Left Bank gets national kudos, but its team just wants to serve perfect pastry to Olympia

Olympia’s Left Bank Pastry is beloved not just by the foodies who form a line outside the French patisserie each morning but also by Food & Wine magazine.

The magazine recently featured Left Bank on a list of the nation’s 100 top bakeries, describing it as “one of the finest patisseries in the Pacific Northwest” and praising chef/owner Gary Potter’s croissants as “one of the best bangs for the buck we’ve found this side of the Atlantic.”

If you know Potter, you might credit his shop’s success to his passion for perfection, his education at Paris’s legendary Le Cordon Bleu or even the butter he imports from Normandy.

If you did, you’d be wrong, Potter says.

“We got this honor because of the team that we have,” Potter told The Olympian. “The team that we have is the best in the area — it’s the best in the state. When I see articles like the ones in Food & Wine, I feel a little bit uncomfortable.”

But, of course, Potter also has something to do with Left Bank’s success.

“I have this vision of the perfect pastry,” he said, “and people in Olympia are agreeing with me.”

He’s particularly proud of his kouign-amann (pronounced “queen uh-MON”), a caramelly Breton cake made with croissant dough. It’s been described as the “world’s most difficult and best pastry.”

“The kouign-amann is really what Food & Wine should be writing about,” Potter said. “Our kouign-amann probably is the best in the country. That’s the thing that we’re probably most famous for.”

He’s proud of his skill with baguettes, too, but the shop doesn’t sell those because it’s just too busy turning out croissants, macarons (adorable meringue sandwich cookies that are among the shop’s handful of gluten-free offerings), quiches and other traditional French fare — all made from century-old recipes and using century-old techniques.

The business, which Potter started in 2011 in a commercial kitchen he built next to his home, opened its first retail location in 2016 and moved to the current building on Fourth Avenue in January 2019.

Potter had been selling much of what he and his team of bakers produced to markets and coffee shops from here to Seattle, but the shelter-in-place order gave him space and time to fine-tune his mission.

The shop closed in mid-March because of the coronavirus and reopened two months later with a sharper focus on feeding classic French pastries to the people of Olympia, who have been lining up outside the shop ever since.

“Every day is like a symphony,” he said. “It’s all coming together for this one moment. All of these bakers are working for this 7 o’clock opening time. I want to make sure that Olympia gets its pastry. I have zero regrets about this decision, and I don’t know if I ever would have done it without that time to reflect.”

His history proves that any mission he’s on is likely to become a mission accomplished.

He grew up in Walla Walla enjoying the vast array of cookies his grandfather made and fell in love with baking while working at the Washington State Penitentiary.

For much of the nine years he taught there, he was working with inmates in solitary confinement — gang leaders, men who were kept separate because they kept assaulting other prisoners or guards, and prisoners on death row.

“I had a two-year escape plan, and it was like ‘Shawshank Redemption,’ ” he said.

Details of the plan included studying French at the local community college and getting his wife, Rochelle, on board with the idea of quitting her job so the couple could move to France with their then 3-year-old daughter.

“She was one to take a risk, or else none of this would have happened,” he said.

Potter still vividly recalls his last day of work in the penitentiary.

“That last day, when I left, I was riding my bicycle,” he said. “It was this beautiful sunny day, and I felt like I was getting out of prison. My beautiful long hair was flowing in the wind, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m free.’

“I cut that hair when I started baking,” he added, laughing.

Left Bank Pastry

• What: Left Bank, owned by Le Cordon Bleu-trained Gary Potter, specializes in classic French patisserie.
• Where: 1001 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
• Hours: 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
• More information: leftbankpastry.com, 360-350-0669

This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 5:45 AM.