Anna le Saux - Hermine Pâtisserie
I can’t begin to count the number of times I walked past the corner of Chaussée de Boondael and Rue François Roffiaen, the short block-long street that gives the nearby tram stop its name, only again, to read the small paper sign taped to the glass door, “Hermine ouvrira ses portes courant octobre a très vite :).” Translation, “Hermine will open its doors in October.”
Hermine, which, in these months of anticipation I half-jokingly called Hermione, after my wife’s favorite Harry Potter character, was to become our very own neighborhood patisserie. No more long walks to Châtelain or Saint-Gilles, jaunts through Sablon, carefully returning home with a box of little treats for weekend indulgences. No. Now there would be one right here, right in the neighborhood.
When I first saw the sign it was September of 2021. I snapped a picture, sent it to my wife, and together we joyously, albeit impatiently, commenced an eager waiting period, akin to the preceding time before a well deserved vacation, or Christmas day, or the birth of a child.
After doing some online sleuthing, my wife discovered Hermine was to be a patisserie specializing in Breton fare.
“I hope she does a kouign-amann,” my wife yearned.
I might have a passion for patisserie, “little treats,” as my wife and I referred to them, as in: “Do you wanna get a little treat today?” but much like my knowledge of the geographical regions of France, my knowledge of patisserie is, admittedly, full of holes.
“What's a Queen Yah-Man?” I asked.
Then October came and went, the weather, from warm to cold, the sign unchanged. I’d return from my daily walks, kick off my boots at the door, hang up my coat, and deliver the same news to my wife—”Nothing from Hermine yet.”
A gleeful and eager anticipation quickly devolved into a passive anger. “It’s a lie!” I’d vent to my wife. “It was supposed to open in October and it didn’t! It’s all lies! Lies!”
“It’s never going to open,” my wife would sulk.
Occasionally we’d peek through the small separation between the window frame and the paper hiding the interior from the exterior and gaze upon the wooden shelves, the cappuccino colored walls, the smokey taupe counter and the protective glass. Sometimes I would imagine the empty shelves full of bread, the countertop lined with tartes and eclairs, baskets overflowing with madeleines, turnovers, and financiers. Yet slowly, reality would come back into focus. The shelves would become bare again, the countertops empty.
One night in early November, passing by before an evening walk around the Ponds, my wife and I noticed the lights on. When the door opened a man walked out. I couldn’t help myself and asked him, “Is this your place? Do you own this?”
“Oh, no no no,” he said quickly, “It’s my girlfriend’s shop. She is very good! She’s worked at Michelin Star restaurants—she is a real pâtissier! A real one, really!” he emphasized ardently. “It will be open soon, I promise.”
“We’ve really been looking forward to it,” I assured him. “Any idea when?”
“Very soon. She’s very good,” he asserted enthusiastically, “I hope you come back!”
Then, one day, not long after, the sign was gone, the paper removed from the windows. Scrawled on the glass door the shop’s hours: “Mardi -> samedi 8-18h.”
- - -
The woman behind Hermine is Anna Le Saux. Originally from Brittany, she, like myself, like many others here in Brussels, is a transplant, having lived here since 2011.
Her day starts at 3am.
At Hermine by 4am.
First it’s the croissants and pain aux chocolats that need proofing.
She preps the kouign-amann, neatly folds the turnovers, fills the eclairs, and bakes the Far Breton.
On the weeks that she has her daughter, it’s back on her bike at 7:30, back to her apartment, pick her up, drop her off at school, and back to Hermine by 8am to open..
Typically there’s a small line of eager patrons, noses pressed to the glass door in anticipation. I know, because I’ve been one of them.
The shop is open until 6pm.
There are no breaks. There’s coffee and a sandwich, but there are no breaks.
After a stage at the age of 13 in a restaurant, Anna realized working in a kitchen wasn’t for her. She found herself surrounded by unsympathetic men, and what was once a passion for the life of a chef faded. A few years later, after finishing her Baccalauréat, she kicked around the idea of being a landscaper but scrapped that idea as well. She did another stage as a chocolatier, however there she was turned off by the amount of machines required in chocolaterie. “I didn’t want to depend on machines,” she says, so she elected for something a little more hands-on.
Her mother, who Anna remembered in the kitchen a lot when she was younger, making homemade patisserie, helped her see the connection between pastry, something she enjoyed, and the kitchen, which she had given up on.
“Pastry, it’s a little bit like the kitchen, no?” She impersonates her mother, with a chuckle.
There were no books of classic French patisserie she would page though at night in bed with a flashlight, there were no posters of Parisian patisserie greats tacked to her wall. She quickly dispels this romanticized notion. “At the beginning, I preferred to go out with my friends, and party,” she remembers, “I wasn’t passionate, [I wasn’t] thinking about pastry all the time.”
