Isn’t That Sweet Opens, Selling Upscale Pastries at Now Serving Café

It’s a match made in heaven: Now Serving Café and Isn’t That Sweet.

The latter, Nicole Betourney’s dessert catering company, opened its permanent location in the 16-year-old La Grange café in early November. Formerly exclusive to catering, Isn’t That Sweet now also sells individual cupcakes and various French pastries available for purchase with your Now Serving meal or coffee.

“It was a perfect match for the both of us. It was really a no-brainer idea,” said Now Serving manager Daniel Eckert. “Our café can attract business to her, and her business can attract customers [to us]… This partnership between the two businesses has really worked out well.”

Palos Heights resident Betourney has run Isn’t That Sweet for the past five years out of a number of different suburban-Chicago kitchens. Prior to that, she graduated from Le Cordon Blue and The French Pastry School, both in Chicago, and worked as the soufflé chef at Las Vegas’ Eiffel Tower Restaurant.

Baking wasn’t originally Betourney’s life goal—she was one semester away from a criminal justice degree—but she instead fell in love with the science of pastry-making.

“It sounds weird, because I’m not a very science-y person… but if it’s not precise with baking, the product doesn’t turn out right,” Betourney said. “And I kind of like that. There’s an absolute thing to what you’re doing, an absolute product that came out, and if you do it correctly it comes out the exact same way every time.”

Those looking for a familiar comfort dessert will find it in any of Isn’t That Sweet’s deluxe cupcakes—red velvet, peppermint mocha—but the more adventurous may find a new favorite with authentic macaroons or truffles, the traditional French desserts that Betourney calls her real passion.

She added that being able to sell deserts that aren’t pre-ordered gives her a chance to make whatever she wants to make some of the time, and to introduce people to something new.

“My goal is to take a little of the city and a little bit of Paris and bring it to the suburbs of Chicago,” she said. “Being classically French-trained, it’s nice to be able to share that with other people.

“La Grange is such a nice area that kind of has a nice European feel to it without being European… The downtown area is so special and so gorgeous that people are able to walk up and down and go to different shops and restaurants and I’m so excited to be a part of that.”

Locals can visit It’s So Sweet inside Now Serving Café at 725 W. Hillgrove Avenue in La Grange. Betourney is also taking holiday catering orders through Dec. 19.

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