by Allison Braden

Ann Marie and Jean Luc Barrucand. Allison Braden / UP

On a wet weekday afternoon in April, Chocolatier Barrucand, in downtown Concord, isn’t busy. Wine bottles sit on a homey shelf by the door. Counters and pastry cases, arranged in a “U” shape, fill the shop, full of bonbons and croissants.

There are no tables. A group of three deliberates over the tarts, cakes, and cannoli, then braves the rain with their choices. Ann Marie Barrucand invites me into the kitchen, and over the clatter of baking sheets and whirr of appliances, she and her husband, Jean Luc Barrucand, tell me how they met.

It was 1991, and Jean Luc — a native of Lyon, France, who’d moved to the United States in 1985 — was pastry chef at Myers Park Country Club. Ann Marie took a job as his assistant, and they soon fell in love. They married a year later and were no longer allowed to work together, so Ann Marie, who had followed her mother and stepfather to Charlotte from upstate New York, decamped for a series of jobs at country clubs around town.

She also worked a stint at Roux Fine Dining at what was then NationsBank (now Bank of America). The baking operations were on the 60th floor, which Ann Marie often had to herself, because the rest of the kitchen was one level below. “Once in a while,” she says, “I’d see Hugh McColl in the hallway.”

Ann Marie had baked with her mother growing up, and she started in the hospitality industry in high school, when she took a job in a kitchen. When I ask if she enjoyed it, she says, “I guess I did because I’m still here.” Jean Luc knew he wanted to bake from an early age. He couldn’t see himself going to college, and his father told him he should pick something that would always allow him to feed his family. He began studying pastry at a specialty school at 14 and took an internship at 16.

The couple, now in their 60s, always aspired to open their own shop. “We were collecting equipment for years in our garage,” Ann Marie says. She gestures across the kitchen. “That walk-in cooler, tables, and all that.”

Around 2007, the Barrucands were tired. After 15 years at Myers Park Country Club, Jean Luc had “had enough,” and Ann Marie was done with floating from job to job. The timing was right. Ann Marie is laconic about the moment their longtime dream became a reality: “We looked for a place, and this ended up being the spot.”

A selection of pastries at Chocolatier Barrucand. Allison Braden/UP

They opened in 2008, weeks before the financial crash. They weathered the challenge together. “For many years,” Ann Marie says, “it seemed like it was just the two of us.” The various obstacles tested their resolve as business owners but, they say, never their marriage. They’d met in the workplace, after all, and knew how to collaborate in the kitchen.

The couple lives just ten minutes away, in a house they bought soon after opening. Ann Marie loves Concord and confesses she rarely gets to Charlotte. “Every time we go,” she says, “it’s like, ‘Where am I?’” She likens Concord to the small town where she grew up in New York. “Everybody knows everybody here,” she says. She adds that when they opened, the expectation was that they’d know all the locals “automatically.” Now, after 15 years in business, they do.

Neither Jean Luc nor Ann Marie, who’d mostly worked in kitchens, were accustomed to interacting with customers. “That,” Ann Marie says, “was a whole learning curve.” Their concept — a classic French patisserie — was foreign to many of their first customers. “The people who came in,” Ann Marie says, were like, ‘What’s this?’” They used to have a sign that said “patisserie,” but, she says, “a lot of people didn’t know what that was.” So they changed it to “French bakery.”

Eventually, they hired a few staff members — young Johnson & Wales grads who have stayed with the shop for years. When the pandemic struck, the Barrucands let them go for a couple of months and worked the shop by themselves but were soon able to hire them back. Business, Ann Marie says, “never really slowed down,” something she attributes to their counter-service setup. They stopped hosting wine tastings, though, which they still haven’t brought back.

But Concord is growing — apartments are going up and the road outside the shop was under construction when I visited. The Barrucands plan to offer a wider selection of French gourmet products, something else they used to do and had cut back on.

It’s part of 15 years of evolution and adaptation. The Barrucands don’t have a menu, which frees them from making the same things over and over. “We did away with a website because we don’t really need it, because we don’t have a menu,” Ann Marie says. Instead, they post pictures on Facebook and Instagram. They cleared the space of tables in 2019 — a prescient move, just months before the pandemic — because customers had trashed the bathroom and they no longer wanted to maintain a public restroom, which are required in establishments with seating.

The Barrucands’ son, in his 40s, has no interest in taking over the shop, but the couple doesn’t plan to retire soon anyway. Their business is different than when they started, and the couple is more relaxed. They take vacations now, which they never could when they started, and are more comfortable thanks to a successful track record, despite the challenges. Although, Ann Marie and Jean Luc agree, they never take it for granted.

“We just make it work for us,” Ann Marie says, “and do what we enjoy doing.”