The new Hot Hot Bakery food cart is spending its first day on the streets of Arlington today, featuring freshly baked croissants and other French inspired fare.
Chris Deutsch and his wife Amy Fuller spent a year baking and training in Paris in preparation for opening a food business in Arlington. Deutsch, who is part French, grew up eating the type of pastries featured in his food cart.
“I used to work for the State Department but it wasn’t for me. I wanted to follow my passion and get into the food industry,” he said. “My mother is French so I’ve always loved this kind of baked goods, baguettes, croissants. I just felt that there was a need in this area for that kind of baking.”
Deutsch said he received help from his good friends at Pupatella (5104 Wilson Blvd). Upon returning from France, he was offered a job as Pupatella’s baker when the restaurant expanded last year.
“I signed on for that knowing that Enzo (Algarme) and Anastasiya (Laufenberg) would kind of allow me to run my own business at some point with their help, and here we are,” said Deutsch.
Algarme and Laufenberg even allowed Deutsch to use the old cart that helped them get their start in 2007, eventually leading to the opening of a brick and mortar location in 2010.
“This is their old cart that they used. It takes a lot of work to run the restaurant so they couldn’t really use the cart and they offered it up to me,” said Deutsch.
Hot Hot Bakery operates out of a cart and not a truck, so it can stay in one location for most of the day without being required to move. Deutsch plans to spend most of his time serving customers in the Ballston area because it’s so close to Pupatella, where he bakes his pastries in the wee hours of the morning.
Customers can enjoy sandwiches on house made breads baked with organic flours. Eventually there will be lunch specials and perhaps a few different donuts added to the menu. For now, Deutsch says he’s sticking to the basics, such as the croissants he has spent so much time training to make.
“It’s not rocket science but it’s tricky dough. I really wanted to bring the kind of croissants I grew up eating in Paris here. No offense to any bakers or bakeries in this area, but it’s hard to find this kind of baked goods,” said Deutsch. “What I do with the process of making these baked goods is that I let the dough take its time. When it’s ready to move on to the next step, that’s when I’ll go ahead. A lot of bakers will pump stuff full of yeast and put it in a hot chamber to make the process go really fast. But to get nice bread and nice croissants, you have to let it just hang out, basically.”
As far as the name Hot Hot Bakery, that also stems from Deutsch’s time in France.
“My grandmother lived in the south of France along the beaches. Along the beach is a guy who sells hot peanuts. He would go around screaming ‘Hot, hot peanuts!'” Deutsch said. “I was telling my twin brother and sister-in-law that I swear it’s the same guy doing it for the past 25 years. That’s how it came up and it kind of stuck.”
In order to cater to both the lunch and the breakfast crowds, the cart will be open from 8:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m., earlier than many of the other mobile food options. Customers can follow Hot Hot Bakery on Twitter to find out the cart locations on Tuesdays through Fridays.
