VERO BEACH — Opening the bread oven door for the first time next week will be a little like the curtain going up for Mark Edmonds and Christian Garcia. The owners of Patisserie Vero Beach, the town’s first French-style bakery in memory, are both veterans of the New York theater scene.
With the magic of set designers, they have turned a bare-bones block building into a welcome bit of urbanity on Old Dixie Highway, transforming the tiny space into a gleaming steel-andstark- white showroom for made-onpremises breads, pastries, croissants, and espresso.
Though they arrived in Vero wideeyed, lured here by their silent partner, the town was already familiar. “Every actor I know has worked at Riverside,” Edmonds says.
Garcia’s and Edmonds’ understated demeanor belies their theater background, though it does suit a more buttoned-up phase of their life – they both also spent time on Wall Street. In between, Edmonds pursued a lifelong love of cooking, while Garcia learned front-of-the-house hospitality. Somehow, the layers of experience are coming together like a flawless mille-feuille.
Edmonds, 42, sang and acted all through childhood. He studied music and theater at Carnegie Mellon University before moving to New York.
“I didn’t ever think I would not do theater,” says Edmonds. He got a part as the boy in “The Fantasticks,” and roles in the chorus for a number of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. He also sang professionally in churches – he deeply loves sacred music. Garcia, raised in New York, was a history major at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. “I always wanted to teach,” he says.
A job on Broadway and a SAG card changed all that. Post college, he was hired to work in the lobby souvenir shop for Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” an experience that would prepare him for the morning rush at a bakery as little else could. “It was dealing with thousands of people in a 20-minute intermission,” says Garcia.
When a photographer friend suggested he could model, he put together a portfolio. “I got an agent right out of the gate.”
That agent was a child’s agent – Garcia at 40 still looks 15. “I didn’t start shaving until my 30s,” he says. His first part was for a commercial for Time magazine of Army recruits getting their heads shaved. “They gave me my hair in a Ziploc.” Next came a gig as an extra in the movie “You’ve Got Mail.”
“Just being on the set was incredible,” he says. “It was like, you’re paying me to sit and watch Nora Ephron direct this movie?”
Bit parts followed on “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.” He danced on 30 episodes of MTV’s The Grind. He made commercials for Mountain Dew, and nearly scored a Coke ad for the Super Bowl .
At one point, he produced his own play at The Producers’ Club, a tiny theater off-off Broadway. By then, day jobs for both men were on Wall Street, Edmonds at Chase, and Garcia at Citi Bank. Then came 9/11. By chance, neither went to work that Tuesday morning. But the tragedy changed their outlook on life. “Do I really want to work in a cubical for the rest of my life?” Garcia wondered.
By then, Edmonds was already training for his new career. He learned to bake bread at New York’s Amy’s Bread, eventually overseeing the making of 1,500 baguettes a day.
He tasted his first true croissant at Ceci Cela, the famous SoHo patisserie, and later learned to make them working alongside a French baker on Long Island.
The terrorist attack was “the catalyst” for taking a job in Vieques, Puerto Rico, said Garcia. They had found an on-line posting for “unique people” to work at a new eco-resort designed by a Canadian architect. Though they flew to Canada to interview, they never saw Vieques until they took the job.
“We just wanted to wrap up our lives in New York,” Garcia said. The 11-room inn was a stunning work of minimalism: three unfinished concrete walls and the fourth side open to nature. Garcia tended to the guests, many of them New Yorkers, while Edmonds dealt with dining.
“We called it ‘fancy camping,’ ” Garcia said. “Our feeling was it had to be spotless, and the service has to be amazing. You’re not paying camping prices.”
To offset the “cold and sterile aspect of minimalism,” Edmonds began baking fresh bread every day. When Condé Nast Traveler got wind of the place and sent a crew for a fashion shoot, “they never left the resort,” said Edmonds. “They loved it.”
To help cater the Condé Nast stay, Edmonds and Garcia hired an ex-pat chef, Michael Glatz, who himself had come to the island several years earlier to work at another small resort.
Glatz, who once worked on a sheep farm to learn about cheese-making, trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. In Vieques, he “single-handedly revolutionized mealtime on Vieques,” according to a writer with Food and Wine magazine. The firepower for that revolution wasn’t just his cuisine, but the goods at a gourmet market he opened and expanded with Garcia’s and Edmonds’ help.
FoodSpace, as the shop was called, opened inside still another resort, this time, a run-down motel on the ocean that the threesome renovated and then managed. The experience was invaluable, they say.
“We were from the theater,” said Edmonds. “It was just about putting on another show.”
Today, yet another show is set to open, possibly in early October. Two weeks ago, Glatz moved to Vero to help open the bakery. Last week, they hired an actor-turned-pastry chef they found through Craig’s List, Sydney Frey.
“We spun around each other,” says Glatz.
Coming together in Vero with so many duplicate experiences is “kismet,” says Frey, with a decade of topflight pastry chef work on her resume.
The former theater major at Skidmore College had earned a master’s of fine arts in literature and publishing from Emerson College. Working as a financial writer with Putnam Investments in Boston, she was baking nonstop in her free time.
“I’d bake three dozen croissants,” she said. “I didn’t have nice neighbors so I’d take them all to the office. Pretty soon, people were asking, ‘Hey Sydney, will you make a cake for my kid’s birthday?” Then, when her father died at a young age, Frey saw a lesson in her grief. “He was young,” she says. “That was my ‘a-ha’ moment. It provided me an opportunity to say, ‘I want to go to culinary school.’ “
Frey enrolled in New York’s French Culinary Institute (now called the International Culinary Center). After an apprenticeship at celebrity chef Rocco DiSpirito’s Union Pacific, she headed home to Philadelphia to become pastry chef at Stephen Starr’s famed Buddakan. There she managed a full-time staff of six, her dessert menu winning awards from a half-dozen Philadelphia media outlets, and an invitation to cook for an “All-Starr” (as in Stephen) dinner at the James Beard House.
In 2003, Frey went to France to study with the famous French chocolate maker Valrhona. Returning to the states, she became pastry chef at 26brix in Walla Walla, Wash., and Ellerbe Fine Foods in Fort Worth, named one of the Ten Best New Restaurants by Bon Appetit magazine in 2010. Frey moved to Indialantic because her boyfriend, also a chef, has family in Melbourne.
Garcia and Edmonds were drawn to Vero through a friend and business associate in their most recent group venture with Glatz: the Hotel Fauchere, a restored Victorian inn in Milford, Pa. Glatz was chef at the restaurant and won high praise; Edmonds ran the bakery.
Garcia, meanwhile, worked as a personal assistant for a major celebrity. “Yeah, while we were sweating and slaving away,” gripes Glatz. The bakery will have tables and will serve breakfast and lunch weekdays, with a brunch offering on Sundays starting later in the season. The owners hope to get a wine and beer license so that they can stay open in the evenings.
”If I had one talent, it’s that I knew how I wanted things to be and how I wanted them to taste,” says Edmonds.
“Fortunately, how I wanted them to taste is how other people want them to taste.”
