Cooking Up Success: Fayetteville Eatery Opens Specialty Food Store

After the lunch rush on the Saturday after New Year’s Day, Vince Pianalto, co-owner of Fayetteville’s Bouchée Bistro, and his two partners took a seat at a table at their restaurant for an important meeting.

Their agenda: map out a strategy for their upcoming trip to the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. For the uninitiated, the Fancy Food Show is a biannual extravaganza where folks in the specialty foods business buy and sell products ranging from the familiar (cheese, tea, chocolate) to the uber-trendy (spinach and matcha tea kettle chips, artichoke water, coconut beer).

With only two weeks left to go before they set off for the West Coast, the trio sifts through a list of 1,400 exhibitors peddling some 80,000 products in an effort to solidify their game plan. The stakes couldn’t be higher. In just a few weeks, after their return, they’ll be opening the doors to their new specialty food store on the downtown Fayetteville square, Bouchée Kitchen, stocking the shelves with many of the items they score in San Francisco.

“There’s a wow factor when it comes to food,” Pianalto explained recently. “For instance, in our bistro, the plate has to wow you. Now we’ll have an entire store that will need to wow people.”

With their expansion into retail, Pianalto and his partners — Sammy Townsend and Justin Calvert — are striving to fill a hole that now exists in the evolving culinary scene in Northwest Arkansas. In fact, it was their own frustration at not being able to easily get their hands on certain fine food items, either for a catering gig or for service at the bistro, which prompted them to venture into specialty food retail to begin with.

“We had a client who wanted caviar for a very high-profile party, and we couldn’t get caviar spoons, and of course we had to overnight the caviar,” Pianalto says. “And we thought, ‘We’re a big enough community now that these are the sort of products we should be able to find here.’”

Bouchée Kitchen, which will be located directly across the street from the bistro — a cheerful nook tucked into the East Square Plaza building — seems a natural progression to what the three chefs have been up to for the past few years. For its part, the bistro is now the place to go to grab a prosciutto, fig and brie tartine, a plate of roasted marrow or a croquet madame. A selection of fresh-baked breads and pastries and handmade chocolate truffles are also on the menu.

When the retail space opens, a nice symbiosis will exist between the two businesses, Pianalto says. For instance, a diner could gobble up a plate of poached eggs en croute topped with black truffles, then mosey across the street to purchase a jar of said black truffles.

Three Chefs and a Bistro

For some, it’s hard to square the growing fancy food business anchored by Bouchée Bistro with the actual man arguably responsible for its existence: Vince Pianalto. For one thing, he’s Italian, not French. And for another, the Springdale native is a far cry from the haughty chef you’d expect to be behind such fare as escargot in garlic cream sauce, or blueberry with port ganache truffles. But it’s this juxtaposition that may very well be at the heart of the businesses’ success.

“In many ways, Vince is the best person to develop this niche here,” says Chef Maudie Schmitt, owner of Fayetteville’s Café Rue Orleans. “Because he’s warm, friendly, and most of all approachable.”

“Not to mention,” she adds, “the guy’s a natural teacher.”

And in fact, it was a teaching stint of Pianalto’s that gave rise to the three-chef partnership that serves as a driving force behind the growing business.

More than two decades into a career in food — one that included the openings and closings of two restaurants (one an Italian eatery in Tontitown and the other a bakery in Fayetteville), teaching at the then-brand new culinary program at the Northwest Arkansas Community College and working for Williams-Sonoma — Pianalto had settled into a rewarding job teaching culinary arts at Springdale High School. Townsend and Calvert were two of his best and brightest students and under his mentorship shined at various state and national cooking competitions.

“When they graduated, I shook their hands and said, ‘When you guys are ready to open a restaurant let me know,’” Pianalto says. “And about two years later they were like, ‘Are you ready to go?’” 

True to his promise, Pianalto established a partnership with the two young chefs and the three of them opened the first iteration of their restaurant — the Bouchée food truck (“bouchée” is French for “a bite of something”) parked at the “Yacht Club” in Fayetteville to serve up French-style cuisine.

