So French! Marc and Gaosong Heu, the couple behind Marc Heu Patisserie Paris, are opening a third location later this summer, this time at the Alliance Française on Colfax Avenue. (Yay for Minneapolis’s Harrison neighborhood, which is really blooming with Animales Barbeque Co., La Doña Cerveceria, and now a new Marc Heu spot all in walking distance from one another.)
It’s a fitting match. The partnership actually began in 2019, when the Alliance Française caught wind of a new French pastry chef in Frogtown whose immaculate croissants were drawing lines out the door. The organization invited Marc to come speak to its members about his pastry journey. ”That was Marc’s first time speaking on a panel about his experience as a chef and an immigrant,” says Gaosong, who leads all the business aspects of the patisserie—finance, marketing, media, etc. “We’re really thankful to the Alliance for giving him the opportunity to do that.” (Marc, who is of Hmong heritage, was raised first in France and then French Guiana, where his family lived and worked on a fruit farm, bringing baskets of passion fruit, clementines, and pineapple to the local market after their trees had ripened. Heu eventually returned to France for his education, but he eventually abandoned his studies in medicine and turned to pastry, enrolling at the revered École Lenôtre and staging at three-Michelin-star Pré Catalan and Stohrer, France’s oldest pastry shop.)
The Heus have continued to work with Alliance Française on various events and fundraisers since that first connection. In the years since, they’ve relocated their Frogtown patisserie to Dale Street and opened a second in Linden Hills. Then, just a few months ago, the Alliance approached the couple about opening a café in their Glenwood Avenue space. (Their former resident bakery, B’Beri Desserts, is now busy bringing a full-service restaurant to the former Owamni space on the Mississippi riverfront.) It was an instant yes, Gaosong says…