Dessert Gallery - Sara Brook's Love of Life Makes Everything Sweeter
A dash of amor makes everything sweeter at Dessert Gallery
Looking back across her decades of successful business ownership, it feels easy to say that Sara Brook must have known what she was doing when she decided to embark on a career as a baker rather than go to law school. It was a risk that not even she understood at the time—she just knew that she was following her heart.
“It’s great to be 21 and not know anything,” she says, “because you don’t know what you don’t know and you’re not scared of anything!”
But it took faith in herself for Brook to make her dream work for her. She recalls how, when she was preparing to attend law school, she had lunch with Judge Ruby Sondock, who encouraged Brook to follow her real passion: making desserts that bring out our inner child. She is still amazed that such a respected and successful woman told her “it was OK to take a left turn.”
It wasn’t a well-worn path for a young female entrepreneur at the time, but her instinct to follow her heart has not led Brook astray through multiple successful business, culminating in 24 years of owning Dessert Gallery. Without female role models in business to follow, she forged her own path, inspired by the strong women in her family and her desire to touch people’s hearts through desserts.
Trends come and go in baking, but Dessert Gallery sets itself apart by staying true to Brook’s mothering nature: Being a nurturer “is very much who I am,” says Brook. Desserts are part of many of our emotional moments in life—our celebrations and even, sometimes, our sorrows—and she loves it when her desserts evoke those memories.
“It’s always been about comfort and love and family and community, those warm feelings you get when you sit down with something so yummy. That’s all I ever wanted to be about and I never veered from that.”
Stocked with childhood favorites like yellow cake with chocolate frosting and chocolate- dipped cookies with ample chocolate chunks, nothing about Dessert Gallery is pretentious. It’s all made from scratch, with quality ingredients, in small batches. The menu is whimsical, nostalgic and covered in generous portions of frosting that appeal to both young children and the grown-up kids who drive them there. She admits that she is still, after all these years in the dessert business, a chocoholic and a lover of frosting: “I was really hoping that by now I would be sick of something, anything! Yeah, not yet.”
Dessert Gallery has become an extension of Brook’s own family over the years, and her nurturing personality has touched all the hands that have found a home working in the kitchen and café. She has made a point to hire refugees, and while their countries of origin have changed over the years, their presence at Dessert Gallery has not. Many have been employed there for decades, even through generations. She recalls how one employee had to bring her baby to her interview, and Brook got to hold him while they talked. “I have a soft spot for moms,” she says, and didn’t let Chamonix’s lack of a babysitter keep her from working at Dessert Gallery for 10 years. Chamonix has since passed away, but an intricate mosaic she gifted to Brook hangs at the café today, and Brook keeps in touch with the baby boy she once held, now grown and serving in the Army.
And that’s just one story.
Brook is the biggest fan of the people who work for her. As I followed her on a tour of the kitchen, she spoke to everyone by name, understanding every employee’s function in the kitchen, describing the skills and attention to detail that they each brought to their jobs. We watched Bruno frost a series of French vanilla cakes with a practiced hand and reflected on the amount of experience that goes into his work. Making desserts by hand means making them with love, she believes; Brook says she will instruct her staff to add amor and they understand that means more frosting, more chocolate, more of whatever will take that dessert over the top.
“I believe that’s what makes our desserts different from anybody else’s: They are handmade, made with love in small batches … If you came to my home, I would make it the same way.”
Family is at the heart of what Brook does at Dessert Gallery, and her own family has had an impact on the direction of the business, from her daughter Jennifer’s spearheading of a rebrand for the 20th anniversary to using the recipe for grandfather’s favorite carrot cake. Brook says that she constantly feels the presence of her mother and grandmother especially, “because they were such inspirations for me.” A four-generation portrait hangs on her office wall, featuring her grandmother to her daughter, a daily reminder of her strong roots.
When her mother passed away, Brook turned to the recipe box that she had passed down. “One day when I was really missing her, I sat down on the floor and read every single recipe.” Dessert Gallery introduced some new menu items after that day, including the caramelitas (recipe p. 40), made exactly like her mom did (just on a larger scale.) Like a thick chocolate-chip cookie, but gooey with caramel and textured with oatmeal, caramelitas are an indulgent treat as well as an honor to eat, knowing the place they occupy in Brook’s heart.
As Brook defined for herself what kind of business she would bring to the world, she became the role model that she never had, proving how fulfilling a left turn in life can be. Sharing a little bit of amor drawn from her own family bonds, Sara Brook puts love into the world in a way that simply makes her happy.
“I love having impacted people’s lives, whether it’s someone who wanted to have an internship in the kitchen, long-time employees and their children, long-time customers and their children … I feel proud of it and I feel accomplished. It’s a wonderful, tiny imprint that I get to leave on the world that I feel good about.”
