ANABEL “ANNIE” TANCO, the owner of Bizu Patisserie (which gets its name from the French word for kiss, bisou), recalls that it all began with a dream—literally. Tanco vividly recalls that she dreamt about a restaurant packed with diners who all knew each other and exchanged kisses in greeting. The next day, she asked her daughter Audrey, “What’s ‘kiss’ in French?”

And so was born the bakery with the French-sounding name, which offers a variety of French pastry and European bread, and other afternoon tea staples. Since Bizu Patisserie was first launched in 2001 as a café kiosk at the third level of Glorietta 4 in Makati, it has since spun off into another café at Alabang Town Center, a patisserie and bistro at Greenbelt 2, and at the Promenade in the Greenhills Shopping Center.

Building a thriving patisserie business on a dream seems like something straight out of a Joanne Harris novel. But Tanco had the entrepreneurial spirit, the foresight to invest in training, and the devotion to back it up.

Dream Big
Tanco considers Bizu a welcome break after her foray into the garments business. She was an exporter of embroidered sweaters for children, when unmet deadlines (which forced her to airfreight her products, adding a huge amount to production costs) and, what she calls “too much of the human factor,” drove her to explore other options. “I was really harassed. I was stressed out. That’s why I got out of the business,” she recalls.

When Tanco first considered venturing into another business, she never thought it would be food; although she once worked at her mother’s canteen at Cherry Foodarama. During the lull of two years after she left the garments industry, she thought of enrolling in cooking school to indulge her love for cooking. It was while she was enrolled at the Center for Culinary Arts that Tanco first toyed with the idea of a pastry shop. Then the idea became a big dream.

Tanco envisioned something along the lines of the legendary Fauchon, founded by a grocer from Normandy named Auguste Félix Fauchon. Since the 19th century, Fauchon has been synonymous not only with savory jams, luscious chocolates, and scrumptious biscuits, but also with a taste for the unique and the pursuit of excellence in every area of expertise.

The beginning of Bizu Patisserie as a kiosk parallels that of Fauchon, which began as a small vending cart on the Place de la Madeleine in 1885. (Auguste Félix opened his first store a year later and the gourmet food boutique remains a major Parisian gastronomic landmark to this day.)

Tanco sought to learn more about French pastry, a quest for knowledge that led her to Paris and an apprenticeship with a pastry master for a number of months. She knew that turning an authentic French patisserie concept into reality required more than just passion. For one thing, Tanco knew that importing equipment from France would already be costly; and, added to the surge of the euro, she realized that the initial capitalization for Bizu was not something she could easily produce.

Being an experienced businesswoman, Tanco was unfazed. Without a bank to give her a loan, she turned to her husband Arthur, a businessman and hobbyist farmer. She also asked help from her in-laws. And, Tanco discloses, she prayed. It was around this time that the dream of a restaurant filled with diners kissing each other in greeting came to her. Audrey, the daughter she asked for the French translation of “kiss,” now helps in marketing the Bizu brand, and her son, Aaron, manages the Bizu outlets.

Know Your Market
The Bizu crowd is mostly female—partly the office crowd who has a sudden pastry craving, and partly the housewives who happen along on a leisurely weekday afternoon who then come back with their families on weekends. Audrey says the Bizu crowd ranges from ages 25 to 44, with the business crowd making up the bulk of its patrons from morning till lunch time, while the young professionals dominate the afternoons.

Aside from the well-known fact women yearn for sweets more than men, Bizu (specifically its Greenbelt 2 branch, which is a patisserie and bistro) attracts its female clientele because it is built like a slice of Paris. Surrounded by patches of green in the concrete jungle that is Makati, Bizu Patisserie and Bistro is covered in soft lavender. But, more than anything, what attracts women (and other hungry diners) are Bizu’s extravagant display cases, filled with ornate pastries, labeled with mouth-watering names.

What is Bizu’s bestseller? Hands down it’s Macarons de Paris. Not to be confused with the local macaroon made of coconut and milk, Bizu’s bestsellers (P35/piece) are round, pastel-colored pastries with crushed almonds and crème ganache flavors.

Of course, what patisserie will not be complete without cakes (which come in personal, midi, and grande sizes), tarts, pralines, and truffles? Bizu was able to achieve a pretty wide price range considering that ingredients are shipped in from France and other countries in Europe. The price of a personal cake begins at P135, for example, and a box of four premium truffles retails at P260 (sugarless, P320).

Tanco says she doesn’t compromise on quality or authenticity in keeping with her original vision of excellence. The orange-flavored pastries are flavored with real oranges; when you order a Fresh Strawberry Chiboust (classic French strawberry cheese cake topped with fresh strawberries the size of ping-pong balls), you can be sure that the strawberries are fresh and juicy; and when you bite into a Samba (milk and dark chocolate mousse between layers of chocolate cake), you get nothing but the explosion of the most luscious chocolate.

Even Bizu’s other offerings are prepared with the same care as its patisserie items. Tanco says the greens in Bizu’s salads and other dishes are organically grown in her husband’s farm in Batangas. “People comment ‘You’re expensive, but you’re good,’ Why? Because I don’t short change you. We’re expensive because costs are really high. If I have to raise my price a bit, I’ll raise my price a bit,” Tanco says candidly. “But this is one place where we use the real thing. We don’t scrimp.” And Bizu’s patrons know it well.

Keep Dreaming
Tanco says her work in Bizu involves taking care of 155 employees, putting systems in place, updating marketing efforts, among other things—aspects of the business that she did not fully oversee in her garments business. And, to keep stress to a minimum, she has also learned the fine art of delegation. “I’m not so hands-on in product development now,” she says. “I have my chef and we meet regularly. I’m more into the business side of things, since I have talented people to handle product development.”

Tanco also credits technology for making day-to-day operations easier to handle now. “When I was in the garments business, from 1986 to 1998, the fax machine was the most advanced thing for us exporters,” she laughs.

Another thing that she likes about her patisserie business is, “Here, when you have a recipe, you just stick to it. It’s more exact.”

Though Tanco has yet to see a full return on her investment with Bizu, she continues to dream. Bizu has expanded its offerings to include off-premise catering services and, just as the first Bizu paralleled the legendary Fauchon’s origins, Tanco’s new dream seems to echo the chain store concept that Auguste Félix Fauchon learned from the man he apprenticed with and, later, made his own. Tanco says all she wants now is to open, at least, one branch a year.

What about franchising? Tanco admits she has considered it. But her vision of the Philippine version of Fauchon, devoted to the utmost quality in every area is making her think twice. “Franchising is another business,” she says. “It’s a serious thing. Bizu is a brand that I want to take care of. If one of the customers is not satisfied with one of the stores that is not my store, I wouldn’t know what to do anymore!”

It is this devotion to quality that earned Tanco honors from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) when Bizu Patisserie was named an Outstanding Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) for 2005 and cited for being “able to prove that Filipinos can produce world-class products relative to its international counterparts.”

Per DTI records, Bizu generated sales of P12.9 million in 2002, reaching P34.9 million in 2004. Tanco discloses that sales figures for 2005 doubled.

“We’ll just take one step at a time,” Tanco says. And with warmth that is more Filipino than French, she says, “All I know is that, we put a lot of effort in satisfying our customers. We love them and we always think about them.”