After 40 Years, Chestnut Fine Foods To Close

By Mona Mahadevan, New Haven Independent

NEW HAVEN, CT — After four decades of making freshly baked oat bread, chocolate mousse cake, and Brie-on-baguette sandwiches, Fred and Patty Walker are hanging up their aprons and heading into retirement.

Come Monday, Sept. 15, Chestnut Fine Foods & Confections — the pink-painted bakery, dessert shop, and deli on Upper State Street — will close its doors for good.

Hanmi Asian Foods, Chestnut’s neighbor, plans to take over the space and transform it into a Korean cafe.

“We’re planning to spend the next few weeks relaxing,” Patty said during a Thursday interview with the Independent. With a smile, Fred, her husband, teased, “We are?”

The Walkers have been cooking and baking seven days a week since 1985. Just months after their wedding, they opened Chestnut Fine Foods in a vacant Wooster Square storefront. Eighteen years later, the business moved to its current home, a ground-floor commercial space at 1012 State St.

There, Chestnut’s candy-colored façade and scalloped lavender sign endured for 22 years: a whimsical holdout on a corridor that’s been defined by change.

As Chestnut draws to a close, its next chapter — as a Korean cafe — will soon begin.

Jae Sim, one of Hanmi’s owners, said they plan to sell traditional side dishes, such as kimchi, and bento boxes. He’s not sure when they’ll open, but he’s projecting October.

"Just Taste It!"

Long before the Walkers built Chestnut into a State Street staple, Fred worked in marketing for a cheese company, and Patty designed interiors, primarily for stationery shops in the South.

She liked the work, she said, but she “really liked cooking” and “really liked baking.” So the couple started driving up and down Connecticut, doing commercial baking for companies along the coast.

Their success gave them the confidence to open Chestnut Fine Foods, a decision they said they’ve never regretted.

Patty developed the menu with help from well-thumbed Betty Crocker and James Beard cookbooks. Her secret to great recipes? “Just taste it!”

Over time, Fred took over the baking operations, expanding and refining the store’s bread recipes, which soon evolved into a core part of the menu.

Patty, the head chef, also designed the store’s interior. She recalled choosing its paint color, “Marshmallow Bunny,” the instant she heard the name: “How could I not?” she asked.

She lined hanging lampshades with upcycled boas, draped round tables in pink floral tablecloths, and filled wicker baskets with stacks of books.

Next to the cash register, wooden cases brim with rows of prepared foods: lemon bars, grilled cheese, raspberry tarts, pumpkin scones, and arugula salads, just to name a few. The store’s seasonal favorites — at the moment, key lime pie, French baguettes, and chicken pot pie — are tough to keep in stock.

These days, the store bakes close to 1,000 loaves of bread each week. During the holidays, “100 pounds of potatoes and 100 pounds of Brussels sprouts is nothing,” Patty said.

It took time, and some missteps, to work up to that scale.

Patty and Fred recalled preparing for New Haven’s 350th anniversary celebration back in 1988, just a few years after they first opened. The Walkers expected 100 four-inch tarts to last through the whole three-day festival on the Green, but they sold out in the first two hours.

So they went back to the store, Patty said, and baked “all through the day and night.” For all their efforts, they still sold out at 2 p.m. the next day.

“That’s when we realized we needed to step up our game,” said Patty.

They expanded their staff to include two more employees, increasing to six when catering weddings, birthdays, and other events.

Those events, Fred said, yielded their favorite, if sometimes chaotic, memories — like when they had to find a way to bring potable water to a wedding in the East Lyme woods.

“We’ve met wonderful people through those events,” said Fred, including classes of Yale graduate students at their weekly get-togethers.

Inside the store on Thursday, Gina Mackinnon, a prolific dog walker, remembered taking an English bulldog named Slider down State Street. When they’d walk past Chestnut, she said, “he’d park right in front of the door.”

Overhearing her story, Fred said, “I think I remember Slider!”

On Thursday afternoon, Mackinnon ordered a dozen bakery items, including pecan bars and a raspberry tart, for her mother-in-law’s 94th birthday party.

Two other “customers” in the store that day — a toy skeleton named Edwin and a stuffed teddy bear named Buddy — didn’t have much to say but sat, seemingly content, at a round table in the back of the store.

“We’ve been touched by people’s response to the closing,” said Patty, citing dozens of Facebook messages from longtime customers responding to the news. One person even wrote a poem about Chestnut, which the couple keeps within arm’s reach in the kitchen.

Another longtime customer, known to the Walkers just as “Marjo,” has purchased a chocolate mousse cake every month for 40 years. Fred offered to keep baking them for her, as long as she gives him a few days of advanced notice.

He’s also offered to teach a handful of loyal customers how to bake their favorite menu items.

Speaking of favorites, Thursday afternoon, Fred was baking one of Chestnut’s most popular loaves: Scottish oat bread. It’s been on the Chestnut menu for at least 22 years and was an original Patty recipe.

“I just made it up,” said Patty. When the couple traveled to Scotland to learn about Fred’s heritage — who said he has a “wee bit of Scottish” in him — they confirmed that there’s no such thing as “Scottish oat bread.”

Real or not, it’s this reporter’s favorite menu item. Made with molasses and honey, Chestnut’s oat bread is dense, soft, and lightly sweet. It’s best enjoyed in thin slices toasted with more honey and a little butter.

“We just love what we do,” said Patty, and that passion carried them through the last four decades, even through the pandemic. But now, in their mid-70s, they’re ready for new pursuits, including a cross-country train trip, blacksmithing classes, and woodworking projects.

They’ll still be around, they said, strolling Lighthouse Point Park and going to the movies.

Over the phone on Friday, Mary Quinn-Devine — the self-proclaimed “Irish soda bread lady” — told the Independent that Fred and Patty are “full of love, lightness, and goodness.”

She’s been ordering from Chestnut for 20 or 25 years, ever since her daughter, Ellen, introduced her to the store. She orders large batches of Irish soda bread to give to friends, family and neighbors.

The closing is “bittersweet,” she said. She’s very happy for Fred and Patty, she explained, but also “miserable for the rest of us.”

When Quinn-Devine heard a Korean restaurant would replace Chestnut, she said, “You know, that’s very joyful — another culture, a growing culture, is going to take it over.”

The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.