“It’s a very male-dominated field. In France, if you’re a woman, you can’t work in the kitchen, and yet you’re expected to make food at home—how do you explain that?”
Even as a little girl, Clémence Pereur was already fascinated by cooking and creating in the kitchen.
“My mom bought me a cooking book for kids, and there was this mouse who was doing the food,” she recalled, noting the first recipe she mastered from the book was for Cantonese Rice. “The little mouse was cutting the chicken…that’s all I remember.”
Literary mice aside, Pereur developed a passion for cooking by observing her mother in the kitchen.
“Like most families in France, we ate all our meals together. My dad would stop in from work to eat lunch with us. And my mom was making food all the time,” she said. “I especially remember Sunday nights. We were pretty lazy on Sunday nights, and my mom would make quiche. You just make the dough and find all the other ingredients in the fridge.”
Another tradition was watching and learning from her Algerian grandmother how to make a meal.
“She’d make couscous, and we’d make it together,” Pereur explained. “There’s this long process of making the meatballs…everything cooked for hours, and you did everything by hand.”
Pereur, who is 28, grew up in Condé-Sainte-Libiaire, a small town just east of Paris.
“We had one bakery, one small neighborhood supermarket, one school, but we saw a lot of tourists because Disneyland Paris is close by. Also, Meaux, known for Brie cheese, is nearby,” she explained.
Pereur is the owner of Like Home, a charming French café and bakery in Midtown St. Louis. This month, Like Home is celebrating its second anniversary.
“A friend who was driving by found this corner location, near two big streets (Lindell and Vandeventer), Saint Louis University and the Moolah Theatre,” she said. “We have regulars—students, teachers, people who work around here. And on the weekends, we have families. We know their names, and some of them have become our friends.”
But Pereur will be the first to admit that making friends has been somewhat of a challenge for a single girl in her 20s in St. Louis.
“I’ve always been really independent, and it’s been difficult to make friends, especially girlfriends.”
Not that she isn’t used to it, Pereur is quick to add. For much of her life, she’s been around men and “male culture” in the kitchen.
“It’s a very male-dominated field. In France, if you’re a woman, you can’t work in the kitchen, and yet you’re expected to make food at home—how do you explain that?” she asked. “I’ve always been “the woman” in the kitchen. I’ve been around the men who joke about sex all day long, and after several years of that, you start to become just like them.”
But cooking and working in the kitchen was always a dream, and Pereur made up her mind early, enrolling in culinary school at age 14. For the next several years, she tried hotel management, restaurant work and internships, all while pursuing her diploma in cooking and service. Then, it was on to pastry school. She attended the prestigious Alain Ducasse Ecole de Cuisine for one year to get her pastry diploma, and then proceeded to chocolate school for another two years to master bonbons, ganache and more.
It was around this time when she came across a listing in Le journal du pâtissier, a French trade publication, seeking culinary interns for the Saint Louis Club. In March 2014, Pereur came to St. Louis on a student visa to serve as an intern for the pastry chef at the Saint Louis Club in downtown Clayton.
“It was difficult to leave my house and my family. My dad came with me for a week, but after three weeks of being here, I wanted to go back home,” she said. “I wasn’t speaking any English—just basic English, really—and I didn’t know anybody. I was living in University City, so I could walk to work. But I thought I was going to get lost!”
But she’d soon decide to give her new surroundings a try.
“I started going out with my roommate…I went to a Blues game…I started to make friends. And I met someone who was American—and thanks to him, I speak English now.”
And it didn’t take long for everything else to fall into place. Just a couple of years later, Like Home opened its doors, specializing in authentic French pastry and other bakery items, as well as café offerings like salads, sandwiches, quiche and soups.
Pereur considers the macarons her signature item, but adds that the croissants, using flour and butter imported from France, are probably the most challenging to make.
“It takes a lot of time to do, and if you mess up the dough, you have to throw everything in the garbage,” she said. “When you pay more than $200 for 10 pounds of butter, and you throw it in the garbage, you cry.”
And while Pereur is very particular about every sweet and savory item that comes out of her kitchen, she does have a small staff, which, up until recently, included her mother, Christine, who helped her open the shop two years ago. Like Home currently has five team members, three of whom speak French, and at least one other person helping Pereur with pastry—which is a good thing.
“I want somebody to make me pastry,” she said. “Sure, I love doing it, but I’m not going to make my own birthday cake!”
