I have a feeling that my wife and I are not alone with our retirement dreams of moving to a village in the south of France, but until we buy that house in Apt, a little bit of France is moving closer to our Savannah home.

Tucked neatly between the new Aldi and the Victory Station plaza is a white cinder-block duplex that will soon be Le Café Gourmet’s bakery headquarters and second retail space.

“We are now in the process of finishing the remodel,” said Helen Hall, who bought the business back in 2022 from founders Alexandre Darbousset and Angela Yeo. “We can move our bakers in probably in the next week or so.”

For starters, 1701A East Victory Drive will be a production-only facility that supplies the café that sits just steps from City Market, but a big blue sign bearing the Eiffel Tower has clearly piqued the collective consumer interest.

“We’ve already had so many people knocking on my door,” Hall added with a laugh. “Even though it says ‘opening soon’, they’re coming in to get bread.”

So that her staff does not have to endure what will certainly be an endless retail line in those first weeks, baguettes, boules, brioches, and all the gorgeous Gallic sweet treats will be baked here and then head up to 53 Montgomery Street to be bought and devoured.

Once her crew is “acclimated to the new bakery,” Hall explained, “the retail side will open up,” most likely by the end of December.

At that point, Le Café Gourmet ‘Deux’ will be a “retail bakery,” a “kind of a grab-and-go or come-and-get-it-and-go,” she coined of the new boulangerie whose onset of onsite sales will be posted on the socials by her managers.

The imminent residents of the Aventon apartment complex and Parksiders are going to buy them out every day of the week.

“Everybody says, ‘Helen, you’ve got a goldmine here,’” said Hall with a laugh.

“NO-BRAINER” BAKERY

Though Le Café Gourmet fans from Pooler and Richmond Hill had clamored for a pâtisserie outpost out their respective ways, the Halls had to expand here, less than two miles from their Ardsley Park home, a location allowing that will allow them to bop between the two shops.

“It was kind of a no-brainer,” Helen Hall said.

“My husband found the building,” she shared. “The lot was completely covered in trees and cats running around.”

She continued, “There was this tiny, tiny wooden sign that said ‘for sale’ in ink pen and the phone number. Nobody would have seen it.”

Ian Hall called, and the couple quickly purchased the property, which most recently was home to Scooter World.

“It was perfect for us. We were really thrilled to find it,” Helen Hall added, citing the city’s overall lack of inventory for culinary retail real estate.

That was two years ago, and the meantime has been spent navigating the often choppy waters of permits and building codes, all the while operating the original café and serving a full French menu just south of Franklin Square.

Even though roughly half of the new property will be used for storage – for now – at over 5000 square feet, the space still doubles what she and her team have been using. When Darbousset opened the café in 2016, he baked everything in its tiny kitchen until business boomed enough to necessitate the addition of a production space, coincidentally two blocks west of the imminent bakery, a kitchen which the Halls maintained over the last two-plus years.

“I don’t know how it did it,” Helen Hall said of Darbousset’s early Le Café Gourmet days.

By intentional design, plans for the new property were drawn up to renovate only the bakery and retail half of the building, and Helen Hall credited contractor Allen Powell on “a fantastic job getting it all together.”

“He’s probably taken six months, or less, and we’re almost done,” she said.

By the end of November, Hall hopes to be out of the “old” bakery on nearby Williams Street and to be fully functional on Munster Street, which might end up as the physical address.

“I’m excited just to get over there, to be honest with you.”

ALL PAIN, ALL GAIN

Even when retail sales start, unlike its sister café, this location will have no tables.

“You come in one door – and it’s a huge room, it’s beautiful – and you go out the other side,” Hall said, describing the layout of what will be a proper boulangerie plus a barista station serving to-go coffee.

No made-to-order sandwiches or crêpes will be offered yet, but those will be added eventually to a menu that features the baked goods Le Café Gourmet sells at the Forsyth Farmers’ Market, The Paris Market, and at its own café. In addition to loaves and sweet treats, croissants, quiche, and other “easy” takeaways will be available.

“I want to start with the pastries and the breads and see how that goes,” she reasoned. “I’m going to keep it simple for now.”

Even so, Hall already has her sights set on the property’s other half, planning to open a French-themed restaurant within the next eighteen months, during which time she and Ian will decide whether to hold onto the downtown café, whose lease runs through 2031.

“I’m going to keep that for a while,” she said, admitting, “though I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to want to go back and forth.”

“The little one is lovely,” Hall said fondly of the downtown café. “All the tourists love it. They flock there. It’s so unique and so different. I would hate to see it turn into a Spaghetti Warehouse or something like that.”

Because the lot between the new branch and East Victory Drive is currently vacant, the Halls are holding off on more formal permanent signage, at least until they know who their neighbors will be.

“Like I said, I’m going to start slow,” said Hall. “I just want to make sure our bases are covered.”

SO MUCH FOR RETIREMENT

Longtime Oregon residents, the Halls retired early and headed to Cancún, where they lived for seven years until Helen Hall, who had owned a catering company in Portland, yearned for another gastronomy venture.

“Some very good friends said, ‘Come up here to Georgia and see what you can find,’” she shared.

A return to the states landed them first on Jekyll Island, and Hall soon spotted that Darbousset and Yeo had put their concomitant bakery and café up for sale. She drove up to Savannah right away.

The Halls’ stay on Jekyll lasted all of two weeks: they bought the business but not the building.

“That’s how it started,” Helen Hall recalled. “This is perfect for me.”

“Alex took me under his wing and showed me all the skills,” she said, knowing at the time that there could be no pretending when it came to pâtisserie preparation.

Hall and her bakery team “have all been trained” to make the French classics in the classic way. Led by bakery manager Nick Tucker and general manager Mayra Cavalheiro, a staff of “fantastic bakers” prepare every bite: Blake Boyer, Luis Franco, and mother and daughter Karla Rosas and Karla Salinas.

My wife and I love going downtown to patronize so many of our favorite food destinations, but having an authentique French bakery a short bike ride away?

Mon dieu! Magnifique! Merveilleux!

Le Café Gourmet (53 Montgomery Street) remains open seven days a week (8 a.m. to 3 p.m.) for both grab-and-go and dine-in crêpes, pastries, salads, and sandwiches. The new bakery retail location (1701A Victory Drive/1 Munster Street) will open in December.

This article appears in Connect Savannah I July 2024.