Our Story

We began with a building and a baguette.

In the summer of 2010 Allan Chapin decided to buy a building on Warren Street in Hudson. It was in foreclosure and had once been a bank.

“Literally, I put in a bid from the runway taking off to Paris,” he says.

When he got the building he didn’t have a clear idea of what he was going to do with it until he bit into a baguette in Le Perche, a small town about three hours south of Paris. With that first bite he knew he wanted to open a bakery.

“We went to THE baker in Le Perche, David Lambert. The baguettes were coming out of the oven. The baker takes the baguette, cuts it in half lengthwise,” recalls Allan. “And then we’re talking. Suddenly I realize I’ve eaten the whole baguette. It was pretty embarrassing.”

As much as Allan loved the bread, the oven that it was baked in held even more interest for him.

“The oven was great. It was so cool looking,” he says, and recalls thinking: “We have to have this oven.”

While we didn’t get that exact oven, we did end up with a second-hand one that belonged to a French farmer and was built in Anjou, France, by Manuel Munoz.

“It’s the proverbial ‘belonged to a little old lady who kept it up on blocks’,” says Allan.
“Everything looked brand new.”

In April 2011 the oven was shipped over from France, as were the bricks that now surround it.

“By what is obviously a miracle, the oven arrived,” says Allan who, with the help of a friend, unloaded the oven and bricks from the giant container that had traveled thousands of miles. The two French workers who assembled the 17-ton oven arrived two days after the oven, another small miracle, according to Allan.

“Their work ethic was fun,” says general manager Jennifer Houle, “It motivated all of us.”

Our round brick and metal oven, located in our carriage house, is wood fired and can bake 200 baguettes an hour. It is one of only a few of its kind in this country.

The oven was just one of the ingredients we needed to create our perfect baguette, the others included the perfect flour and a top-flight staff.

Lambert, the owner and baker of Les Flaveurs du Perche, flew from France to Hudson with 50 pounds of flour in his suitcase (fortunately he didn’t get arrested, says Allan) and met with Don Lewis who runs Wild Hive Farm in Dutchess County.

“David took his flour down there and they were comparing flours,” recalls Allan. “They sat there smelling, tasting and feeling the different flours. After two days it was like ‘eureka!’ and the two of them came up with a blend of about 60 percent soft white pastry flour and 40 percent hard red wheat flour.”

The blend is now freshly milled weekly for us by Don.

“We wanted local ingredients, and organic was important to us too,” says Jennifer. “There’s no comparison. It’s small batch milled.”

“This baguette,” Lambert told Allan after tasting a just-out-of-the-oven Café Le Perche loaf, “is better than any baked by my competitors.”

The New York Times described our baguettes as “slender” with “dark, brittle crusts and moist, straw-hued crumbs,” while our croissants were deemed “perfect” and our rustic loaves “magnificent.” We were thrilled with the glowing write-up.

“It’s a formula, a chemical process,” says Allan of baking, “all the rest is art. It’s the talent of the person doing it.”

When the project began Allan’s knowledge about the bakery business was shaky at best.

“I didn’t know anything, literally anything, about baking,” he says. But the lawyer and banker got a crash course in a hurry, meeting with a number of experts in the field and touring a lot of bakeries in New York City and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, renovations continued on the circa-1820 building that began life as an American Express location before becoming a bank and finally a private home. After a top-down overhaul the building still maintains much of its wonderful 19th century decorative charm.

“We kept a lot of the original details,” says Jennifer. “I’ve never worked in a place where people want to come in to get a look at the dining room.”

Jennifer came on board in November 2010 after Allan convinced her to quit her job in Manhattan and move to Hudson to run Café Le Perche.

“There’s a little Le Pain Quotidien on my daily route from my apartment in Manhattan to work. I would always stop in and have an apple-pear turnover and a coffee,” says Allan. “They have a great staff there. I started talking to Jen. I watched her run the place and "One thing led to another and we made a deal.”

“My first thought was: ‘this man is crazy’,” recalls Jennifer. “He kept telling me about this building in Hudson. We met for a drink and I came up here a couple of times and checked out the town and decided it was a place I could uproot and come to.”

“I was a sales executive at Getty Images and then I had a whole career change and went to culinary school,” says Jennifer concerning her life before Café Le Perche. “I then worked for some successful restaurateurs in Manhattan.”

Jennifer has found our entire staff including our first baker, Lisa Brickman, a former pastry chef at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, who we sent to France to train with Lambert before we opened. Lisa has since left, but we now have another fantastic baker, Nicole, who has stepped into the role. Jennifer also found our executive chef, Robert Pecorino, as well as the waitstaff.

“It’s a good team,” says Jennifer. “We have all nice people working for us.”

Since our opening in the summer of 2011 we have, and will continue, to expand in new directions.

“The development is constant,” says Jennifer. “It was just going to be a bakery, but when I came on board and looked at the space I thought: ‘we could do so much more’ and then we continued to develop it and now our customers are really determining where we go.”

“It’s amazing how far we’ve come,” says Allan.

We know have a zinc bar that runs the length of the second room; a large dining room featuring a working fireplace; and a brick patio, with seating.

We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and have a full bar and a wine list showcasing French wines.

“You can come here in the morning for a cup of coffee, have a sandwich and salad for lunch or a local rib eye and glass of wine for dinner,” says Jennifer.

As with our baguettes, we strive to get the freshest, local ingredients for all our food, working with a variety of area farms and companies.

“Anything we can source locally we are,” says Jennifer.

Hudson and the surrounding area have provided for us and we hope to continue to provide something special to the community we now call home.

“When we were building this place we really didn’t advertise or market. What we did is just kept the door open and let people come in. We would stop what we were doing and give them a tour and show them our vision. The anticipation it created was amazing,” says Jennifer. “Café Le Perche has become a little escape in Hudson.”