After a holiday to Brussels and Amsterdam in 2008, she fell in love with Amsterdam. Seeing an open market for French patisserie there, she went to her local university in Rennes to study Dutch, only to learn it wasn’t an option. The next best option? Move to Brussels, learn Dutch, and eventually relocate to The Netherlands.
She never left.
Brussels gave Anna her first job. After completing her training for patisserie in Rennes she had her first interview at now closed Patisserie Fabrice Collignon on Chaussée de Waterloo.
“He said to me, okay, I don’t know you, I don’t have a place in my patisserie for you, but if you want, you can go to the Villa Lorraine, the restaurant, and tell them, it’s me who sent you. I said, okay!” Anna recounts enthusiastically. Upon arriving at Villa Lorraine, a two Star Michelin restaurant, she was hired on the spot.
“It was my first job,” she tells me. “At the time there was a lot of pressure.” She describes the long hours of mise en place, beginning the day at 8am, working until 3pm, having a break and family meal then resuming her preparation at 5pm, the kitchen opening at 7, and the sometimes grueling purgatory-esque wait times as customers finished their cheese and mulled over their desire for dessert, only at 1am to call it a night and abstain. Clean up, have a beer, go home, sleep for a few hours, come back and do it all over again.
She went from Villa Lorraine to Le Chalet de la Forêt in Uccle. It wasn’t until working here, at her second Michelin Starred restaurant, when the chef pâtissier went on paternity leave and Anna was temporarily put in charge that she had the revelation that, “okay, it’s a cool job,” as she puts it.
“It was a job. It was a great job. I did the job, but with no real intelligence, or passion,” she says. “I did the job like an ouvrier, but not really involved.”
I can’t help but laugh. Having walked past Hermine dozens of time, having gone in to buy a morning croissant or pain au chocolat, and having seen Anna, putting the finishing touches on her berry tarts by neatly placing sliced strawberries and whole raspberries, or carefully layering her mille-feuilles. It’s hard to believe that she approached what is now her passion as she once described.
“It’s more fun, and easier when you really involve yourself in the job,” she says.
Le Chalet de la Forêt would be the last time Anna would work in a restaurant kitchen. She went from working at Le Chalet de la Forêt to Café de la Presse—from a two Star Michelin Restaurant to a coffee shop. With a child on the way, she needed a break from the crazy pace and long hours of haute cuisine.
“I just needed a break,” she says, “There are few women who continue to work at the restaurant with kids.” It’s hard to have kids and work a shift from 8am to midnight, she explains unsurprisingly. Café de la Presse provided Anna with a different ambience, with young customers, and a more laidback staff. She continued to work up until she was eight and a half months pregnant. She laughs as she recounts delivering bagels to concerned customers, pantomiming her pregnant belly.
After her daughter Stella was born, she went on to work at Pâtisserie Nicolas Arnaud in Châtelain where her hours were more manageable and where she described the work as very hard, but educational. “I wanted to get back into serious pastry,” she says, praising Arnaud for being serious and square. “I learned to be productive.”
After two years under Nicolas Arnaud, she wound up back at Villa Lorraine, this time working at Traiteur de la Villa Lorraine where she temporarily became the chef pâtissier, in charge of the pastry for all the Traiteur locations. She boasts about her all-girl team. “We did the job square, but with my ambience,” she says, “It was really really fun.”
Her time at Traiteur de la Villa Lorraine didn’t last long however, and she ended up back in Châtelain, this time at Nikolas Koulepis Pâtisserie, working again as the second in charge. “I realized it wasn’t my place to be second. I didn’t want to be the second. I wanted to be the chef.”
When COVID came she decided it was time to do her own thing. The way she wanted.
In June of 2020 she took over a small shop on the corner of Chaussée de Boondael and Rue François Roffiaen. The idea was to be the neighborhood bakery. “I wanted to have regulars,” she confessed. Anna describes the idea of a bakery as an institution, a place where people come daily and where the lives of buyers and sellers intertwine.
Like many, Anna struggled with obtaining the machines required for the shop due to the COVID pandemic and the micro-chip shortage. Come September, when she had originally planned to open Hermine, her oven hadn’t arrived. In this time of stagnation, she worked with hub.Brussels, an organization that works alongside Brussels-based entrepreneurs. They helped to advise on a business plan, provide financial advice, as well as a marketing coach.
