New dessert cafe opens downtown

Local dessert lovers have a new place to satisfy their cravings with the opening of a dessert café and cake shop downtown. \nPastry chef and chocolatier David Fletcher opened BLU Boy Chocolate Café and Cakery on Aug. 8 at 112 E. Kirkwood Ave., in a space next to the Buskirk Chumley Theater. \nThe cafe offers espresso drinks, cakes and treats like banana rum teacakes, vanilla and raspberry cupcakes, handmade chocolates, mudslide cookies and brownies labeled “really dark chocolate brownies.” \nFletcher, 43, opened the store after working for 16 years as a physician. He now wears a shirt that reads “You may stray but you will always return to your dark master ... the cocoa bean” and says the shop fulfills his passion for cooking.\n“You only have one life to live,” Fletcher said. “(Medicine) is certainly meaningful, but for me it wasn’t my passion. I liked what I did but it wasn’t what fueled me.”\nIn August 2002, Fletcher started refining his culinary skills. While still working as a physician at the IU Health Center, he flew to New York City every weekend for nine months to take an intensive pastry-making class at the Institute of Culinary Education, a culinary school. \nHe resigned from the health center in May 2007 and now devotes most of his time to the shop, arriving at 5 a.m. every day to bake and prepare for the store to open at 7:30 a.m.\nIt’s a lot of work, but Fletcher said that from a young age he knew he wanted to be a chef, reading cookbooks while others were reading bestselling novels.\n“I was always the kind of person that would read cookbooks for fun. That was my pleasure.” Fletcher said. “My mother never baked; she hates to bake. I made my own birthday cakes.”\nAs a young man, however, becoming a chef seemed less than ideal. \n“At the time there weren’t people like Emeril and Rachael Ray and all the people you see on the Food Network,” he said. “There wasn’t the glamour and it wasn’t the profession that it is now.” \nScott Jackman, Fletcher’s business partner, says the shop hopes to make gourmet chocolate and desserts more approachable to customers. \n“We don’t want to be that froofy place,” Jackman said. “People see these pastries with silly French names and it’s intimidating. Some people could walk in and think, ‘Oh, that thing has a weird name and maybe I don’t belong here.’ We want people to have fun and be in on the secret.” \nThe shop also tries to use as many seasonal, local dairy products and ingredients as possible, Fletcher said. \nChristine Barbour, an IU political science lecturer and a food writer for Bloom Magazine, said that’s a good idea. She predicts the shop will be a success. \n“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Barbour said, “but I see them doing very well. They use, as much as they can, local foods – which is pretty amazing, wonderful from a health perspective and tastes good. I go every day and I could live on those mudslide cookies.”\nDoug Bader, a friend and customer, said he wants the shop to do well. \n“(David’s) a remarkable man and this community is so fortunate for having him,” Bader said. “We’re very, very pleased that he’s here.”\nFletcher and Jackman said they hope to extend their hours beyond the current closing time of 6 p.m. and plan on increasing their customer base.\n“We are waiting to see what the market will do, but we would like to see (the shop) as a date place for after-dinner dessert,” Fletcher said. “We kind of like to see ourselves as a dessert house rather than a coffee house.” \nAnd perhaps in this dessert house, Fletcher should be wearing a shirt that does not say “You will always return to your master ... the cocoa bean,” but rather “You will always return to your inner child.”\nAfter all, that is exactly what Fletcher decided to do.