Fredericton's Chess Piece Pâtisserie & Café is the cozy-chic dream born from a young woman’s early days baking with her humble yet iconic Easy Bake oven.  

 

          Nestled along the shores of the Wolastoq (St. John) River between the Westmorland Bridge and City Hall, this classic French pastry shop is the mainspring of Patti Hollenberg’s many endeavors.

 

          When I come through the door, Patti is in the middle of exchanging a few words with a business partner while at the same time unpacking an order of Jamòn Ibérico. She smiles to greet me and offers me a cup of coffee as she adjusts the red rolled-up bandana holding up her loosely tied bun. The espresso machine is grinding incessantly over the chatter of the café, and after casually sidestepping around her barista, she sits down with me, removing her cellphone from the hands-free phone holder hanging around her neck. Patti not only runs this neighbourhood-favourite pastry shop, she also owns her own line of ice cream (Queen Street Creamery), and runs Chess Piece’s two new locations at Fredericton International Airport (one at Arrivals and one at Departures). She tells me the location we are sitting in is the production homebase for all her projects.

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          Patti grew up in Miramichi, a world-renowned salmon fishing hub which is home to a large Acadian community North-East of New Brunswick. After completing her degree at the Culinary Institute of Canada at Holland College in PEI, she knew she wanted to turn her Easy Bake Oven dream into reality. “I remember getting it when I was like 6 years old, and I ran out of all the cake mixes the first day, I probably gave my grandfather diabetes, and he wouldn’t say no,” said Patti, “mom knew better, she bought me the additional backup kit”. After graduating, she lived and worked in Calgary for two years, but eventually decided to return to the East Coast because that’s where she felt she could have the most impact. With rent prices and competition low, Fredericton seemed like a good fit to her, but looking at the display fridge as I enter the café, it’s obvious that even without any competition, innovation is an integral part of her philosophy.

 

          Every Wednesday, she features a limited time ‘Patti’s Pastry’, her own creation that is only available for the day. Last week, she created a maple cheesecake topped with a luscious maple cream, a dessert she wanted to be both luxurious and heart-warmingly familiar. Today, she is working on her next Canadian-inspired creation: a maple tart with pure maple-infused frosting cradled in a graham cracker crust. The three shelves of the main refrigerated display overflow with highly sophisticated French-inspired treats that are on regular rotation: macarons in unique flavours like crème brûlée, salted caramel, strawberry rose, and London Fog; a reimagined version of the classic opera cake called  ‘Opera torte’ (a ganache-covered almond sponge cake filled with coffee-infused buttercream); the eponymous ‘Mille Feuille’; seasonal fruit cheesecakes; a regal-looking three-layer carrot cake sprinkled with gold flakes, aptly named ‘24 Karat Gold’, along with the obligatory croissants, muffins, scones, and sticky buns. Although Chess Piece is the epitome of elaborate desserts, Patti believes in simplicity, “not everything has to have 6 flavours to it,” she says. Along with her pastry Chef, Shelise Kennedy, she likes to create desserts with strong, punchy flavours that leave a lasting impression. But she doesn’t stop at desserts: a second refrigerated display also offers a variety of savoury lunch fare like quiches, soups, and house-made sandwiches with gourmet fillings.

 

          The original Chess Piece location is celebrating its 10th anniversary this November and has since added a cozy and dog-friendly patio alongside it, in homage to her two sheep dogs, Spencer and Hamish. She brings them everywhere with her, “they’re local celebrities,” she laughed, “so I want to be as inclusive as I can”. For Patti, inclusivity doesn’t stop at her plan of adding carabiners to each table to help her customers tie their dog’s leashes safely, it also inspired another innovation: dog biscuits, a recipe she is also working on today.  This new project is born out of a collaboration with The Cap, a local brewery that makes their beer in-house. “They have like 120kg of spent grain every week from the mash, that’s a lot!” she said, “it’s a byproduct of making beer, and it usually goes to farms for animal feed, so now we’re thinking about how we can repurpose it so that it can help the local economy”. It’s a project she is excited to grow, “it showcases collaboration between businesses, and being mindful of environmental stewardship, that’s one big thing that has always been important to me”.

 

          Patti is expanding beyond pastry-making because she believes that constant learning is essential in today’s food industry. This is why she completed the ice cream science program at the University of Guelph, one of only two in North America, when she took on Queen Street Creamery. “I wanted to make Ben and Jerry’s level of ice cream, but at the time, no one could teach me what I didn’t already know,” she said, “information is often gatekept,” she added. For this same reason, she sits on the advisory board of the Institute of Culinary Arts and is involved with helping students stay up to date with industry requirements and standards. “It’s important to never stop learning,” Patti says, “you should always try to better yourself, learn something new, because the minute you stop trying to better yourself is the minute you stop caring. I always kept that mentality with me”.

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