Let Fou d'amour Make You Dinner

If , a bakery and café whose recipes wind up on dozens, if not hundreds, of Pointers’ tables each week, had a motto or a tagline there would be no need to take a fancy or French approach.

For a business whose name means Crazy in Love, it could be simply: Dinner driving you crazy? Let us handle it!

It’s what Michele Makowski and Darcy Towns, partners and co-owners of the bakery, catering and dinner-take out spot that turns five this year, do nearly every day of the week. That is make dinner for someone else, not their own families. Each has two children, each work long days and each would love having a fresh meal ready to go.

“We’re crazy in love with what we do,” says Makowski. “We know what we would want to feed our families and that’s what we do.”

Look at the stainless steel tables and counters in the kitchen of their French- and family-recipe inspired café on lower Kercheval in the Park and you’ll see what you’d see in any home kitchen where fresh meals are made.

Peas, flour, pasta, milk, chicken, spices, whatever goes into the Wednesday night dinners, carryout casseroles and baked goods such as scones. 

Theirs is not take-out in the sense of Thai or Chinese or cheeseburgers or other restaurant fare that will box up what they make.

This is food made from a kitchen that might as well be in a home. It is food made by moms who make meals they would want their families to eat. It is made with produce and meats from Eastern Market, from ingredients bought fresh daily and weekly. Stop by and you can see for yourself.

Casseroles such as unstuffed pepper bake and lobster mac-and-cheese are available for carryout Tuesday – Saturday. Casseroles were added to the menu about a year ago when they noticed demand for dinners went beyond Wednesday nights. Wednesday Night Dinners come with salads. Casseroles stand alone.

“When we started the casseroles, we thought let’s do 15. We sold 40. It just got to be more and more. So we added a second night and a third night,” makowski says.

Last week, for Wednesday Night Dinner, 87 orders had been emailed or called in by mid-morning Wednesday, and they expected to hit 100 for the dinner that is Makowski’s favorite: chicken patties. They are seasoned chicken cutlets, ground and seasoned right in their kitchen and served on angel hair pasta with peas and a wedge salad.

If customers aren’t ordering for themselves, it could be for a sick friend or someone who needs a hand getting through the week or a tough time.

“They’ll call or come in saying, 'I really want a home-cooked meal but I’m just too busy to make it myself,' ” Makowski says.

“Dinner can be the biggest pain in the butt,” Makowski says. “We cook all day so you don’t have to.”

Sounds like another tagline!

This week's Wednesday Night Dinner is braised short ribs over rice and stewed tomatoes with green beans and a cookie. The Comfort Casseroles are chicken pot pie and tuna noodle, using sauce recipes from Towns' family.

The carryout business and baked goods make up about a third of the business. The other 2/3 is catering, which is how Fou d’amour started long before it had a commercial space to work from.

Then its name was Just Delicious and then it was very much about the catering and more and more the scones, which wound up on grocers' shelves.

Fou’ d’ Amour still makes its own scones - cranberry apricot is the top seller - but they are not the same as Just Delicious scones.

The former partners split last year, one focusing on wholesaling scones, the other keeping the catering, carryout meals and their own scone recipes as well as other baked goods. Makowski says she and Towns chose not to go the route of scone distribution because of the size of space and solely-focused time commitment it required.

“Scones are our bread and butter,” Makowski says. “We still wanted to do our other things.”

Customers to the restaurant located at 15110 Kercheval are mostly Park residents, she says, but a Groupon brought in Farms and Shores residents who told the owners they wished they known about them sooner. Fou d'amour, which Makowski points out sounds like food and love when spoken quickly, has an email list that hits 1,700 and is increasing each week by about 10.

In keeping with the French meaning of their business name, it’s crazy how the business keeps growing, Makowski says.

“It’s the best feeling to have people say, ‘Oh my god, thank you, for taking care of this. They are just so appreciative,” she says.

And then she thinks, laughing: “Come on, why doesn’t someone make a casserole for me?” 

Email michelejustdelicious@hotmail.com or call 823-8425.