Black woman opens up bakery to bring French culture to Brooklyn neighborhood

In Brooklyn, New York, a Black woman inspired by French culture opened the Je T'aime Patisserie bakery last summer. It has risen to become a popular destination in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood in the year since.

Jatee Kearsley, from the neighboring borough of Queens, is the bakey's owner and described herself as a lover of everything that has to do with love, family, friends, relationships, food and community. She chose Bed-Stuy as the location for her first business because of the community's links to Black history.

"This is Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, a historically black neighborhood," Kearsley said. "It just encompasses everything that I wanted for my business to serve an underserved neighborhood. So it was important for me to make sure that I put an impact on communities that not only I come from, but that I want to see grow and flourish as well."

People in the community often wait outside for Kearsley to open the doors, rushing in when she does so. People are eager to get their baked goods because she makes everything with love, she explained.

Customers visit the business multiple times each week, embodying their sense of community as they support the owner.

"It is really refreshing to watch this business thrive in this neighborhood," customer Latoya Shauntay Snell said. "If any one of us has been here in Bed-Stuy for a decent amount of years, we've watched not just businesses move, but people."

Kearsley opened up Je T'aime Patisserie after she visited France and fell in love with their culture.

"The French cooking techniques are very intricate, very detailed, very technical," Kearsley said. "So knowing that I like to solve problems and knowing that I love a challenge, I just gravitated towards their technique of baking."

All of Kearsley's recipes are her own, and she creates them from scratch. She calls it her own spin on French pastries -- the quality of food is very important to her.

"We don't use any coloring," Kearsley said. "We don't use any processed anything. We put fresh berries and fresh jam. We make jams. Yeah, we put it on the fruit Danish, our jalapeño cheddar biscuits. Everyone loves the ham and cheese croissants, the chocolate croissants, the almond croissants."

Je T'aime Patisserie's food is made fresh each day because Kearsley cares about what's going into the bodies of the people her community. She also helps out the community by accepting government assistance like EBT (electronic benefit transfer) as a payment.

However, when she first told her family, friends and associates that she'd accept EBT the idea wasn't positively received. Some told her she shouldn't want those "kinds of people" in her establishment.

However, Kearsley ignored them because she knows how vital government assistance was for her mother and childhood friends, as well as some people she currently lives around. She believes that everyone deserves access to top-of-the-line food, even if they can't afford it.

"People need access to affordable food, healthy food," Kearsley said. "It’s not sitting in a store for weeks that was sitting on a truck for weeks, that was sitting in a factory for weeks. This is food. You get a fresh, from my oven straight to your mouth."

Kearsley's business didn't start off well, as she saw few customers in her first four months in business -- locals thought Je T'aime Patisserie was just another case of gentrification in the neighborhood.

As word of mouth spread about Je T'aime Patisserie being a Black business, many residents decided to check it out.

"We've had a lot of people come in here like, 'I never had a freshly made croissant' or 'I've never had a quiche,' " Kearsley said. "Or 'I've never had a mousse cake' or 'I've never even tasted anything vegan because it's too expensive.' "

She is working with another community organizer to turn the bakery into a residency kitchen -- a space for people who have wanted to open a bakery or a business but couldn't. Kearsley wants it to be a place for the community to grow and for people to share love.

"Being a generational curse breaker, it may be for some people, they may be able to carry that weight," Kearsley said. "But I don't choose to carry that weight, I choose to start new generations of goodness. So I’m not a generational curse breaker. I am a generational starter, so I want to create my own way, just start something new."