Sweet Rabbit Bakery owner and baker Andrew Cheng took a 14-year hiatus from professional baking before emerging with his extraordinary French, American and Asian contemplation on grains and pastries in Chicago.
The small, corner shop sits in the Roscoe Village neighborhood. The space was previously a Starbucks, but originally the building was a tied house. The Schlitz Brewing Co. built the tavern in 1903.
A signature globe can still be seen at the top of the designated landmark. The symbol seems fitting above the bakery exploring borders both global and personal.
The ham and cheese croissant has become the bestselling item since the shop opened last May despite the baker’s own lament.
“I call it a failure in editing,” Cheng said, laughing quietly. “Because it just has all my ideas thrown in there.”
Those ideas begin with a buttery and brilliant croissant dough made with rye flour by Janie’s Mill. The organic artisan grain farm and stone-ground miller is located in the tiny rural village of Ashkum, about a two-hour drive south of the city. Its flours have become prized by prestigious professionals as well as home bakers.
“So rye flour helps with the ham and cheese and rye kind of idea,” the baker said. “And inside it has a bechamel with mustard, sort of like a croque monsieur.” You may know the croque monsieur as the French ham and cheese sandwich that’s ideally served hot and crunchy, but has more variations than there are cafes in France.
Cheng folds ham and Gruyere cheese inside his rye dough before baking and finishing with a housemade everything mix.
“Everything you’d find on an everything bagel,” he said. “And then it just bakes together very well, moist and hammy and cheesy.”
It is in fact a stunning pastry. Long and elegant, golden and crisp, with a lacy cheese skirt barely showing. It’s distinctly Cheng’s style, a minimalist story hinting at hours spent at delis and cafes and farms.
“My favorite item is the buckwheat kouign-amann,” said the baker, who breaks the usual chef’s silence on favoritism. The kouign-amann is a French pastry that’s often a suspension of caramelized sugar and butter.
“For this croissant dough we add buckwheat flour,” he added. The flour adds an elusive flavor somewhere between earthy and the sea. “And I paired it with a black sesame filling from my childhood.” From tangyuan, the Chinese warm glutinous rice dumplings served in barely sweetened soup.
“The two flavors just sort of meld together,” Cheng said. “And I feel like it kind of symbolizes where I’m at as a baker right now.”
He’s a baker who confidently takes two creations on opposite ends of the culinary spectrum, and honors them in one complex pastry that crackles and chews, and makes me wonder where he came from.
His parents moved from Hong Kong to Cleveland in the ’70s. He grew up mostly in the suburbs, working in his family’s restaurant, then moved to Chicago in 1995 to go to graduate school for computer graphics. But he decided to start baking instead and went to the now-closed Cooking Hospitality Institute of Chicago.
“And then I found a job at Bittersweet Pastry Shop,” Cheng said. “I quit cooking school because I was just learning so much more at Bittersweet.” He worked there on and off for about five years, and at a couple of different restaurants.
“Then I took a 14-year hiatus,” the baker said. “Because I didn’t quite understand how to balance work life and real life.”
He worked as a video game design artist at a company where everyone loved him because he would bring trays and trays of brownies, cookies and other things he was working on.
“My parents were very happy with me those 14 years,” Cheng said.
But he wanted to go back to the kitchen to bake professionally.
“My reentry was learning breads at Floriole, still hands down my favorite bakery in Chicago,” the baker said. Then he helped open the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in 2019, where he learned to understand the technical challenges of scheduling and production. After that, he worked at Hewn bakery in Evanston. “And then I opened up this place.”
The specialty croissants have recently become the fan-favorite sweets in the petite pastry case. There’s a striking pistachio yuzu and a luxurious strawberry rose with shattering layers that reveal delicately tart and intoxicating floral flavors. But they mark a departure from the shop’s original intent.
“I started this place as a serious contemplation and meditation on grains and the role of pastries,” Cheng said. Now he’s thinking more about what items will keep his customers coming back, all while maintaining his own standards and minimalist style.
