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The Real City Listen. Adapt. Surprise.

La Madeleine founder Patrick Esquerre brought French elan to Dallas. But his company outgrew him, and now he’s reinventing himself in the classic Dallas style.
By Mary Brown Malouf |

SUAVE, IMPECCABLY DRESSED, HIS hands moving with nervous energy when he talks, Patrick Esquerre takes charge of our lunch situation with French gallantry. “You would like wine?” he asks in a tone that implies only one answer is possible. “The list please,” he requests of the waiter firmly. “Today we will have something French, if you don’t mind.”

Esquerre is “between projects” now. Reluctantly, he has separated (he insists it’s not a divorce) from his mistress of 15 years, the national chain of bakeries he founded soon after he moved to Dallas from France. He had been president, COO, and CEO, but over the past couple of years, Esquerre has been gradually edged out of those positions, one by one. He won’t air the exact disagreements that forced him out; he just says that if he’d retained 100 percent control, he would still be Mister Madeleine. But the fact is, he’s too much of a wild card to fit in the corporate structure La Madeleine’s success now requires. Esquerre operates without business plans and customer surveys. Instead, like most entrepreneurs, he’s guided as much by impulse and intuition as by facts and figures.

“It was a sad thing–I gave it up by degrees,” he says now of the Madeleine split, putting a hand over his heart. “But I am still the founder.”

As he tells his biography over a chilled glass of Sancerre, his life is divided into chapters, the first being his childhood on a farm in France, a time described in the cookbook From a French Country Kitchen that he wrote with his beloved mother. As an adult, Esquerre went to work in marketing and public relations, first with Young & Rubicam, then at his own firm. Not surprisingly, he specialized in challenging situations: Once he arranged for the pope’s appearance in a Paris football stadium. He managed 150 political meetings for Jacques Chirac, and he organized the “world’s first real robot exhibition.” Moving from food to religion to politics, he re-invented himself and his life constantly. La Madeleine was the invention that led him to end up in Dallas.

“I was a Lno-know.’” he says with a Maurice Chevalier-like, brow-raising smile. “I knew nothing. I didn’t speak English. I was a French immigrant. I didn’t know anything about baking. But I thought I had a good idea. My only choice was to listen.”

The lesson is, choose carefully to whom you listen. Patrick Esquerre listened to Stanley Marcus. The story of La Madeleine’s beginnings is almost a Dallas legend, and if it’s not yet, Esquerre’s on his way to making it one. When he needs advice, he says, he still turns to Mr. Marcus. It’s a simple philosophy, like those bracelets kids wear now that say, WWJD-What Would Jesus Do? Esquerre’s guiding question is WWMMD-What Would Mr. Marcus Do? He loves the story, but he makes it short.

“Mr. Marcus, he told me,” says Esquerre. “If I opened an authentic. French country bakery near SMU, it would be a winner. Period.”

Mr. Stanley, Dallas’ retail guru, describes himself wryly: “I make people figure out what, if they just sat down and thought about it long enough, they would figure out for themselves.” As Mr. Stanley remembers his advice to Esquerre, “Patrick asked me whether 1 thought he should open in Dallas or Houston. I told him. Houston is better if you’re going to open several stores simultaneously-the city is so spread out that it’s hard to pick the best geography. In Dallas it was easy: Pick a location near SMU. The audience is sure to be there most of the time, and they all want three meals a day. You protect yourself against the vicissitudes of a changing economy by targeting the students, a predictable, stable customer for nine months of the year, who always need what you have to sell.”

To more cautious people, entrepreneurs seem blindly self-confident. Esquerre says he started building the first bakery near the corner of Mockingbird and Central without an architect, just a contractor who learned to expect a lot of change orders. He took suggestions from passersby, who would ask what he was working on. He would answer by building what they asked for. “Somone would ask, ’Oh, a French bakery?’” he remembers. ’”Are you going to have a brick oven?’ So I’d put in a brick oven. Or they would ask, ’Are you going to have wood floors?’And I’d put in wood floors.”

A bachelor, Esquerre was practically a nanny to the first bakers, whom he brought, along with everything else, from France, and who were so French that they impatiently refused to figure out the hold function on the business tele phones. “They didn’t speak enough English to get around,” says Patrick. So he helped them with the formal ities-and the fun- of living, even play ing Santa Claus at Christmas. He extended the paternalism, the personal approach, and the big gestures as the chain of bakeries grew. Until he left, Esquerre considered La Madeleine’s employees his “family”-stretching the definition considerably, because by the time he left, there were 60 bakeries across the country employing nearly 3,000 people. And his guests were part of the family, too. There was always free bread and jam at the bakeries. He gave bread and desserts to most of the charitable fundraisers, dinners, and tastings that asked him for donations. And until last year, he spent the whole month of December visiting every one of his bakeries in a red, fur-trimmed suit. “Extravagance can be a good thing occasionally,” observes Mr. Stanley, “Even in a business.”

