meet melanie
Pâtisserie Mélanie is the culmination of an almost 10-year journey
Beginning with Melanie being a burnt-out teacher, and, “ending” with Melanie being a Paris-trained pastry chef with a growing business.
10 years ago, I was teaching high school English. I felt really stagnant in my work. I started making lists of things I would most like to do if I weren’t teaching. Working with food and baking (especially French pastries) always popped up at the top of the list. Around the same time, a former student visited me and shared her experiences training in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu. It sounded amazing. I told this student how I would love to do something like that, but couldn’t take a year off to complete the three-stage program. She said the school offered each stage concurrently, so I could do the stages during my summer months off. I applied to the school, got in, and went to Paris the following year. It was a crazy three years. I would turn in my classroom keys, attend my students’ graduation ceremony, the next day be on a plane to Paris, and the day after be in the kitchens at LCB from 8am until 8pm.
It was definitely not vacation. It was work. Hard work. But interesting and fun, even the times when the chefs yelled at us in French, “Dépêchez vous!” (“Hurry up!”) On my rare days off, my husband (also a high school English teacher) and I sought out croissants and pastries and chocolate in a quest to find the city’s absolute best. Amazingly we did not gain 100 pounds! We’d return to San Diego just in time to start a new school year. But the whole school year long, we’d be dreaming of Paris and its croissants and pastries! San Diego did not offer anything close to what we had in Paris.
It took me three long years (2012-2014) to complete the patisserie program. But the whole time, I held onto the vision of life as a pastry chef. I’d share what I was doing with my family, colleagues and students, and sometimes even bake for them. When I completed the program in 2014, I finished teaching one more school year, and then walked away from teaching in the summer of 2015 (after 15 years of teaching for the same high school). It was time to be a pastry chef. But where would I work? We weighed me working at a bakery for long hours and minimum wage against digging into our savings for me to open my own small-batch bakery to bring our neighborhood the kinds of high-quality viennoiseries and pastries you could only find in Paris. My husband and I craved them. Surely others who had been to France and eaten a great croissant were searching for that too in San Diego!? It was an easy decision to make, coupled with the fact that we already owned a commercial space (on the first floor of our condo building).
We turned our live-work space into a small retail boutique, created a website and social media presence, decided on logos and packaging—built a brand—all without much professional guidance. Permitted under San Diego County’s Cottage Food Operator law, I began baking out of my home kitchen. We opened on February 14, 2018 with a limited menu of French viennoiseries and pastries. The response was immediate and promising. I received a fabulous, full-page review by Michele Parente (food and wine writer for the Union Tribune) and a Best of San Diego award from San Diego Magazine (both within five months of opening). Most importantly, we received and continue to enjoy the support of the neighborhood, and have plans to open a Parisian-style sidewalk café to showcase our viennoiseries, pastries and more!