It’s harder to appreciate the simple beauty of his radiant house croissant, made with heirloom Turkey Red whole wheat flour from Janie’s Mill. Especially when compared with its chocolate-almond croissant cousin, made with deep, dark cocoa-infused spelt dough rolled around a silky Valrhona couverture.
The Bunny-O, his jumbo rabbit-shaped sandwich-cookie hops easily across social media as an adorable nod to the Oreo, but far more tender like a whoopie pie. The Hunny Bunny, the house cinnamon roll, hides a lovely pull-apart bake under a glorious honey glaze. The carrot cake at Sweet Rabbit, however, may be the most handsome of all at the moment topped by precise dollops of cream cheese frosting and studded with green pepitas.
The Danish highlights seasonal fruit, petals of rhubarb on one of my two visits, over a cloud of that cream cheese, embraced by laminated challah pastry.
A banana spelt and a blueberry crumble muffin are really more tea cakes, or elevated muffin tops. Even the coffeecake swipes a classic with a dramatic cinnamon swirl.
And then there are the impeccable classic cookies — from a chunky chocolate chip to gorgeous gluten-free chocolate buckwheat to a loaded vegan oatmeal raisin walnut — that will have you contemplating their transportive power in our culture.
The breakfast sandwiches, made with Cheng’s take on Chinese pineapple buns, hold egg, chile crunch, pimento cheese and an optional sausage patty.
“I wanted to mix a little bit of my culture with the Chinese chile crunch, which we make ourselves, and the pimento cheese that my husband, Tim, grew up eating,” the baker said.
The breakfast sandwiches are soft, sweet and savory, a gentle meal designed to grab and go. I do wish there was a bit more chile crunch and pimento cheese available, even if just to order extra on the side.
They’re subtle, perhaps too much so, as are the purple ube Ho Ho’s rolled around coconut mochi buttercream, the Morning Cardi-O croissant buns with green cardamom, and the current savory squares with a spinach artichoke dip filling.
What’s not subtle is the house sourdough bread, made with the Turkey Red flour. Get the loaf sliced to order, then stop whatever you’re doing and take a bite. Marvel at the magic of microscopic crispy bits of the crust giving in to the tug to the heart of the crumb.
“Sweet Rabbit has two meanings,” Cheng said. One was inspired by his focus on fast service for sweet pastries, and the other is a slice of his sourdough bread. “It looks like it has a nice ear, kind of like our logo.
I might add that his menu seems to multiply like rabbits with about 26 different items per day.
“I should scale back just a little bit,” the baker said, laughing quietly. “But they’re all my kids and I can’t get rid of any of them.”
He also does wholesale for four locations of the Heritage Bikes & Coffee group. His pastries are also available in a little coffee shop called The Lost Hours in Edgewater, which is owned by a distant cousin of his husband.
That’s about 2,000 items total per week. He works about 80 hours a week with just one kitchen helper and a dishwasher in the back of the house. Mike is his front of the house guy, who only has one person to help on Saturdays. Service is surprisingly smooth at the counter service shop with lines that can suddenly surge out the door even early on a Wednesday. Dogs wait patiently out front or take a big stretch on the patio out back when weather permits.
The baker is living his dream career after overcoming years of challenges, not just in the kitchen.
“Growing up gay and Asian as a Chinese kid in the ’80s was very different than it is now,” Cheng said. “But I had a good group of friends in high school.” They worked summers at a gay-owned and -operated catering company. “And it was staffed full of bright, vivid, loud-as-life flamboyant gay people who were positive role models.”
He found comfort in that kitchen, and now he’s trying to foster the same support in his space too.
And his parents have come around.
“They’ve been to the bakery and can see what I’ve been trying to do,” the baker said. “So it’s very nice.”
Sweet Rabbit Bakery
2159 W. Belmont Ave.
Open: Wednesday to Friday 7 a.m to 2 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 8 a.m to 3 p.m. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
Prices: $4 (Bunny-O cookie), $4.75 (buckwheat kouign-amann), $5.50 (ham and cheese croissant), $5.75 (pistachio yuzu and strawberry rose croissants, each), $7 (egg breakfast sandwich), $4.75 (black sesame latte)
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Excellent, three stars
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
lchu@chicagotribune.com
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