When Benedicte Maudet was growing up in Saint-Lunaire, a seaside village in Brittany on the northwest coast of France, her mom would roll up freshly made crêpes, sprinkle them with a little sugar, and pack them into picnic lunches. “I’m a crêpe lover — they’re easy to eat and quite healthy,” said Maudet with the appropriate accent. “In Brittany, we eat crêpe like they eat bread in the rest of France.”
Today, in a simple kitchen on the bottom floor of an office building on East Haley Street, across from Veracruz Park, Maudet is emulating her childhood by mass-producing crêpes to prepackage for the Santa Barbara market and, hopefully, the rest of California, too. Maudet’s Artisan French Crêpes is focused on classically simple recipes and organic ingredients, and she’s importing French buckwheat flour to use for her gallettes, which are the gluten-free, eggless, more savory pancakes. “It’s like we do in Brittany,” explained Maudet, who’s proud of the half-dozen Krampouz crêpe makers she bought from France. “This is the real way.”
Though she has her eyes on the French expats who live in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and “miss real crêpes,” Maudet’s research revealed quite a market among the rest of us. “Really, here in America, people love crêpes, too,” said Maudet, who launched her enterprise last fall after buying out the madeleine cookie company that built the kitchen. “It’s worldwide, like the pizza.”
