12:34 am – On the playlist: “Just Dance” • Lady Gaga and Colby O’Donis
After rolling out the cinnamon roll dough, Kelly liberally spreads the filling across the length of the five-foot sheet with an offset spatula, and covers it with a thick layer of cinnamon sugar. As a cloud of cinnamon settles, she and Lisa start tightly rolling the dough from the back to the front. The air is getting sweeter all the time.
A caffeine fiend, Kelly pours another Milk Money Latte with four additional shots of espresso. The farm that produces the milk used for Willa Jean’s coffee program, Progress Milk Barn, was the first recipient of the John Besh Foundation’s Milk Money grant, which provides micro-loans and business training to small family farms in the New Orleans area. A portion of the latte sales go back to the foundation.
2:05 am – On the playlist: “Parlez-Nous à Boire” • Sweet Crude
The action picks up around 2 am. The bakers start shouting out the time every half-hour, because the first shifters will start arriving in a few hours. In the meantime, all of the loaves need to be baked, the kitchen tidied, and the oven temperatures cooled. Any delays can throw off the kitchen’s flow for an entire day.
Tasha has been covered in flour standing in front of the oven for a few hours, tapping, turning, and jockeying hot loaves around to make sure they bake evenly. The cooling rack next to her is full of ciabattas, baguettes, and various other breads.
While Willa Jean goes through a lot of bread, its bakery also sends ciabatta to other restaurants in the John Besh empire, including Shaya, and Domenica. Tasha stacks the loaves like a Jenga puzzle until each space is filled. A great wall of gluten.
2:45 am – On the playlist: “Ol’ Lady” • Big Freedia
Heavy pans of cinnamon rolls are ready for the oven. Based on Kelly’s mother’s recipe, the sweet, sticky rolls are another familial tie to her roots in coastal South Carolina. Willa Jean was named after Kelly’s paternal grandmother, and while the two didn’t cook much together, time spent in the kitchen and around the table ignited Kelly’s passion for cooking. The smaller convection oven the team uses for pastries is packed with croissants and Danishes, and tender, tangy buttermilk biscuits cool nearby.
Back at the main oven, Tasha takes the last of the baguette dough and fashions it into a pain d’epi, a wheatstalk-shaped loaf that will be used to decorate the bakery counter, and, like most days, will eventually be sold to an intrigued customer.
3:17 am – On the playlist: “Shadow People” • Dr. Dog
With the great wall of bread finished in the kitchen, Lisa starts bringing armfuls of the day’s cooled loaves out to the bakery counter. She carefully arranges them in cubby holes along the bakery’s faux-brick wall, sometimes standing on a milk crate.
Behind her are a few large paper bags full of day-old bread and pastries that Willa Jean contributes to a local food pantry and after-school program. As Lisa walks back-and-forth stocking the bakery, she tracks perfect floury footprints all over the honeycomb-tile floor. We all do. Jermaine, a father of two, who had been working in the dining room all night lays down paper to help control the mess.
Now that the cinnamon buns have cooled, Kelly whisks up a bowl of icing to drizzle over them. This homey, comforting food is just as first-nature to her as the show-stopping marvels that she had been creating at chef John Besh’s August, the ones that earned her a nod from the James Beard Foundation in 2015. Her eye for style, texture, and structure—which she used with great success in August’s Deconstructed Banana Pudding (served with banana cake, Nilla Wafer ice cream, and dehydrated peanut butter)—is still evident in her stripped-down, honest sweets at Willa Jean.
