PROFILE
SWEET TASTE OF SUCCESS
Jen Barney rises from a basement bakery to star power with the Food Network and Meringue Bakery. BY SUSAN C. SCHUYLER | PHOTOS BY FRONTIER PHOTOGRAPHY
J
en Barney, owner of La Crosse’s Meringue Bakery, remembers the precise moment when she first realized she could mix her passion for art and food into a job as she watched a television recruiting ad for pastry chefs. “I didn’t even know that was a career path you could take,” she says, flexing both hands above her head to illustrate how the idea blew her mind at the time. Within months, she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Minneapolis/St. Paul to study pâtisserie, the art of French pastries and cakes. “It had to be baking. It really did,” Barney says with an affable smile. She is dressed casually, seated at a bistro table where her generous laughter echoes against the crisp white walls of her Main Street bakery. The temptation to gaze at the shop’s gleaming casework is irresistible. There, meticulously prepared and arranged, are colorful rows of delectable homemade pastries, macarons, cupcakes—and so much more. A RISING STAR Barney’s masterful storytelling is equally hard to resist as she explains why she chose to pursue master baking instead of taking the
path of traditional chefs. “I could be a little more visually creative, and bakers have a lot better hours,” she says. And so it began—Barney’s meteoric rise to become the baking-competition television star and successful business owner she is today. To get there, Barney left behind a brief career as a corrections officer and an abandoned attempt to become an art teacher, and she has never looked back. After culinary school, she worked three years as a pastry chef in the Albuquerque Hyatt, then briefly returned to her hometown in Stanley, Wisconsin, to help at her parents’ restaurant, and later followed her best friend to La Crosse. Here, Barney honed her skills in many of the city’s most notable restaurant kitchens, including Four Sisters, The Waterfront and The Mint. STAR LIGHT, STAR BRIGHT “I was meant to be in pastry,” Barney says. She also knew that she was meant to start her own business. She got the chance to strike out on her own at Pogreba, a North Side La Crosse restaurant housed in a converted church, complete with a catering kitchen in its basement. “I worked third shift, trying to get my product out to all the farmers’ markets in town,” she says.
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