Melanie Dunn (Courtesy photo)
Bakery, North Park

Melanie Dunn Takes Her Viennoiseries, Chaussons and Kouignettes from Hillcrest to North Park

(Don’t Worry, We Didn’t Know What These French Treats Were Either)

By Frank Sabatini Jr.

It took conquering a series of roadblocks before pastry chef Melanie Dunn would see the opening of her first full-on retail shop, where we find many of the prized baked goods that she learned to make during her training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

Dunn and her husband opened Patisserie Melanie this spring on 30th Street in North Park after operating the business from their live-work condo at The Cairo in Hillcrest. Launching into baking some years ago was a radical career move for Dunn considering she had previously taught English for 15 years at Crawford High School in City Heights.

If you drop into her shop, defined by a pink and white exterior, you’ll perhaps need a well-traveled palate to understand the specs and pronunciations of her French delights. Or you can read about some of them here in a quick lesson Dunn provided while talking to us about her time spent in The City of Love.

Downtown Condo Guys: Congratulations on finally opening your patisserie in North Park. How does it differ from when you were running the business in Hillcrest?

Dunn: At The Cairo, where my husband and I live, the bottom floor is zoned for commercial. So we operated under the California Cottage Food Law, which is what people use if they don’t want to rent a commissary kitchen. We were allowed to sell directly to the public out of the building. I baked there out of my home kitchen and sold the pastries through our little shop on the ground floor for two years until the pandemic hit.

When reopening in North Park, we went from 400 square feet at The Cairo to 1,500 square feet at the new shop. It’s great to have such a nice space with an open kitchen.

Downtown Condo Guys: What were some of your challenges in launching the North Park shop?

Dunn: We had signed the lease for our North Park location in January 2020. We had a very long build out before opening in April of this year because of the pandemic and lots of electrical issues. It was our first restaurant so we had nothing to compare it to.

Downtown Condo Guys: So prior to starting the business several years ago, you were an English teacher? What led to the career change?

Dunn: Yes. Teaching is a really creative experience until it’s not. When the creative aspect of it went away, it was a lot of shuffling papers. So around my 10-year mark, I started making lists of things I wanted to do. Food and baking came up—French pastries in particular because of the art of it. So I started looking at places where I could train for certification. I looked at schools locally as well as the Cordon Bleu in Paris. I found that the amount of money I would spend on a plane ticket and rent in Paris was comparable to the tuition at the [former] Art Institute in San Diego. So it was a no-brainer that I was going to Paris.

Downtown Condo Guys: How long did it take to earn your diploma from Le Cordon Bleu?

Dunn: The program was in three stages. I did it over the course of three summers. I continued teaching school in between each stage, and stopped teaching completely in June of 2015. It was like a weight was lifted although I miss my colleagues. And I kind of miss the planning that went into the job since I am an organizer.

Downtown Condo Guys: Were the classes at Le Cordon Bleu rigorous?

Dunn: Yes, in the sense of timing. You had to be fast. And the schedule was pretty grueling sometimes with back-to-back demo classes that mimic the feel of actually working in the industry.

Downtown Condo Guys: Did you learn French along the way?

Dunn: I took some French in high school and did some tutoring with a local French teacher here in San Diego prior to starting the program. But fortunately, our demo classes had an English interpreter.

Downtown Condo Guys: Best and worst experiences while studying in Paris?

Dunn: Best would be going out exploring the bakeries because you get to see different pastry chefs’ interpretations of the classic desserts you’re learning about in the program. And there are so many of them in terms of form and flavor.

Worst was not having a lot of time outside of the school because you’re there 10-12 hours some days. Also, the school’s locker rooms were tiny little shoe boxes, and you’d have dozens of women trying to change in or out their uniforms at the same time. It was like a mosh pit.

Downtown Condo Guys: Talk about some of the pastries available in the shop that you learned to make in Paris? And help us with their pronunciations.

Dunn: The kouignette [Queen-net] is our top seller. It’s a miniature version of a cake from the Brittany region called kouign-amann [Queen-aman]. The cake is made with leavened croissant dough that is layered with butter. Sugar is incorporated into the final layer, which caramelizes when baked. It’s a very specialized pastry that has really taken off in the U.S.

Lesser known is chausson [Sho-sahn], which in France is usually an apple turnover made of puff pastry. My favorite French pastry is pain aux raison [Pan-oh-rayzon]. We make them at the shop. It’s croissant dough spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with golden and black raisins. It’s then rolled up like a jelly roll. The French call it escargot, which references the spiral in snail shells.

Downtown Condo Guys: Speaking of which, what is your standard for a perfect croissant?

Dunn: It has to be all-butter unlike some that are made with margarine. And it has to be baked to a beautiful golden-amber color opposed to a really darkened crust, which in the industry we refer to as San Francisco-style croissants. Also, I feel a good croissant fits perfectly in your hand unlike those giant croissants you can buy at Costco. [Chuckle]

Downtown Condo Guys: How early do you start baking each day?

Dunn: My assistant pastry chef and I get there at 4:00a. It’s a delicate balancing act in how much to bake so that we don’t sell out too early and that we don’t have leftover product that we have to throw away at the end of the day.

Downtown Condo Guys: Where do you see the business in five years from now? Do you plan on expanding with more locations down the road?

Dunn: One of the reasons I named it Patisserie Melanie is that I didn’t want to ever sell it or spin out the same version of it somewhere else. I do have some other ideas for bakery cafes under different names if the right locations surface. We are looking at about five years from now.