Sweets With Substance: Jatee Kearsley Runs a Brooklyn Bakery With a Bigger Purpose
When Jatee Kearsley spent four months eating her way through Paris in 2021, she had no idea just how far her life adventures would take her. Though she and a friend visited the city with the express purpose of understanding the history of French pastries and the processes by which they’re crafted, she couldn’t have known that, two years later, she’d have her own patisserie. And she couldn’t have imagined that, nine months after she opened, she’d go viral , and people would be calling from across the country—and the world—trying to get their hands on some of her baked goods. Je T’aime Pâtisserie , in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, opened in the summer of 2023 with little fanfare. In the early days, business was slow, and Kearsley remembers selling around 12 croissants a day, six chocolate and six plain. “No one knew about us,” she says. But then the popular social media channel, Righteous Eats , got wind of what Kearsley was doing and, in April 2024, featured her in a video that w...