The moment you enter Jean-Pierre’s Bakery and Cafe(601 Main Ave., 970-247-7700), your senses are massaged by aromas wafting from the kitchen – freshly brewed coffee, pastry, bacon, garlic, butter. A quick glance to the left and your fate is sealed.
Display cases glow with cookies, fruit tarts, croissants, eclairs, Napoleons, cakes and cinnamon pull-aparts. They cast a spell. If you’re not careful you’ll forget you originally entered to have breakfast, which, here, can be as simple as coffee and a croissant, or as filling as crab and asparagus crepes.
Apart from quiches and omelets, the killer baked french toast from made-on-the-
premises brioche is worth the 20-minute wait.
Just kick back and have a coffee and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Should you doubt the freshness of the citrus you sip, sneak a peek in the back, near the doors to the kitchen and behold a gizmo that squeezes oranges as they are fed into its top.
Executive chef and managing partner Marcel Bahri (pronounced “Barry”) lights up as he demonstrates – cutting top and bottom from each orange and feeding it into the machine. After repeating the process several times, juice trickles out, eventually filling a juice glass.
“You see that? That is fresh-squeezed the French way,” he says triumphantly, meaning that even the machine is French.
All things français permeate this 75-seat restaurant and wine bar, notably the crepes. Hold on, maybe it’s the croque monsieur, the hot sandwich that is to the French what grilled cheese or the hamburger is to Americans. No, wait, the baguette. Definitely the baguette, with its paper-thin crust and filigreed, feather-light interior.
“I spent 15 years trying to perfect the baguette, so it would be like the ones you get in France,” says pastry chef and owner Jean-Pierre Bleger (pronounced “Bleh-zhay”). “I finally discovered that at altitude the secret is water. Water, sea salt and bleached organic flour from the San Luis Valley.”
This disclosure is also an exultation, victory over the dark forces that would keep Bleger from perfecting this bread so beloved by his countrymen and, now, Durango residents.
Bleger cheerfully recounts his arrival in the United States, his work in Texas, where he opened his first bakery in 1969, and how he finally found peace and balance in life by moving to Durango.
“After 20 years in the rat race, I’d had enough,” he says.
And in 1990, when prices were still reasonable, he bought and renovated a former Chrysler dealership. It’s now prime real estate, but Bleger has no worries about a landlord increasing his rent. Best of all, from the moment Jean-Pierre’s opened it was a hit.
Housed in a corner portion of the building is the bakery, cafe and a recently opened wine bar. When the spirit strikes, Bleger will knock out a tune or two on the 19th-century grand piano.
Rebecca, Bleger’s wife of 35 years, buys the wine. He bakes the pastries, 25 bread varieties, and whatever seasonal specialties strike his fancy.
Anne Barney, a spokeswoman for the Durango Area Tourism Office, is appropriately effusive when she discusses Durango restaurants. And while she doesn’t like to play favorites, she confesses to having a weak spot for Jean-Pierre’s almond croissants.
Barney is a former food stylist with a culinary degree from Anne Willan’s La Varenne cooking school in Burgundy, France. Periodically she needs a little French fix.
“That’s when I pop in for an almond croissant,” she says. “That and a cup of coffee is such a wonderful way to start the day.”
-Ellen Sweets
