Nine years ago Violetta Adrien began to build a nest egg selling the pastries every Haitian knows as pâtés. Every week she’d stuff doughy pockets with beef, chicken, salt cod, or vegetables and bake them by the dozens for church gatherings and private parties. If “you don’t have it at parties it is not Haitian,” she says. “I start making my piggy bank, and every time I do a party I take it home and I drop in $50, $100.” Back then she was working full-time at Evanston Hospital as a surgical technician, but she knew she wanted to open a restaurant someday. She gradually invested her nut in the equipment she’d need to do it—pots, pans, plates, glassware—all of which she stored in her small Evanston town house and in the larger homes of her siblings.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The 50-year-old didn’t even know how to make the pastries—descended from the French pâté en croute—before she came to Chicago in 1981 from Fort-Liberté, a small town in coastal northeastern Haiti. But she certainly knew her way around a kitchen. As the oldest daughter and second child of seven, she was her family’s primary cook growing up, before and after school and on lunch breaks, while her parents tended the family’s large garden. They grew their own vegetables and raised their own chickens and goats, and Adrien got in the habit of cooking for large groups with the bounty. As a teenager she wanted to attend culinary school, but her father, who’d emigrated to Chicago in 1979, insisted on secondary school instead. She followed him here, and after she took English courses and earned her GED, he helped her land a job at Evanston Hospital, where he worked in housekeeping.
In 2009 she enrolled in Kendall’s personal chef program, and racked up so many electives in pastry and cake-decorating classes she had nearly enough for a third certificate in pastry. It was then that she discovered the recipe for a classic pâte feuilletée, puff pastry, a labor-intensive process she adopted for her own Haitian pâtés. With bread flour, unsalted butter, water, and salt, it requires five rolling-and-resting cycles, and can take up to six hours to make. But it turned out a more reliably flaky and beautiful egg-washed pastry than her old recipe.
It’s advisable to call ahead to see if she has these dishes on hand—if she doesn’t, she’ll make them on request, along with off-menu items like tassot, the goat version of griot, or du riz djon-djon, a mushroom-rice dish dyed inky black by special dried fungi her aunt sends her from back home. The same applies to the pâtés, which go especially fast. “The Haitians, they really like pâté,” she says. “And every time they come here, if I don’t have it they feel really disappointed.”
