Farrell: Owner of The Midnight Bakers in Bluffton gets helping hand from young apprentice
Olivia Renaud is like most 22-year-old pastry chef apprentices.
She's poised, focused and interested in mastering each new skill she's taught.
She puts her own playful spin on classic recipes.
She's competitive.
Curious.
Bright.
Yes, she's just like most 22-year-old pastry chef apprentices, except for the part where she's 9.
I hung out with Olivia and her mother, Jennifer Rudemyer, on Mother's Day at The Midnight Bakers in Old Town Bluffton, where the two frequently can be seen, especially on Sundays, when Olivia helps serve customers and learns to make things like tarts and cakes.
Rudemyer and her daughter started coming to the bakery, which is owned by Robert Plantadis, in January when they stopped in for coffee and a treat while out exploring their neighborhood.
They've been stopping in ever since.
Plantadis, a pastry chef originally from France, treats the bakery like a home and his customers like guests. Service is informal; regulars can help themselves to more coffee or grab a pastry from behind the counter if Plantadis is busy helping someone else. He encourages that familiarity -- customers call him by his first name, pronouncing it "Roe-bear" -- which in turn adds to the cozy nature of the small corner shop in the Calhoun Street Promenade.
Olivia fits right in.
"She's just very curious," Rudemyer told me. "She asked if she could look behind the counter. Then she wanted to go in the kitchen. She had a lot of questions."
And that was it. Soon Olivia, a third-grader in the gifted and talented program at Hilton Head Island Elementary School, was helping Plantadis -- or rather he, her.
She's learned to count change and greet and serve customers. She's learned to wipe a counter by spraying the cleaning solution onto the towel and not directly onto the surface. She's even learned what most would consider to be a very valuable life lesson.
"Kids are used to 'Good job! Good job!,'" said Rudemyer, who is an English teacher at H.E. McCracken Middle School. "It's not always 'good job!' in a bakery. There's a right and wrong way to do things."
It's seems like a rarity these days to see a kid who wants to be so hands on, observing real life and learning from someone older, doing "work." It's an old-fashioned image almost, one that doesn't feature iPhones or iPads or trips to mass-marketed restaurants with food that gets unpacked and not created, as Plantadis pointed out to me in what I thought was a very interesting thing to consider.
While Olivia learns how to master tasks like forming dough into tart pans or the rules of how to properly handle food, Rudemyer watches, drinks coffee and happily chats with other customers.
"It's a relaxing time for me," she said. "We both love it for different reasons."
They typically hang out for a few hours, Olivia in a puffy chef's hat and an apron that has to circumference her waist several times before the ends of the belt can be tied. She is at once independent and obedient, immediately helping customers pick out a pastry -- on tiptoes from behind the high counter, with just a few inches of blue eye peeking over -- but also looking to Plantadis for instruction or to make sure he sees that she's done something the way she's been told to.
She was perched on a stool in the kitchen while I was there, using a small roller to evenly shape and manipulate a delicate dough without tearing it.
When she was done, she flew over to her Rudemyer.
"Mama! Mama! I did it!," Olivia said, giving her a single flour-dust clap.
After seeing Plantadis interact with Olivia for a while, it was no surprise to find out that he has four sons .... and all grandsons.
Not a little girl among the lot.
Olivia clearly brings him joy. The money she earns from tips goes into a fund he's created for her, and he cannot stop talking about how great of a student she is.
In other words, Olivia has become a surrogate granddaughter to him.
Beyond this, though, he sees actual talent.
"The natural ability she has is unreal," he told me in heavily accented English, a reminder that he is French and knows from cooking ability.
Despite advanced abilities in the kitchen, she's still a kid; she can make a fruit tart, but don't be surprised if she's arranged the kiwi and blueberries into a smile.
"Is she wearing lipstick?," I asked Rudemyer at one point, noticing Olivia's pronounced smile.
"That's Olivia! Accessories and fashion," she responded with the classic loving-mom micro-eyeroll that I recognized from my own days of insisting on Bonne Bell and stirrup pants.
Olivia is busy-minded, in general. She loves to dance and read and swim and hang out with friends. (She thinks she might have two best friends.) And she loves to shop. In a classic demonstration of her kid-like charm and abled maturity, she loves both "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Chopped."
"I used to want to be a teacher," she told me. "But now I want to be a chef."
Her love of cooking comes from her father, who is also French and lives on Hilton Head. He taught her to make crepes, she said.
"I want to learn to make creme brulee," she told Plantadis and Rudemyer.
He beamed.
Rudemyer did not.
"Ohhhh. Fire."
Follow columnist and senior editor Liz Farrell at twitter.com/elizfarrell or facebook.com/elizfarrell.
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This story was originally published May 15, 2015 at 1:29 PM with the headline "Farrell: Owner of The Midnight Bakers in Bluffton gets helping hand from young apprentice."