With the continued success of La Bou and their many other properties and projects, Annie Ngo and husband Trong Nguyen have endeavored to open a new restaurant modeled after a French bakery and café.

Located at 51st Street and Folsom Boulevard, Les Baux opened for business last Saturday, offering coffee, breads, baked goods and a welcoming environment. Ngo and Nguyen named the bakery after a small village that sits on a hill in Provence, a region of France.

“It’s our favorite place to visit actually,” Ngo said. “I think it’s my favorite place in the world.”

The wide and open room of Les Baux smells of freshly ground coffee, baking bread and oak. Large windows and an open floorplan give customers a bright and airy space to sit and engage in visual interaction with the bakers and chefs while enjoying a coffee and some baked goods.

The aroma of wood comes from the French oak floors, wine barrel light fixtures and counters made from the reclaimed oak of wine vats.

“In the age of frugality and sustainability, resources are limited-both financial resources and environmental resources–so we like to reuse things,” Nguyen said.

Eventually, Les Baux will offer a full service bistro, oyster bar and beer and wine bar. For now, Nguyen said they are focusing on the breads and on an innovative, single-cup serving coffee bar.

As owner of Capricorn Coffee, a Bay Area-based coffee roasting company, and from experiences roasting coffee beans as a child growing up in Vietnam, Nguyen said he has a strong connection to coffee.

He hopes Les Baux will help spread his passion for good coffee to the local community.

“We drink lousy coffee because…it’s mass brewed,” Nguyen said. “There’s no connection to the source of the coffee.”

Frustrated with consumers’ lack of knowledge about the origin of their coffee beans, Nguyen said he set out to create an environment where customers could select their beans while learning more about the journey the coffee makes before becoming a delicious beverage.

“I took all that together, the things that have bugged me over the years and realized…the biggest enemy to having a wonderful cup of coffee is time,” Nguyen said.

The clock starts ticking the minute the beans are roasted as the quality of the beans’ flavors begins to deplete. After the beans are ground, the quality drops even faster and once the coffee is brewed the flavors will only last for a short period of time.

To remedy this, Nguyen uses only freshly roasted beans from Capricorn Coffee. Each week, Les Baux will feature ten varieties of beans from different regions of the world. By working in small batches and using their company’s beans, Ngo and Nguyen are able to offer exceptionally good coffee at a fair price.

To fully embrace the essence of the beans, Nguyen developed a single-cup brewing style capable of extracting the full flavor of the beans into a delicious cup of coffee.

Using a Melitta style of brewing, Nguyen carefully pours hot water over the fresh grounds in the filter, allowing the water to sit for two minutes. Then, he drops the filter and hot coffee gently drips down into the cup. While slightly more time consuming, the end result is a robustly flavorful cup of coffee free of any bitterness or grit.

“The coffee is actually the thing I’m most confident about,” Nguyen said.

In addition to the coffee bar, Les Baux will also offer a selection of French-style breads and baked goods.

“We only do things we like,” Nguyen said. “We like bread, we like croissants, we like coffee…(and) we like to bring the community together.”

The boulangerie-style menu offers breads, rolls, brioches, croissants and other classically French baked goods.

“I think a bakery to me is like the glue of the community,” Nguyen said. “It’s a good location to just come in, hang out and not spend a lot of money.”

Jessica Scharff can be reached at [email protected]