Chef’s Dish: Bruno Chiari, Kallyste Chocolates
By Mike Mitchelson

About the last place one would expect to find a French Café is in the aging Signal Hills strip mall in West St. Paul.

But there it is. Kallyste Chocolates, owned by a Frenchman named Bruno Chiari, a native of Corsica. (Kallyste is the Greek word for Corsica, which means, “island of beauty”). Chiari will move his café to a more visible Woodbury location in the fall, however.

Kallyste Chocolates offers fine chocolates (Belgian) and fudge varieties. But what’s caused Internet chatter are its sandwiches and entrees. It’s a bit of an oddity walking in, say, mid-afternoon after the lunch rush. There’s nothing visually to indicate that the tiny café, with chocolates packed inside glass display cases on the counter, serves a gourmet sandwich on a baguette. But the small kitchen hidden in the back is where Chiari works his magic. In addition to 25 different sandwiches, Chiari prepares crepes, salads, chocolate and cheese fondues, his own version of raclette, and fish, pork and beef entrees.

The café is modeled after a common concept in France, the “salon de thé,” (tea salon), Chiari said. “Most of the time they have something upscale and have pastries,” he said. “You go over there for tea, but for lunch time you can go there for a salad or sandwich. My concept is a little bit wider, I would say.”

Oh, about those 25 sandwiches.

Chiari said his best seller used to be the Minnesota sandwich—lettuce, tomato, onion, American cheese and turkey—one he made because he had to. But within a large group for lunch, at least one person would be more daring. Word spread. The most popular sandwich now includes spinach and mangoes among its ingredients. Another has leeks, plum and mushroom. “When they taste that they say, ‘Wow, that’s good,’ and I can tell you that they don’t go back to the Minnesota sandwich,” he said.


Across the pond

Before Minnesota, Chiari lived on the French Riviera, and, through his own one-man company, created menus for Accor, a European corporate services company that owns several hotel brands—including Sofitel. Accor hotels spread across the globe, and Chiari designed menus corresponding to a country’s cuisine, often researching a culture back several centuries to build his authentic menus.

He was raised in a family of great home cooks and his grandfather ran a company that provided goods to restaurants. “I was always riding with him, going to restaurant kitchens,” Chiari said. But he was a talented soccer player, too; that path led him away from restaurants, and his education led into the business world. He pursued a busy business career for about 10 years. “Then I realized I need work that is a passion,” he said. He began working in a small restaurant, and slowly branched out on his own into menu development, which led to his work for Accor and other clients—he developed sandwiches for a French company catering transatlantic flights, and ethnic spice mixes for another company.

Chiari said his “main achievement,” however, was creating the official menu for the 1998 World Cup soccer tournament in Paris. “There were 32 nations at that time for the first time (the tournament formerly allowed only 24 teams),” Chiari said. “I proposed to make 32 menus. They said, ‘Well, if you can make it.’…I knew it was so important, I was with some very high-level guys, and I didn’t want to mess up anything.”

Chiari also attended culinary school along the way, thinking he needed “official” instruction. But his prior experience—mainly travel—was what influenced him the most. “A lot of chefs are coming from the same kind of school, and they are in a kind of box,” he said. “And that was one reason Accor hired me, because I was out of it.”

So there he was. Living in one of the most beautiful areas of the world, working for himself. But Chiari came to Minnesota for a reason many accomplished foreign chefs do—he fell in love with a Minnesota woman. He remembers the date he arrived—January 8, 2001. “I used to joke about that because it was the shock of my life,” he said. “The previous day I was living on the French Riviera and I was in short sleeves and the next day I was freezing, dying over here.”

He briefly regretted the move when the relationship ended in divorce and available cooking jobs were unsatisfactory to his skill and ideals. “But I believe in fate; I am here for a reason,” he said. He cooked briefly at Mystic Lake Casino, but changed jobs to service the slot machines, where he was better able to work on his English.

At work one day, he was eating a meal with knife and fork and watched a man with the same entrée grab a bun, load it with everything on the plate, and ate. “At that time, I was thinking I would like to start a French restaurant but wondered why they are struggling so much over here,” he said. “When I saw this guy, I said, ‘Well, thank you,’ because here in the U.S. people are sandwich eaters most of the time.”

Instead of eating bread with an entrée, Chiari decided to serve the entrée on bread. “But on good bread, not buns—more French—good baguette, ciabatta, croissant, or brioche are the four I am using. I saw no reason why (people) couldn’t like it. And that seems to be the way it is starting now. I am making one with sea scallops. Why couldn’t that be a sandwich?”

After three years at Mystic Lake, he opened Kallyste Chocolates in 2005. Not an ideal location, Chiari said, but functional and affordable. His reputation grew with reviews in the Pioneer Press and on the Internet and local cable television. The Woodbury location is in a new development in a high-traffic area off Hudson Road, and will triple his space to 3,000 square feet. With the added space, he’ll sign on a French pastry chef, open a bakery and expand his entrée offerings. The opening is scheduled for October.

The name will also change to Kallyste French Café. “It will be a real French Café,” Chiari said. “Everybody is doing the same thing. I cannot do the same thing. I never did, so I cannot do it.”