On a Roll

Meet Aaron Clouse, the culinary wizard behind the hot new pastries Columbus can’t stop talking about

By Melinda Green / Photos by Sumner Howells / Story Design by Victoria Smith

Parable Coffee, in the heart of downtown, isn’t your typical coffee shop.

“We love to reduce things to their most fundamental economic blocks,” said co-owner Ben Willis. “[People] come in and say ‘I can’t believe a latte is nine dollars.’ But every single step of the process was done by human beings.”

“The consumer has no idea how anything came to be. Generally, they’re being taken advantage of by corporations. But we’re very transparent,” he continued.

Definitely not a typical approach to coffee. And, thanks to pastry chef Aaron Clouse, you won’t get typical pastries here, either. “Give me a pen and paper, and I can draw stick figures,” Clouse said. “But 3D, my brain is wired to do 3D art.”

Clouse, a native of Tiffin, Ohio, attended the French Pastry School in Chicago. It was an intense program, with so much more to offer than the small-town bakeries back home.

“I grew up on a farm,” Clouse said. “I grew up milking cows. I started doing some cakes in high school, for friends’ graduation parties and whatnot, and I loved it, but I didn’t know there could be a career in that outside cake decorating.”

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After high school, he enrolled in Heidelberg University to study music. Soon, though, he realized, “It turns out I’m a little tone-deaf. It was not a match made in heaven.”

Meanwhile, his baking got better and better.

He withdrew from college after one semester, signed a lease on a Chicago apartment sight unseen, and called his parents.

“My parents are very smart, very educated, very organized. They were upset for a day, and then my mom cosigned on my loan so I could go to school,” he recalled. And his journey began.

He knew he needed to land in a big city to accomplish his goals. “Fresh out of school, places in Chicago want to offer $13.00 an hour to be a pastry cook, and it’s like, there’s no realistic way to stay.”

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Columbus was close enough to—and far enough away from—his family in Tiffin, and he decided to make his mark here.

He started at The Refectory. It was the refined, classic, French direction he knew well. But, after a year or two, his creativity started to struggle with such structure.

He eventually landed at A&R Creative Group, where creating different dessert menus for different local restaurants allowed his ideas to grow. It wasn’t long before he accepted the invitation to join his friends at Parable and unleash his creativity.

“If I could find one word to find my style, the word would be ‘whimsical,’” he said. “A lot of the inspiration comes from the traditional desserts, reimagined. Like mashups.

“So it’s very much like, crème brulée is one of my favorite things; I absolutely hate making cookies, but I know that a crème brulée cookie would actually work as a hand-held dessert.”

And what about those circular croissants? Well, Clouse keeps close watch on industry publications and colleagues to spot trends.

“I was like, ‘You know what, there’s this circular croissant trend that’s in Singapore right now.’ I realized I had the opportunity to bring that trend to Columbus before other cities would catch on.

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A lot of our savory food [in Columbus] is on-trend. Unfortunately, pastry is something that changes quick. I really want to push and do things that New York is just starting to do.”

Plus, croissants are his favorite pastry to make. “Croissants are intense on the technical side, but once you know the dough, you can do a lot of cool things with it,” he continued. Why croissant dough works the way it does fascinates me. You do one little step wrong, and it won’t work at all.”

One of his favorite things about his career so far has been his experience on Food Network. “I feel like I thrive in chaos—I think it’s the energy is just so high,” he admitted.

In the beginning, he interviewed for shows and was rejected, he says, because he was “robotic” and formal in the video interviews. Then, a producer told him to “just let loose in your next interview”—and he did.

He applied for "Halloween Baking Championship", thinking it was the winter Holiday Baking Championship. “In my head, I’m like, I’m gonna go make little reindeer cookies, all that,” he said. “I don’t know if they thought I was joking, or somewhere I missed the memo that it was Halloween, but I was like ‘Look, it’s a Christmas tree on a frozen lake,’ and I had little dry ice.”

But he was accepted. In California, he met the rest of the cast and quickly realized he had made a big mistake. “For the three days before filming, I Googled every Halloween character he could think of,” he said. “I was watching scary movies every day in the hotel room, and I don’t like scary movies at all.”

But he embraced the chaos and finished as a finalist.

He admits that pastry is a difficult field to make a career in. The pay is rarely lucrative, and jobs as a pastry chef are few and far between. He’s had to do things to set himself apart in order to make a life out of it.

And he’s definitely making his mark at Parable.

To learn more, visit parableparable.com