Photo: Tom Cardoso It’s 3:00 am on a drizzling Friday morning. St. Clair West is quiet and uninviting, but about a block west of Christie lies a little bakery where they keep the door propped slightly open every night. You can smell the sweetness emanating as you pass by on the sidewalk. And on this particular night, they’re expecting me. In the daytime, Pain Perdu is the kind of place where you’d listen to Edith Piaf over a caf au lait and a newspaper. At three in the morning, the bakery is dark and empty, but I can see the kitchen lit up in the back. The space is filled with racks, a big countertop in the centre, and mounds of dough and butter everywhere. It’s hot and loud from the hum of ovens, and of course, it smells amazing. This is the night shift, when all the breads and pastries that adorn the bakery by day actually get made. I take it for granted that I can get fresh bread from seven in the morning on if I want to (not that I’m ever awake that early), without giving a thought to the people who made it while I was asleep. It’s like some kind of magical event that happens across the city every night, where elves with delicate fingers come out in the wee hours — not to make shoes, but to bake croissants. Except I don’t see any elves as I finally tiptoe into the kitchen. No soft giggles like glockenspiels, and not even the purr of French radio. Instead I’m greeted with the sound of ‘80s speed metal, and a guy in jeans, an apron, and a baseball cap. Eric is the chef at Pain Perdu, and he’s here nearly every night. Photo: Tom Cardoso “That’s the nice thing about working in a bakery alone at night — you do what you want,” he laughs. Whoever runs the shift gets to choose the music. Tonight, Eric is in charge, and he has the help of his apprentice Sanober. She’s here every Thursday and Friday morning, when she isn’t at her day job doing research at CAMH. “It’s realistically a 10 or 11-hour shift, pretty much every day,” says Eric. “From a 16-hour day from when I started, I brought it down to a good 12, 11 hours, just by taking little shortcuts, using the space that’s around me, coming in a little early.” Eric and Sanober have been here since 1:00 am. At 3:00 am there are 15 kg of butter churning, the baguettes are started, and various raisin-laden pastries are already rising in the oven. “I have the front door and the back door open,” says Eric. “It’s so hot in here that you have to move fast when the dough is involved and the butter is out. You’re always fighting the clock. At least I am. We could have come in a few hours earlier to relax or whatever, but what’s the fun in that?” he grins. In the meantime, a new up-tempo ‘80s synth-and-guitar track blares over the sound of the ovens. This is what it must have felt like to be going to the gym in the ‘80s. It feels exhilarating. Sanober, Eric’s apprentice, has been coming in two nights a week for the past month. After working in a cupcake shop, she wanted a solid foundation in baking to get an informed sense of the industry, before making her planned career shift. That’s what led her to Pain Perdu, which is ostensibly as hardcore as they come in the baking world. Photo: Tom Cardoso “You’re always on your toes at first, with learning new things,” says Sanober, as she slaps handfuls of butter into towers about a foot high. “But then you get more efficient and consistent. You want to be perfect and consistent — you know, a master of the domain. And that takes time. You know what to do in a month, but you can’t do it in your sleep, and that’s kind of the goal.” Eric has been the chef at Pain Perdu for five years, and as he swings from oven to cooling rack and back again, you wonder whether he really could do this in his sleep. He probably can. “To be a baker, it’s about repetition,” he says. “It’s kind of boring in a certain way. Because it’s about consistency, so you have to either be consistently good or consistently bad. People need to know what to expect. You can’t be fantastic one day, and then awful the next — it kind of makes them go, ‘You know what, I’d rather go someplace a little less good at times, but at least they’re always the same.’” His movements around the kitchen are instinctive, like some kind of manly, apron-clad dance. As I watch him roll out dough into long baguettes, I’m hypnotized. I might even be drooling. “Pretty much everything here is phallic,” Eric laughs. Photo: Tom Cardoso Eric’s baking exploits began in the ‘70s, thanks to his grandmother. “She had Le Petit Gourmet down on Yonge Street,” he recalls. “I started there in about ’72, ’73 — and I was a shit-disturber, I was 6 or 7. So I started doing cookies, and rolling croissants, doing dishes. It was extra pocket money. “I’ve done a little bit of everything. I’ve done the front of the house, the back of the house, I’ve been a pastry chef, I’ve worked in fine dining. I’ve done a lot. And then you get sick of it. I went into construction for about 12 years. And then it was actually my brother, the owner, who was like, ‘Eric, I need help this Christmas, I can’t find a baker.’ I was supposed to come in temporarily, I started part-time — and I just never left.” He spins around mid-sentence and lifts a tray out of the massive oven to slide it into the cooling rack. Oh yes, the croissants are out. Making a croissant takes about five to six hours. It’s a process of folding butter into finely rolled out layers of dough, and letting them chill in the freezer before moving on to the next layer. Every night, Eric bakes about 1500 to 1800 croissants. On Mother’s Day, his busiest day of the year, he’ll produce 2500. “For me, it’s about the croissant,” Eric muses. “I love croissants, especially the chocolate croissant. I build my whole croissant dough, that we make the regular croissants with, all around the chocolate… kind of like a book, you know if you fold in half, you get all the little pages? I love seeing that. “There are so many different methods, and so many different recipes. Mine is a little bit out of the ordinary, I guess. It takes a little more attention to detail.” There’s a certain element of romance to this middle-of-the-night ritual, the secret life led by bakers in small artisanal bakeries like this one. The tradition hails from Europe, where bakery life intersects with the city’s nightlife. In France, and in most of Europe, people would get out of the nightclub at five or six in the morning, and head straight for the back door of the bakery. You’d throw the bakers a twenty, and out they’d come with a box full of croissants. Naturally. But the small glory of that life is becoming increasingly rare in Toronto. Eric doesn’t get many random night-time visitors anymore. Bakeries like Pain Perdu are becoming more of an anomaly with their intimate, homey atmosphere and attention to detail. The life of the traditional baker, who works when we’re all either drunk or asleep, is becoming endangered. Photo: Tom Cardoso “In baking, that’s the biggest trouble — finding bakers,” says Eric. “Because you’re not really paid for it, it’s average pay. There’s no glory because no one really comes to praise you, except for the ones that are a little ego-driven. You’re not really here at the time when the customers are here. “It’s a hard life. It’s hard to keep relationships, unless you’re working in the same industry. It’s the same thing with restaurants really. The whole hospitality industry is a hard industry — it’s usually a lot of freaks, alcoholics,” he says jokingly (is he joking?). “We’re not some of those freaks, of course,” Sanober interjects. “I was told I’m fairly normal,” Eric muses. “Baking is a lost art,” Eric continues. “I find that traditional small places like this are being eaten up by corporations. They don’t want to use real butter. We use the best butter we can find in Ontario. … It’s just to keep this art alive, because it’s all conveyor-belt now, it’s all machines, it’s people getting paid 7 bucks an hour to put things in boxes. By 4:00 am, I’m bleary-eyed from all the music's power chords, while Eric and Sanober continue to weave past each other seamlessly. I think, maybe they secretly are elves after all. As I bid my adieus, Eric asks me if I would like a croissant. And so, with half a croissant in my hand (the other half already in my mouth), I stumble out into the night. I may not have spent an exciting evening drunk on a Parisian dancefloor, but the frigid Toronto air mixed with the delicious croissant somehow tastes like I have. Erene Stergiopoulos writes for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter @fullerenes.