It’s hard to understate the creativity and care that Cari Brown and her husband, the fine artist Christian Brown, put into everything they touch. Between owning and operating the artists’ space, The Workhouse, and now operating the hip, delectable, European-inspired Café des Chutes next door, the Browns infuse artistry into everything they touch.
Cari Brown started out baking bread at age 17, eventually making her way, in 2009, to the “bread location” of the much-heralded Sparrow Bakery, a company she worked for off and on, eventually managing Sparrow’s Old Ironworks location up until 2018. When Sparrow opted to move out of the 100-year-old Old Ironworks building, the Browns took over the space, opening up Café des Chutes in late 2021.
Initially offering a lineup of Sparrow’s baked goods, Café des Chutes eventually moved into baking its own goods, and now, in 2023, bakes all of its own sweet and savory offerings — besides a couple gluten-free items on offer from Bend’s Blissful Spoon.
Eating some of Café des Chutes’ baked goods have me dreaming for days about getting more. With that in mind, I sat down with Cari Brown to talk about “the art of the pastry.”
Source Weekly: Tell me about some of the top sellers at Café des Chutes.
Cari Brown: We’ve gotten a little bit of notoriety for our Oregon Roll — which I didn’t name it name it the Oregon Roll, a regular customer did — but it’s a croissant dough rolled with the house-made marionberry jam topped with a hazelnut butter-like doughnut glaze; it’s really good. But I think the sleeper, the one that I love the best, is the Pistachio Croissant. It’s a riff on a traditional French-style almond croissant. We use an apricot jam that we make, and we make the pastry cream in house. We roast pistachios and do all that. Those are twice baked, so they’re really excellent way to use leftover croissant. It’s very standard practice.
The pastry cream has a little bit of orange zest, and butter and confectioners’ sugar, ground pistachio. And then you got a pretty healthy topping of whole pistachios on top and a little bit of powdered sugar.
I worked on the recipe for that for a while. The day where finally I was like, OK, I got it, I took a bite and I was like, I’m not going to eat the whole thing — I’m just gonna take a bite and I’m gonna throw the rest away. But I literally just stood over the garbage can and ate the whole thing.
SW: What is the “art of the pastry?” What makes them so good?
CB: In all transparency, because of the limitation of our facility, we don’t do our own do lamination here. We buy laminated dough from a really lovely bakery. Really though, the thing about pastry that makes it so good is the butter. We use as high a quality butter as we possibly can with a really high fat content, and the pastry dough that we get is lovely. There’s this real art to laminating dough I got to learn. One of my primary functions, besides bread baking, was laminating for Sparrow [Bakery], and it’s a process.
SW: Tell me something that you’re really excited about in regards to this place.
CB: One of the things I’m really proud of is that despite some fairly significant handicaps in the realm of our facilities and our space — we have a tiny kitchen — we have really done our best to adhere to making the highest-quality products that we can and making everything from scratch that we can. Sometimes that is really hard and it’s complex. But, you know, it was important to me that we have a hand in most of the things that we make.
As far as our sandwiches go, I think it’s probably the smoked trout sandwich. That’s one of my favorites. So for that we take the high-fat-content, unsalted creamery butter and we whip it and we make a compound butter that has fresh dill, lemon zest, lemon oil, salt and pepper, a little bit of Aleppo pepper. And that’s the base for the sandwich. We also make our own radish and carrot pickles that go on that, which are really lovely and good. Then we get this really beautiful wild-caught trout from up in Washington, and it’s just a rich, unctuous, really flavorful sandwich with this sharpness that you get from the pickle.
This article appears in Breakfast and Lunch Guide 2023.
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