Photos by Brian Pavlich
Pastry Chef Breanne Kostyk has the skill, creativity, and talent to work anywhere—New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, hell, New Orleans. But the self-taught practitioner of this delicate art has chosen a town with a population of 9,352 people and a quiet reputation in which to ply her trade.
“Breanne’s presence here is a testimony to the quality of life and the caliber of cuisine to be had in the small town of Covington, said Renee Kientz, a St. Tammany Parish tourism executive.
“She is a world-class, dynamic pastry chef with the breadth and depth of knowledge to master everything from elaborate, elegant concoctions that truly inspire awe, to rustic and comforting pies that make you yearn for home.”
Just shy of twenty-nine, the Tolland, Connecticut, native is also a rolling stone who’s perfectly at ease with reinventing herself and “living the journey.” Her path to the pastry kitchen at Covington’s OxLot 9 was a circuitous one. Hang tight for the ride on this oblique road.
In 2009, Kostyk exited the esteemed Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, after picking up a degree in design, only to face a crumbling economy. So the trim, serene brunette joined Project M, a program for creatives that helps them use their skills to benefit social change, placing them in different cities throughout the country. Kostyk joined a group headed to Greensboro, Alabama, where the team was asked to build something—they did not know what, that was their challenge—that would unify people. Kostyk recalled being out with her group members and overhearing a girl marvel over a piece of pie. “She was just saying how much she loved pie, and we all got into a discussion about how you can’t really argue with pie. Everybody loves pie. We decided to unify people around pie.” No matter that Kostyk had never baked a pie in her life—only the occasional batch of cookies with her mother—she was going to figure it out and bake pies.
PieLab came to life as a combination pop-up café, design studio, and civic clubhouse in a cobbled-together structure. Situated in the so-called Black Belt, a former cotton-producing region where about one-third of children live in poverty, the area has been called “Alabama’s Third World.” Members of Project M tagged PieLab as a “negative-energy inverter, fueled by pie.” The goal at PieLab was not at all to sell pie; it was to get people talking to one another.
But sell pie they did. The experiment was an immediate success, with a diverse crowd and an energy that fostered an exchange of ideas and the forging of intergenerational friendships. Pie was served on ceramic plates, creating instant community because, as Breanne told The New York Times, “people were forced to stick around and talk to each other, and not take their pie and run.” On the first day, with pie selling for $2 a slice, PieLab made $400.
And Kostyk discovered that she preferred making pie to working as a designer. She was baking eight or nine pies a day from scratch—apple crunch, blueberry-oatmeal, coconut custard, banana cream, pear-berry, lemon meringue, and organic cranberry. “I loved baking pies,” she said. “For a whole year, that was my favorite thing to do—just wake up in the morning, bake pies, and teach others how to bake pies. It was a lot of fun.” When her yearlong grant to remain with PieLab was up, Kostyk also discovered that the South felt like home and that she did not want to leave.
With no plan, she made her way to Birmingham, a city she and her PieLab friends used to visit on weekends to catch bands. Though she had never worked in a restaurant—save for whatever facsimile PieLab offered—she ended up at Urban Cookhouse, a new fresh-and-local, fast-casual eatery. She started as the morning kitchen manager and soon formed tight bonds with customers.
When Rod Palmer of Owls Hollow Farm lost his greenhouses in a snowstorm, the young idealist came up with a plan to get him working again. Under Kostyk’s direction, Urban Cookhouse donated one day’s profits from its $25 “Take It to the House” to-go dinners to the farmer. Kostyk drove the effort with social media networking, and the restaurant raised $7,000 in aid.
When the owners were ready to open a second Urban Cookhouse, they brought on Kostyk, then 25, to serve as the restaurant’s general manager.
In her tiny bits of spare time, Kostyk indulged her passion for pastry, baking obsessively and sharing the fruits of her labors with friends. One of those friends was also friend to Food & Wine magazine award-winning chef Jeffrey Hansell, who was leaving Commander’s Palace in New Orleans to take over the kitchen at the illustrious Veranda on Highland in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I needed a pastry chef, and this friend told me about this girl who was fanatically passionate about baking,” Hansell said. “The mutual friend also said Breanne had never worked as a pastry chef. I was unsure; but when I met her, I knew she was the one. She started the next day.”
Hansell invited Kostyk to join him at OxLot 9 when he opened the restaurant with his wife and business partner, Amy Hansell, in 2014.
“She is very well versed, not just in sugar but the whole gamut,” Hansell said. “She wows us and shatters our expectations all the time.” He explained that different staff members, the bartender for instance, may notice a fresh or unusual ingredient and present it to Kostyk, challenging her to build an idea around it. A recent challenge came from Hansell’s toddler son in the form of a honeysuckle flower he found in the family yard. “I gave it to Breanne, and she came back with a sandwich of blondie shortbread cookies, delicate honeysuckle ice cream, and a floral-kissed peach jam,” Hansell said. “She really has the knack. It’s her gift.”
Kostyk said she takes her inspiration from childhood smells and flavors and strives to incorporate a myriad of tastes, textures, and sensations into a single dish. Case in point: her current most popular dessert, the Campfire, is a play on baked Alaska, only it is executed with lightly cold-smoked ice cream on a base of handmade, rustic graham crackers, covered in Belgian chocolate, and enclosed in a dome of honeyed meringue that’s gently torched to reveal the textures and peaks in the airy fluff. Her Greek yogurt cheesecake marries white chocolate, puréed apricot, pistachios, and candied ginger; and an ode to the citrus season is offered as an olive oil cake made with the juice of blood oranges and served with candied kumquats and rosemary pine nut brittle.
Of her future in Covington—or anywhere for that matter—Kostyk is noncommittal. “I tend to not think too far into the future,” she said. “I kind of like to plan my life day by day. Had I, at so many turns, gone the way my life was going, I would have ended up in a very different place each time. And I wouldn’t be here now.”
At our 2015 Small Town Chefs Awards, at the Louisiana Culinary Institute on June 25, Chef Breanne Kostyk will end the night on a sweet note with her stunning Spring Pavlova with lavender meringue (recipe here).
Details. Details. Details.
OxLot 9
Inside The Southern Hotel
428 East Boston Street
Covington, La.
(985) 400-5663 • oxlot9.com
.jpg)