“For the three of us, it’s the most pure culinary form,” Pianalto says of the decision to cook French food. “It’s a technique that’s very tried and true, not to mention that no one else was doing it.”

Encouraged by their success with the food truck, the three moved their business into its current brick-and-mortar location, where they’ve been churning out fresh croissants daily for three years. 

It’s the synchronicity between the three partners that has served as the secret ingredient behind the businesses’ success, Pianalto says.

“The three of us just really balance each other out,” he says. For example, in the kitchen, each of the chefs has a particular focus that when taken together rounds out the bistro’s menu, he explains. For his part, Townsend is the chocolatier, whereas Calvert gravitates toward pastry and Pianalto focuses much of his attention on the savory side of things.

And surprisingly, the generational gap that exists between Pianalto and his two former students is another factor that keeps the team well-balanced. While Pianalto brings his years of wisdom and experience to the table, he looks to Millennials Townsend and Calvert for their tech and social media savviness, he says.

But while Pianalto refuses to personally take credit for the businesses’ success, others in the community aren’t so quick to dismiss his contribution, not only to his own business, but to the growth of the area’s larger culinary scene.

“Vince is a legacy builder,” says Daniel Hintz, founder of The Velocity Group. “He didn’t just cook or own a restaurant, he taught, and that’s how you build a scene — you actually cultivate talent and you expand people’s palates, and that’s something that Vince has been doing in Northwest Arkansas for a long time.”

The Kitchen and Beyond

Expanding people’s palates will be a major focus of Bouchée Kitchen, slated to open either at the end of January or the beginning of February.

To that end, the largest percentage of the store’s merchandise will be specialty food items. And while the chefs will import many out-of-town products — for instance, they’ve already begun building a relationship with the popular San Francisco-based cheese company, Cow Girl Creamery — an entire section of the shop will be dedicated to locally made Arkansas items, like cheese from the Elkins-based cheesemakers White River Creamery, coffee from Springdale-headquartered Onyx Coffee Lab and syrups, bitters and shrubs from Bentonville-based Pink House Alchemy.

The shop’s stock of kitchen supplies will also have a bit of local flavor. For instance, Fayetteville-based custom clothing maker BonnerBell has already signed on to make a line of aprons for the store. And of course, some products will come straight from the bistro’s kitchen, such as chocolate truffles, fresh-baked bread and Townsend’s famous pâté.

In addition to specialty food and kitchen supplies and appliances, Bouchée Kitchen will also host cooking classes, like pasta and chocolate-making classes, as well as pop-up dinners in its 1,800 SF of space.

As busy as the three chefs are with the opening of their retail space, they continue to eye other potential opportunities for growth. For one thing, they’re on the lookout for the perfect location for a Tapas restaurant in Fayetteville, the name of which has already been decided upon: “Bocado,” the Spanish translation of “a bite of something.”

And not surprisingly, their gaze has fallen on the exploding culinary scene in Bentonville. To that end, Pianalto says one future opportunity for growth may lie with the expanding culinary program at NWACC’s Brightwater: A Center for the Study of Food. At the school’s new location at the former Tyson Foods plant in downtown Bentonville, there will be a public market space where food retail vendors will play a role. Pianalto says he has had very preliminary discussions about perhaps selling Bouchée chocolate, breads and pastries there. In addition, it could be that a small satellite location of Bouchée Kitchen will be established there.

For his part, Glenn Mack, executive director of Brightwater, views Pianalto’s culinary talent and success as a resource that he says he hopes the school can indeed tap into. Specifically, he foresees the possibility of Pianalto teaching a class, delivering guest lectures or acting as a mentor to students. Indeed, one of the new focuses of the culinary program is food entrepreneurship, of which Pianalto is a fine example, Mack says.

“To have expertise in food truck ops, brick and mortar retail and specialty foods, it’s not just expanding one business and making it bigger or adding on more locations, but they’re doing different types of food-related businesses so kudos to them,” Mack said. “We need more culinary ambassadors like Chef Vince and his team to really show people that you can pursue your love and passion for food and also make a living at it.”