The bakery bringing delicious French pastries to the West

PROVO — When it comes to French pastries, nobody does it quite like Bonrue Bakery.

The French-inspired bakery offers up classics like a butter croissant, as well as sandwiches and other handcrafted pastries.

"When you have a good bakery, it brings such a neighborly community feel together," Bonrue co-founder Chris Connors told the Deseret News.

The bakery brand is rapidly expanding across Utah, with one new location that just opened up in Provo, Utah, just in time for the national attention the Brigham Young University and Notre Dame game is bringing to the city.

"We have a great team that's moving up to northern Utah that have been with us for a while here in southern Utah," Connors said. "So I'm excited about them going up there and growing with our brand."

They're not stopping with Provo. The bakery announced more locations for Orem and Spanish Fork, as well as 10 more locations across Utah that will be announced soon.

"I think there's a lot of intrastate travel in, especially in the state of Utah," Connors said. "And I think this seems like a natural progression, moving up to northern Utah."

The origins of Bonrue Bakery

Bonrue Bakery started out in St. George and quickly became such a popular hotspot that it expanded to two more locations in southern Utah.

Connors founded the European-style bakery in 2021 with his partners Li Hsun Sun and Chris Herrin, who are described as "food craft connoisseurs," who also happen to have extensive experience in the hospitality and restaurant world.

"I would say my passion is people," Connors said. "My passion is customers, hospitality."

Just months after opening Bonrue, Herrin, an experienced chef who worked at the likes of Bouchon and French Laundry, died of some health complications. Connors said the success of Bonrue serves as a tribute to his legacy.

"We just kept growing, and we felt like we owed Chris that," Connors said.

When it comes to Connors' experience, his background is in hospitality.

His first job was as a lifeguard and cabana host at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. A guest ended up offering him a job to run a group of sushi restaurants in San Diego. He was hesitant at first because he lacked experience in that industry, but his fiancée, now wife, encouraged him to go for it.

"I fell in love with it," Connors said. "It was just nonstop. It was just — I describe it as controlled chaos."

From there, he worked as a franchisee and director of franchise operations for a brand in Las Vegas. He soon teamed up with Sun to open a taco shop. After selling that, they opened a wine bar that they still own to this day. In 2020, he moved to St. George and started drafting plans for a restaurant that ultimately became Bonrue.

"I think it's a good neighborhood bakery, and that's one of our goals is just to be the best bakery in every neighborhood we go, in every community we go," Connors said. "We want to be good community partners."

What I ordered

I stopped by shortly after the bakery opened in Provo, and they were sold out of some of the main pastries I wanted to try.

So later in the week, I set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. to arrive in Provo shortly after the 7 a.m. opening to get my hands on the delicate pastries.

Here's what I ordered:

Guava cheese danish — It's a flaky pastry base packed with sweetened cream cheese mixture and guava, with tiny sugar crystals decorated on top. It's sweet and cheesy in the best way.

Chocolate croissant — This one is a bicolor croissant dough rolled up with dark chocolate. The chocolate offers up a delicious, tasty bite compared to the flakiness of the rest of the pastry. It's the best chocolate croissant I've ever tasted.

Kouign-amann — This little pastry is the queen of all pastries. It's a sweet milk dough layered and layered with delicious butter and sugar, and then it's all baked until it reaches a caramelized shell. It's sweet and flaky and delicious.

In order to make a good kouign-amann, you need two main things: "great butter" and "great lamination skills," according to Connors.

"It sounds like a simple thing to do, but it takes a lot of talent," said Connors.

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