LOCAL BESTS : The Secret Source

What secret do the Bistro Garden, Shutters on the Beach Hotel, the Bel Air Country Club and the Regent Beverly Wilshire share? They all buy their intense, dark chocolate ganache cakes, hazelnut charlottes and rich fruit tarts from Caprice pastry shop.

For the past 10 years, Jean-Louis Kippelen has been wholesaling cakes, fancy cookies, pastries and candies to local restaurants, hotels and caterers. The French-born pastry and chocolate maker knows that good ingredients are the key to good baking, so he uses only imported Callebaut chocolate, real butter and fresh fruit and nuts. During peak season, Kippelen makes more than 100 cakes a day.

Because 90% of his business is wholesale, most people aren’t even aware of the nondescript, red-brick pastry kitchen on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. “I’m the best-kept secret in town,” he says. “A lot of places claim they bake their own pastries while somebody is delivering mine through the back door.”

Kippelen makes about 25 different cakes and tarts, including white chocolate and pistachio, opera, Grand Marnier butter cream, lemon mousse, even New York-style cheesecake. A cake that generously serves 12 to 15 starts at around $20 and can be decorated to order. Just don’t ask for any fluffy white frosting.

“I call those Crisco cakes,” mutters Kippelen, “because basically all they contain is shortening and powdered sugar.”

* Caprice: 3213 Pico Blvd, Santa Monica, (310) 453-1932