So, how did La Baguette French Bread and Pastry Shop come to be?
The iconic bakery, recently sold to Tashie Restaurant Group, was the brainchild of Reginald Dalle.
Dalle, who is from near Lille, France, got the idea for the bakery while he and his wife, Teresa, were graduate students at the University of Arizona. A French bakery was located around the corner.
“It’s like a dream for every French person to have a bakery,” Reginald says. “So I was really intrigued. Of course, I started to befriend the owner. He was French, from Paris. He had a bakery there.”
The baker said he’d help Reginald learn the business. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come in nights and I’ll show you the job and we can talk about the machinery and how it works?’”
The Dalles planned to move to Memphis, where Teresa is from. Reginald thought about opening a bakery here if he didn’t land a teaching job. In 1975, Reginald got a job teaching French at Memphis State University, now University of Memphis.
But, Teresa says, Reginald “loved that idea of the bakery. He started getting information on equipment, and he made contacts in Paris.”
The Dalles and their friends Bob and Brenda Cooke, Memphians who were at the University of Arizona when the Dalles were there, formed the group of five people interested in investing in a French bakery. They moved into the current location in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza in 1976.
Some equipment was handmade, including a huge marble-top table, still at the bakery, which was “perfect for making pastries and croissants,” Teresa says. The late Guy Pacaud, a French baker who moved to Memphis, was head baker. “He was the one who started the bread.”
The group chose the name La Baguette. In addition to being the little diamonds on rings, “baguette” is the “famous bread. It just rolled off your tongue.” The French word for bread is “pain,” which didn’t sound like a great name for a bakery, Teresa says.
La Baguette was an instant success. “There was a line out the door. We had no clue it would happen. People were walking out the door with a baguette under their arm for the first time.”
Pacaud brought in a chef and other bakers from Paris, so all the pastries were done by French bakers. “All the recipes were from the number-one bakery in Paris, Lenotre, which is really famous for all its pastries. In order to be true to Lenotre’s recipes, we had to follow exactly the correctness for good pastries. So … natural butter, natural ingredients. Everything was really well studied.”
The pastries included croissants, pain au chocolat, Napoleons, and the still-famous almond croissant. “They take older croissants and put a custard in it. It’s the way French were able to use up croissants that didn’t sell the first day.”
When they opened, there was “no French bread, no baguettes, no authentic pastries” in Memphis, Teresa says. “People are used to it now.”
The bakery became a “cultural phenomenon,” Teresa adds. “We had friends who wanted to come down and work there. They thought it was a privilege to be able to sell some of these goods. It was just a really nice happening at the time. Those first few years were a lot of fun. Then it got to be a lot of work.”
La Baguette opened “satellite stores” in Memphis. The bakery also began serving soups and sandwiches.
Reginald taught French and Teresa taught in the English department at Memphis State. In the early ’80s, Reginald took a job teaching French at Memphis University School, where he stayed for 30 years. “He loved the school and realized his true vocation was teaching.”
The Dalles sold their share of La Baguette in the mid-’80s. Paul Howse, an investor, became sole owner in 1987.
“We really felt like we left an institution,” Teresa says. “I felt like we left something good for Memphis.”
La Baguette is at 3088 Poplar Avenue in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza.