Entrepreneurs are sometimes good at starting businesses (most of them fail), but they are notoriously bad at running businesses, even when they succeed as La Madeleine did. Investors have a dollar objective; entrepreneurs have a creative objective. Investors have their eye on the bottom line; entrepreneurs are looking to the future.

EVERY SALESMAN KNOWS THAT SELLing-whether you’re dealing in bread or images-is about creating relationships. “Creating good PR is the essential skill an entrepreneur needs to sell his wild idea. Patrick has one of the great PR minds in the business,” says Mr. Stanley. “He has an ability to connect with people who will publicize him.” People like Mr. Stanley, whose name, in connection with anything, adds luster and legitimacy in Dallas. Esquerre shrewdly picked Channel 13 early on as a potential partner. The station was growing too, and appealed to the high-quality demographic he was interested in. He offered to cater a KERA fund-raiser, and he fed them the same food he served in the restaurant, It was great PR-he showed off his product, got a lot of exposure, and built up goodwill in the community.

And Esquerre himself became a familiar face to Dallasites. He worked the KERA pledge drive and participated in chef’s benefit cook-offs. La Madeleine looked like a hands-on business. Customers associated Esquerre with La Madeleine the way they associate Mr. Stanley with Neiman’s.



ALONG TIME AGO, MOST BUSINESSES HAD a person attached to them. Customers knew the person who sold them groceries, or suits, or chicken fried steak. They knew the person who owned the store and there’s no better salesman than the owner. But the individually owned-and-run enterprise is becoming a dinosaur. When there are 15 stores, all just alike, who knows who the proprietor is? So the chains try to give their businesses a personality without having to involve a live person. There’s no reason to deal with the capriciousness of a real personality when you have the choice of creating one. Who knows if there’s a real Colonel Sanders? Dave Thomas is a TV character, not a real person flipping burgers. And we only know Ben & Jerry from the picture on the ice cream cartons.

Dallas changed its bread expectations after La Madeleine opened, All the other bakeries that have opened in the past few years owe a great debt to Esquerre for leading Dallas away from the Mrs. Baird’s mentality. Before La Madeleine, Dallas bread was something you could leave fingerprints in. But Esquerre’s traditional French recipes had to change, too. For instance, it wasn’t lunchbox functional.

“Early on, there were complaints about the bread,” Esquerre remembers. “They’d say the holes are too big, and the peanut butter and jelly falls through. That is not a French problem. So I changed the bread to have smaller holes.” Esquerre’s ear for customer cravings is the reason there are chocolate chip cookies and scones in a French bakery. It’s a key to his marketing mantra: “Listen. Adapt. Surprise.”

“Then surprise, surprise, surprise them again,” he says. “Soon they come to expect the surprise from you, and they come for it again and again. It becomes an addiction, you see?”

The question now is, what’s he going to do to surprise us next? He’s a booster boy for Dallas, so he’s not going anywhere. “Dallas is close to my heart,” he says. “I’ve had a great experience here. The only problems I’ve had have been with people who just moved here. I want to give something back. My raison d’etre is not just to build a business but to build one that will help achieve a bigger goal.” Esquerre, like most entrepreneurs, is never at a loss for ideas or the energy to implement them. He’s set up a foundation to assist children and the elderly. He wants to establish a consulting firm, a resource for small businesses that would provide them with access to expertise, establish connections, and help them find backers.

And Esquerre has found he’s still hooked on the food business and fascinated by the ides of combining the culinary tradition of one country with the eating habits of another. He’s decided he wants to produce a line of the most American kind of food-pre-prepared foods, a snack or meal you can buy in the grocery store and reheat at home. It sounds familiar, but don’t think of it as just another TV dinner, he says, because all prepared dinners on the market build their product off their competitors’ ideas. And they depend more on the design of the box than what’s inside. (Swanson’s is only now updating their original TV dinner, a ’50s concept that actually promoted the idea that families should eat dinner together around a TV set,) Esquerre has hired a real chef. He’s developing a flavorful, healthy meal, affordable and easy to use. Instead of starting with the box. he’s starting with the food. Food scientists in France and here will develop consistency, texture, and nutrition. But it’s his marketing savvy thai will make his meals stand out from the other pot pies. He plans to sample it in supermarkets and conduct his research while the grocery store guinea pigs are chewing. Does it taste good? Is the texture good? Listen. Adapt.



WHAT WOULD MR. STANLEY SAY ABOUT Esquerre’s new notion?

“I drink it’s probably a good idea,” he says. “He’s ingenious and he’s excited, and that’s what leads to creativity.”

Why does Esquerre think he can come up with a gourmet-quality, reheatable meal when the big companies have only produced mediocrity in the freezer section? It’s the obvious entrepreneurial answer. “The more people say something is impossible, the more I want to do it because I know no one else will.”

Surprise.

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