All fresh, all the time at Pastiche

Denise Perreault

08/02/2009

HITS THE SPOT: Brandt Heckert and his wife, Eileen Collins (not pictured), have found that their Federal Hill location has been part of the recipe for success for 25 years. /

If you offer products of the best quality possible, business experts say, customers will find you and your business will become a success.
It doesn’t always work that way, but it certainly has for Pastiche Fine Desserts, a dessert café on Federal Hill that for the last 25 years has, in a low-key way, been offering customers desserts-to-die-for in a cozy atmosphere reminiscent of the best European cafés.
With a summertime menu ranging from peach apricot cake to Italian mascarpone torte, everything at Pastiche is made on-site from scratch. “That’s what good food is all about,” said co-owner Brandt Heckert. “I feel we Americans lost the idea of using fresh and natural ingredients after World War II. People got used to supermarket bakeries in this post-war, instant-gratification kind of mentality.”
At Pastiche, Heckert said, only butter is used and only real chocolate, no compounds or substitutes. Cream is from Christiansen’s Dairy in North Providence and fresh eggs from a small farm in Johnston whose chickens are not cooped-up but range free. Lemonade is hand-squeezed daily and the coffee roasted at New Harvest in Pawtucket. Even the boxed candles that can be purchased to top birthday cakes are handmade.
“It seems these are simple things that make sense if you want to offer a quality product. Doing it well is such a simple concept,” Heckert said. “Of course, it’s easy to say it’s all about quality, but it is not so easy to pull it off. There is a day-to-day grind to stay on top of things.”
One facet of Pastiche of which Heckert is particularly proud is providing “what I think is a great place for people to work,” he said. “We have some incredibly long-term employees here,” including pastry chef Scott Stegmann, a Johnson & Wales University graduate who’s been there 22 years, and general café manager Amy Foster, an employee for 16 years.
“We’ve got people who have been here seven, eight, nine, 10 years, and you don’t often find that in restaurants and the hospitality trade, which can be fleeting for people,” Heckert said. Noting that retaining staff is a key factor in the café’s consistency, Heckert said Pastiche pays “a good wage,” with such benefits as health insurance and a 401(k) retirement plan. “You have to take care of the people who work at your establishment,” he said. Thirty people work at the café. Heckert and his wife, Eileen Collins, who is co-owner, both attended Pilgrim High School in Warwick, but did not know each other until they met in the U.S. Virgin Islands many years later. Each had lived in various parts of the country, including the Pacific Northwest and California. Both eventually moved back to Providence, where Collins worked as a waitress at the 3 Steeple St. restaurant downtown in the 1980s.
With no formal training as a pastry chef, Collins began making desserts to offer at the restaurant and Heckert joined in because “it was kind of fun to do,” he said. Steeple Street customers responded so favorably that, in time, the two were working out of a Federal Hill storefront, creating desserts and selling them to Providence restaurants on a wholesale basis.
Prodded in part by the number of people knocking on their door out of the blue to buy a cake or two, Heckert and Collins realized that the wholesale business was not for them because they could not maintain quality while mass-producing pastries. They dropped the wholesale work and opened their own café in 1983, moving to their current location right around the corner from DePasquale Square in 1985.
“Not having control of my product was a little disconcerting,” Heckert said of wholesaling. “The restaurants would serve it a little longer than I thought they should.” At Pastiche, there are “strict parameters” for how long a dessert can be on the shelf, he said. The cafe regularly donates leftovers to shelters and churches.
Eat-in table service is available and Pastiche does a robust take-out business. On a recent Friday morning, a steady stream of customers came in and out. Butch Adams, who lives nearby and works as a photographer at The Times of Pawtucket, said he goes to Pastiche at least once a day. “The coffee is delicious,” he said. “It really is superior coffee, worth stopping by and sometimes even getting two coffees to make sure you have enough.” &#8226

COMPANY PROFILE
Pastiche Fine Desserts
OWNERS: Brandt Heckert and Eileen Collins
TYPE OF BUSINESS: Bake and sell desserts
LOCATION: 92 Spruce St., Providence
EMPLOYEES: 30
YEAR ESTABLISHED: 1983
ANNUAL SALES: WND