Despite her desire to be the neighborhood bakery, there were doubts about the shop’s location. Not only hub.Brussels, but even some of Anna’s friends expressed concern over the shop’s location. She reassured them she was confident it was going to be a good location—even if some regarded the corner commercial unit as cursed due the lack of longevity of the business there before her. Her proximity to Saint-André primary school doesn’t hurt either, as just the other morning I saw a young girl, face covered in chocolate, joyously eating her pain au chocolat with both hands coming out of Hermine.
hub.Brussels also pressed the importance of social media, Instagram, and having a website (which she still doesn’t have). On the listing for Hermine on Google Maps, there’s no description, no details other than an email address, which, still today, she hasn’t even taken the time to fully finish setting up as the emails arrive from “abcd”. What there is though, is a perfect 5.0 star review.
It’s clear that her focus has been less on the shop's digital image and more on the quality of the patisserie. In an industry where web presence is so vitally important to many businesses, Anna’s way of doing things has been working quite well.
“Check my Instagram,” she says with a laugh in an ironically haughty tone.
- - -
It’s mid July, a Saturday, and my wife and I are on the train back from Groenendaal after a day’s walk in the forest. I check Instagram, watching my most recent stories when I see a post from Hermine that I immediately show to my wife.
It’s the end of the afternoon, the last day before Hermine closes for annual leave, and nearly everything is sold out. What remains are two lemon tarts, a brownie, and a loaf of Japanese style milk bread.
“Want an Hermine treat?” I ask her, holding the phone so she can see the story.
“If we can make it there in time,” she replies.
I check my watch. The post is four minutes old. We’re five minutes from Etterbeek Station. It’s going to take us about eight minutes to walk to Hermine.
“Let’s try,” I encourage.
The doors of the train open and we’re on the platform and up the stairs.
We hit the traffic lights perfectly. We’ve been walking all morning, yet I still walk briskly, not realizing I’m walking so far ahead of my wife.
As we round the corner on to Chaussée de Boondael we spot a couple pushing a stroller. Noticing the storefront of Hermine for what seems like the first time, they hesitate in front of the door before deciding to enter the shop.
As the wife and I reach the window, we peer in just in time to see Anna boxing up the last two remaining lemon tartes seen only moments earlier on Instagram. The couple smiles, excited for their lemony treats. The brownies are gone as well.
“Almost,” I say defeated.
“Ah well,” my wife expresses as we turn around and head home.
- - -
When Anna was finally able to open Hermine in late November she did so on her own, all alone.
“I put the light on, I was alone. I said, okay, it’s open, and nobody came in like, ten minutes. Okay, okay, Fuck, it’s going to be terrible.” She recounts the story of her first customer, a man in a suit who unceremoniously entered the shop, pointed at a couple things, Anna bagged them up and the man was on his way. He hasn’t been back since, Anna tells me.
In the beginning it was all word of mouth. Though in the seven months Hermine has been open, Anna has received a fair amount of press. The shop has been spoken about on the radio, she’s been featured in Tartine et Boterham, she has articles in Le Vif Weekend, as well as Bruzz. “You see the article?” She asks me, “because they say I’m a star.” She doesn't understand how she could be regarded as such. She shows me a screenshot on her phone her friend has sent her of the article. She’s still baffled at the coronation.
In May, the Union des Bretons de Belgique awarded Hermine with the best kouign-amann in the city. Anna’s quick to note that due to her use of cane sugar the award is in the “fusion” category, though this should neither be here nor there.
She tells me there are still often people who call, who have had the shop recommended to them by friends or family or co-workers, who order boxes of multiple tartes, eclairs, and of course kouign-amanns to taste for themselves. While there are some customers who come in looking only for an eclair café or a lemon tart, as they were specifically mentioned in the Le Vif article, others come in looking to sample everything at least once. She tells me about a woman who came in recently who was overjoyed upon seeing a creme au chocolat behind the glass, as she had tried everything but said illusive treat. At the same time she tells me about an elderly woman, whose daily motivation is to walk the block from her home to Hermine for her daily baguette.
“I know two out of three of our customers,” she tells me, emphasizing the importance of locality—much like her locally sourced butter, milk and cream. It’s these return customers that Anna says she wakes up at 3am for.
It may seem masochistic to work the nearly fifteen-hour days Anna does, waking up every morning at 3am, but such is the life of a baker. “When I opened my own shop, I didn’t think about the hours. I knew it was going to be hard, and involve a lot of time,” she says, trailing off in thought. “Now, I’m in. I cannot return.”
“But there’s a difference,” I tell her, “between ‘being in’ and ‘being stuck.’ Being stuck means you don’t have a choice, you can’t leave, that if you wanted to, you couldn’t. You don’t want to leave, you’re happy, right?” I inquire.
“Yeah, I am, really!” she confirms, with a deep exhale. “Pastry is now a passion. I’m proud to create this. It’s really cool to do that. I work with my passion, I do my passion, and the people see that, they see that I’m really involved in what I do.”
“Are you a star?” I ask her.
“Oh yes,” she laughs, “a big star.”