Brisha Hemby, Formerly of Bridgehampton, Finds a Sweet Success Story in Paris

Someone strolling along the Rue Saint-Martin or Rue de Turbigo after visiting the Centre Pompidou, or one of the other smaller museums that dot the Marais district in Paris, could easily miss Le Passage de l’Ancre.

It’s a narrow, pedestrian-only street, dating to the days before Baron Haussmann’s massive urban renewal project in the mid-19th century created the broad boulevards and uniform streetscapes that today define the French capital.

Among the tiny shops there is Batter, an online wedding cake business launched by Brisha Hemby in early January.

Hemby, 46, who was born and raised in Bridgehampton, lived in New York City for years, where she worked as a makeup artist for the likes of the Jonas Brothers and Harry Connick Jr.

But France always held a special place in her heart.

“Living in Paris was my dream since I was a kid,” she said, describing how she took French classes and was a member of the French club while a student at the Bridgehampton School. “Luckily, work brought me to Paris several times and gave me a small taste of what life would be like here.”

When she wasn’t on tour, Hemby enjoyed baking and took pride in the birthday cakes and other creations she made for her friends in the city. She also harbored a desire to one day attend Le Cordon Bleu, the elite cooking school in Paris.

“I remember I sent away for a brochure,” she said. “But I couldn’t take off six months of work to go, so I forgot about it.”

That changed in 2017, with the death of her father, Delvin Hemby, a popular deckhand on the South Ferry that links Shelter Island to North Haven and a part-time chef himself. Her mother, LaRosa, had died in 2001, and Hemby realized there was no time like the present to follow one’s dreams.

“It was incredible, like the best education ever,” she said of her time at Le Cordon Bleu. “But it also was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

Everything had to be done according to strict protocols, recipes were precise, and points were even taken off if a student’s uniform wasn’t properly pressed, let alone if a crust was the slightest bit overdone. Hemby said she still has three binders of recipes she learned while a student at the school that she makes from time to time.

Graduating from Le Cordon Bleu opened the door for Hemby to remain in Paris. Diploma in hand, she qualified for an apprenticeship, known as “un stage” in French, with Christophe Adam, who — and only in France would this be possible — is renowned for his eclairs.

Soon afterward, she was hired by a French food media company to be filmed preparing American recipes, which were posted on Facebook and Instagram. “Most of their sponsors come from the U.S., so they focused on American recipes, and they wanted Americans to make them,” she said.

That job also played a crucial role in allowing Hemby, whose student visa would otherwise have expired, to stay in France. The company, she said, hired a lawyer to help her obtain a one-year work visa as a salaried employee.

But aware of Paris’s reputation as one of the world’s leading choices for destination weddings and eager to branch out on her own, Hemby began laying plans to open her own bakery. The COVID-19 pandemic gave her time to put together a business plan, obtain a one-year entrepreneur’s visa, get a website designed, and find a place that would be large enough for a staff of one to work.

“I made it up as I was going along,” she said. “I just took this jump. I found this shop on the internet one day after looking for nine months. It all happened really fast.”

That went for the orders, too. Ordinarily, one might think that a Parisian bakery devoted to American-style custom cakes, hidden away in a tiny alley, might take a little time to find its footing, but Hemby said she received her first order just a couple of days after she opened for business and hasn’t looked back.

“I’m part of a lot of expat groups on Facebook,” she said. “I made an announcement that I was open, and that’s how I got my first orders.”

Hemby said she has weddings booked solid through autumn. She works with a hotel, but also networks with wedding planners to find potential clients.

She offers a menu of standards such as red velvet cake and chocolate cake, but she works with customers on all manner of custom cakes that, to judge from the images on her website, battercakestudio.com, are almost too beautiful to eat for dessert.

Hemby delivers her cakes herself, usually hiring an Uber to drive her to wherever the wedding is being held. And, no, she doesn’t worry about a perfectly made wedding cake toppling over in the back seat if the driver has to make a sudden stop. “Most weddings in France are smaller than American weddings,” she said. “So the cakes are smaller, too.”

In the nearly six years she has lived in France, Hemby has seen some major changes, including the continued impact of globalization, for one. When a McDonald’s opened on the Champs-Élysées in the late 1990s, it was almost scandalous, but now Paris has KFCs and Pizza Huts, and will soon have its own Krispy Kreme shop, which will probably be enough to cause soufflés to fall across France.

At first, Hemby rented an apartment in the 19th arrondissement in northeast Paris. She later moved to the 7th arrondissement, on the Left Bank. She now lives with her boyfriend, Farid Bodet, in an apartment in Bussy-Saint-Georges, a suburb of Paris in the Île de France region.

“I guess I’ve always been drawn to French culture and the French way of life. It really suits me, and I really feel at home here,” she said, adding with no little irony that she now lives just two stops away from another symbol of globalization: Disneyland Paris.

While she has some fond memories of Bridgehampton, Hemby said she has no plans to return. “There are things about it that I miss, but nothing that makes me want go back,” she said. “It would just make me feel sad, and I want to keep my memories of the good times and my childhood there. But it’s not that place anymore.”

She said she remembered picking strawberries, spending all day at the beach with her sister, Brandy, riding her bike on roads that weren’t always packed with cars. “We would leave in the morning and come back for dinner,” she said.

“The long-term plan is to stay here and become a bit more well known,” she said. “I don’t have any plans to leave. I’m going to stay and make it work.”