Banh mi meets croissant as pastry chef creates 'flavour architecture' at Crème Café and Pâtisserie

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Martin Nguyen is a trained chocolatier and pastry chef who followed his passion for food across the globe. 

Crème Café and Pâtisserie, located at 376 University Park Dr., opened in March, but the inspirations behind it date back to Nguyen's childhood growing up on a tea and coffee plantation near the city of Da Lat in the central Vietnamese highlands, where Arabica beans flourish.

Vietnam is, in fact, the second-largest coffee exporter in the world, "So everybody drinks coffee every day," says Nguyen. 

Although his grandfather has sold the family farm, the coffee business lives on in its own way in Regina. "At Crème Café we try to balance between the coffee and the pastry," he says.

Those pastries are a nod to Vietnam's past as a French colony. Crème Café's star pastry, for instance, is the choux or cream puff.

"If you go to Paris or any kind of patisserie store in the world, they have the choux pastry," says Nguyen. "We have the buttery flavour; we have a crunchy exterior. You can be versatile with the fillings. You can do savoury as well. It's open for you to create."

The business is also known for its croissants. Crème Café's most popular lunch item is banh mi with a croissant used in lieu of a baguette.

Asked what he enjoys about pastry making, Nguyen can't pick just one part of the process: "I think it's the whole thing because when you work in the kitchen, especially in pastry and dessert, you have to pay attention to every single detail. Every single step is important – even the temperature, the humidity, the technique. It all has an impact on your product."

A chef's journey

Nguyen didn't plan to end up here. Regina was one of many stops on the road to develop his food creativity.

Leaving Da Lat, his first move was to Singapore to learn how to make chocolate.

He and his sister Nobel operated an artisan chocolate business for five years before Nguyen chose to expand and learn pastry making. 

So, he came to Canada on a student visa and studied pastry making in Toronto. He completed a two-year program and worked at a couple of hotels prior to plying his trade at a luxe patisserie.

When the first COVID lockdown forced the shop to close temporarily, Nguyen was on the job hunt, which brought him to Regina. He got a gig at Dandy's Artisan Ice Cream to help the company develop its line of gourmet chocolates. 

There, Nguyen says, he had more room to tinker – thanks largely to owner Daniela Mintenko. 

"She likes to experiment with new concepts and ingredients. We'd make cakes or jelly from scratch and put it in the ice cream. But you need to know which ingredients come together as good combinations. I enjoyed that."

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Then Nguyen received a job offer from the prestigious Fairmont Château Lake Louise in Banff National Park. He became the pastry chef in charge of the iconic hotel's afternoon service, designing delicacies for high teas, weddings and other special events. 

Putting his family first

All the while, Nguyen was raising a young family. His wife, Chloe, had joined him in Toronto from Vietnam, and the couple now had two children. Commuting between Lake Louise and their home in Calgary was getting tiresome. They decided Regina might be a better spot to put down roots.

So, he brought his knack for "flavour architecture" back to the Queen City and has been delighting customers with near-daily new spins on cream puffs ever since.

Actually, to call his choux a simple cream puff would be a huge understatement. It's a work of art, often with two types of cream filling, a mousse, a jelly, and sometimes chocolate.

Nguyen begins with the main flavour he wants to use. Next, he considers the structure. How can he physically incorporate that flavour into the pastry without it falling apart? 

"You build a dominant flavour and then a secondary flavour. So you experiment with texture and flavour and you keep learning," he explains.

The desire to innovate and create keeps Nguyen going. To eat at Crème Café is to get to know his family (his wife works there and his sister, who recently moved from Toronto to join them, is an investor), their personal connection to coffee, and their inventive takes on the Vietnamese and French influences that marked their upbringing.

Nguyen is entertaining the idea of not just roasting coffee for the business, but also developing a bean-to-bar line of chocolates.

When I visit next, I need to ask him how to say "bon appétit" in Vietnamese.