the bat with construction of the pave-stoned floor you can see that 10362 French Café is a cut above and, as per the notes in the instructions booklet pointing out some of the techniques being used, is all about exploring and celebrating new build ideas.

Without the size, full building or minifigures of a modular buildings set, 10362 French Café needs something different to it, and looks to a more disciplined, involved and intricate build process to find it. This is a LEGO experience that will slow you down, purposefully, and demand a little more attention and concentration than either what you may be used to from similar-looking models, or that you may be expecting from what could be one of your first LEGO sets. And those little notes picking out details, techniques and even parts usage? They are some of the most personable comments in LEGO instructions that we’ve seen for a while, to the extent that it begins to feel like the designers behind this set are actually sat with you pointing clever things out as you build it.

And, once you give the set the extra time and care that it needs and get through that first bag of parts that put the base together, 10362 French Café will pull you in and show you exactly how many clever things it has within it. And that’s because this is clearly a design team that is having fun, building to a higher level and taking you along for the ride as you see some of the tricks that they weave into various stages of this model. Some details are subtle and you may actually miss completely or not fully appreciate the deeper understanding and skill required to create such things, whilst others that you do spot will cause you to pause and take a second glance at for how novel they are – not every LEGO set can do that, and it’s very much the strength of 10362 French Café here.

For what 10362 French Café sets itself up to be (and somewhat boxes itself into needing to be), it is an enjoyable, interesting and wholly unique LEGO set to build that different types of adult LEGO fans can find value and fun in. In addition, the final model has a real solid weight to it that reflects the sheer amount of brickwork and technique that has been worked into it. As a display piece, it has an odd specificity worked into it with that cold, flat back, but front on it is really detailed and captures a lot of character and charm for the subject matter it is focused on.

All that being said and perhaps in the design team’s likely mission to set clear design rules and ideals, and even establish a series moving forward, 10362 French Café feels a little too boxed in for broader appeal. For those specific LEGO fans not wanting minifigures in such a typical playset environment, this is a great little grown-up set perfectly formed for display on a desk or shelf as pretty decoration. But for anyone thinking you can merely add your own minifigures afterwards and begin to build around the set a bit more, you need to be aware that this is a set that has not been designed with minifigures in mind, and the proportions and scaling will highlight that the minute you try to place a minifigure anywhere within the model. Case in point…

Further to this, whilst the rulebook that 10362 French Café establishes begins with such promise and really excels through the build of the model with all sorts of tips and tricks spun into the design, the fact you are building an ever-so-slightly-oddly-scaled façade feels like a real anti-climax, as does the fact it’s just a restaurant and, more importantly, that anything else to come in this series will likely be the same too.

The positives of the build experience and the novelty value behind 10362 French Café should see suitable interest in this set, but we can’t imagine realistic appetite will be there for a whole series of these, particularly if it’s just restaurants. Part of the charm and appeal of modular buildings, City and Creator is the variety of buildings that you can put together. How many restaurants would you honestly have interest in building, if it were a series?

Boxing 10362 French Café – and whatever may follow from a new sub-series of sets – into some quite particular and potentially divisive design rules, and into one subject matter, feels like an unnecessary move that shrinks down the creative space that could otherwise be explored by something looking to branch out from the established rules of modular buildings. The creativity and technical expertise that has gone into designing 10362 French Café is excellent and is exactly what anything wanting to create a new space for LEGO for Adults can thrive with. But it’s likely going to be lost if all the other rules and the choice of subject matter that it is used within are as restrictive as this.

Our honest opinion: Surprisingly wonderful to build but quite weird in scale and, when you think about it, as a LEGO set in general. Kudos for trying something new, and we recommend if you get the chance to try it out, but we can’t see this being the best direction for an entire new series. The shadow of modular buildings continues to loom large.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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