Le Bec Sucré

Note: This story was produced for our spring 2020 issue before the COVID-19 crisis. Please see end of article for business updates.

C’est Bon! An Authentic French Patisserie Opens in Middletown

A flavor-induced delirium hit Newport last year when a young Parisian baker and pastry chef named Bélinda Quinn and her husband, Barnaby, quietly unveiled a pop-up artisanal patisserie.

“I wanted people to feel they had just stepped into Paris,” Bélinda says, smiling at the memory.

On the first weekend, customers who dropped by were charmed by baskets of baguettes, rounds of pain de compagne and a narrow counter with chalk-lettered signs marking wavelets of fresh-baked viennoiserie, including pain au chocolat, tarte aux fruits, pain aux raisins and chausson aux pommes (apple turnover).

By the second weekend, there was a line out the door. Strangers fell into rapturous conversation about lemon tarts and buzzed with the gossip that Bélinda had helped make the bread for the Presidential Palace. (True.) A retired naval intelligence officer was brought nearly to tears by a croissant: “The first bite took me right back to when I was stationed in Paris as a young man.”

Bélinda and Barnaby, who were both born in France, had no notion of creating such a ruckus when they met in Paris in 2016. She was honing her skills with renowned local bakers, and he was completing several commissions as a painter-decorator specializing in fine finishes (think lacquer, gold leaf, Venetian plaster). By then, Barnaby was based in Newport, and after a year or so of trans-Atlantic romance, Bélinda and her two small children from a former marriage came to join him.

Right away, she began coaxing from the ancient oven in their rental apartment the authentic breads and pastries of her country. As time went on, and using the pop-up as a trial run, the couple began laying plans for a bakery to be called Le Bec Sucré. The meaning in English is “the sweet tooth,” but the literal translation—”the sugared beak”—also figures in, as an homage to the state’s seabirds.

They moved to a comfortable house that had lots of room for the kids to run around outdoors— and a proper kitchen. (When they left the apartment, the landlord sent the oven to the junk heap.) Last fall, they had another child. And this spring, the new bakery welcomes one and all to Paris on Aquidneck Avenue in Middletown.

The day begins with breakfast pastries and breads, butter and jam (also, of course, coffee and tea), and segues into a lunch menu that is still taking shape, as the Quinns want to plan in sync with the spring and summer harvests.

“We’re really excited to work with local farmers,” Barnaby says, noting that there will eventually be quiches, salads, sandwiches—croque monsieur, jambon beurre, Parisien, pain bagnat—and regional specialties such as the Niçoise Pissaladière (a kind of pizza dough topped with caramelized onions, olives, fresh herbs and, if desired, anchovies).

“And when the berries, the pears, the peaches, the plums are just at their best moment—that’s when I want to make those tarts,” Bélinda adds. Happily, the tarte aux pommes can be a mainstay, since local producers have apple varieties on hand virtually year-round.

Le Bec Sucré has the production capacity to provide a range of breads to restaurants, businesses, the yachting community and someday, Bélinda hopes, to local schools. The pastries are sold only at the bakery.

“When people come in, we want them to see what’s happening,” he says. Thus, the new Italian hearthstone four-deck oven (for breads) and the convection oven (for pastries) are on display, as is a long work table where Bélinda prepares her doughs and makes her creams, purées, curds and pastes. This is also where she tests out new schemes and sketches from her pastry journal.

“‘Laboratory’ is a good word, because baking is really a kind of science,” she says, shaping two loaves of sourdough bread made with her own levain (starter). Her every touch is deft, decisive and calm. This work is about moving, on cue, at the speed of nature.

It takes three days to make croissants and other viennoiserie from a many-layered buttery dough that goes through stages of rising and “resting” before being baked. Success has precise requirements. A croissant, for example, “must be flaky, light, with a honeycombed cavity inside a crust that is dorée [golden], not brown, and has a shimmer of egg wash. Of course,” Bélinda adds, “it must be not too sweet, not too salty, balanced just right.”

Unable to find domestic providers, she has sourced many of her ingredients from France for now. “I use white and almond flours that are organic and are milled differently, and I also use French butter and chocolate, and jambon de Paris and Comté cheese for sandwiches.”

Le Bec Sucré connects the Quinns with a legacy that is as much personal as patriotic. “We’re putting our soul into this,” Barnaby says, which means in part carrying on a family tradition where creative expression is prized, multiculturalism is a given and cooking is a high art.

Bélinda’s parents left Vietnam in the 1970s, resettling in the south of France and opening a Vietnamese restaurant in Hyères, on the Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Cannes. The children grew up helping with all manner of tasks.

“The restaurant was our kitchen table,” she says. “It was part of the life of the family, and love was in the food.” She became an accomplished and inventive cook and began considering a future as a professional chef.

A few years later, she went with her parents to Paris, where they opened a new restaurant. “And one day, my friend Nicolas Grignon invited me to the bakery where he worked. He opened his labo for me, and he showed me everything. He believed in me, even though I had never baked before. Once I touched the dough, I knew right away, ‘Oh, yes, this is what I want to do!’ I began a kind of rigorous apprenticeship to learn the basics.”

No sooner had Bélinda found her art form than she realized it was vanishing. The French had reveled in Julia Child’s brusque critique of her own country: “How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?” Yet over the previous two decades, the trusted traditions of French baking had themselves been losing ground to industrially pre-mixed doughs and frozen baguettes. All around the country, historic neighborhood bakeries were going out of business. Bélinda joined a movement of young bakers committed to relighting the artisanal flame and to sharing insights about the health benefits of time-honored techniques, as well as organic flours and other unprocessed ingredients.

“We are the new generation rediscovering the old ways,” she says.

On a recent evening, she was having dinner at her parents’ restaurant in Paris, where she had come to attend EUROPAIN, an international baking and pastry symposium. It had been a heady couple of days, catching up with friends and filling her notebook with ideas.

She had brought the baby with her and, as fragrant dishes came to the table, he was passed gently from his grandmother to his grandfather, then transported into the arms of an uncle in the kitchen, then to a sous chef who is considered a member of the family, and then returned to his mother, before the cycle began again.

Bélinda was home. She was also very much looking forward to going home, to Rhode Island.

Le Bec Sucré
696 Aquidneck Ave., Middletown
401.662.0448; LeBecSucré.com
Find them on Instagram @LeBecSucre_RI

Updated April 9, 2020. Open W–Su, 7 am until sold out (generally by noon) In-store shopping, takeout, curbside pick up. 401.662-0448