by Nick Taylor 

Pablo Valdez stood behind his glass front counter smiling ear to ear as he handed out pastries and desserts to loyal customers.  In the open room to his rear were the ovens he’d fed for over forty years with dough beaten on the nearby countertops.  “For you,” he said to one, and then another and another. On this his last day at his West Fourth Street storefront, his regulars were told to keep their money in their pockets. Pablo wanted to thank them for their business and say goodbye to Patisserie Claude. 

We are all stones in the stream of our lives, but some of us alter the current more than others.   My stream is New York City’s Greenwich Village, specifically a little slice of the West Village bordered by Sixth and Seventh Avenues and West Fourth and Bleecker Streets. The stone I’m talking about, that so many other lives have swirled past and touched and been touched by, is Pablo.

Pablo Valdez comes from the Dominican Republic and he bakes French croissants and pastries.  He learned from his predecessor and mentor Claude LeBrenne, who opened Patisserie Claude at  West Fourth Street near Barrow Street in 1982.  Pablo worked with him from the beginning, a calm counterpoint to Claude’s mercurial temper imported straight from the coast of Brittany where he’d learned to bake from his father.  Then one day in 2008, Claude disappeared.  The shop  closed without notice, its windows papered over, until a couple of months passed and Claude’s re-opened with Pablo at the helm as the new owner.

Little had changed. The plain and almond croissants and pain au chocolate, the raisin Danish, were just as good, the fruit tarts and the Napoleons and chocolate mousse and opera cakes as light and sweet, the dainty cookies too. The coffee was fresh and hot and the cappuccino came with the right amount of froth. The music playing in the small back room, where the ovens were and where Pablo and his helper Adriano beat out pastry dough on the countertops, was Spanish now instead of French.

In Pablo’s hands the patisserie was calmer.  It became a family affair. At one point Pablo’s son Carlos manned the counter in the afternoons. His nephew Joel frequented the shop  in the morning and late afternoons and talked Yankee baseball while Pablo and I tried to make a Mets fan out of him.  Where Claude had displayed photos of his trips to a seaside village in Colombia where he had a home, Pablo posted notices of Pablo Jr.’s professional boxing matches at Madison Square Garden. 

Pablo and Claude remained in touch. In fact they talked on the phone almost every day. Sometimes a new dessert would appear adorned with a French name — Pont neuf was one — and you knew that Claude had put a bug in Pablo’s ear. He’d show up occasionally, too. To be tolerable, his life in retirement in North Carolina needed now and then to brush against West Fourth Street and the shop with his name on it, run by the man who might as well have been his brother.

Early in 2023 Claude let Pablo know that he was sick. Pablo responded as a brother would, flying to North Carolina when Claude was descending in the last days of his cancer treatment and again for the funeral.  Now, after all his years at the pastry ovens, Pablo began to look forward to regaining a life that didn’t involve rising before dawn to bake croissants.

Regulars at the shop heard rumors that Pablo was looking to sell. And like Claude, not to just anybody. He wanted to sell the shop to someone who would keep it alive. Finally, on the last Monday in January, regulars were told to come that Wednesday to say goodbye to Pablo.

I went that afternoon about four-thirty. Pablo was happy. We hugged. He looked relieved. He had cooked all his customers’ favorite things and was giving them away. He’d agonized over the rising price of chocolate, and reluctantly raised the price of a piece of that cake from $4.50 to $4.75. Now, regulars offering money were told to put it away.

Next morning the store was dark, chairs stacked on tables, the grate still pulled down behind the glass door.  The morning croissants would have to come from somewhere else. Pablo is now a stone in someone else’s stream.

The new owner, we’re told, is from London and probably won’t be around much.  After renovations, Patisserie Claude will reopen as Claude 82, for its first year in business. Adriano may still be in the kitchen, pounding dough and feeding the oven. The lovely and remarkably smart Jemima Ventura can still work the counter if she wants to but having finished college will probably move on. So for the regulars there will be change, but maybe not that much. We’ll see.