A Top Pastry Chef From Boston Is Making Sweets and Sandwiches for The Curb

Editor’s note: This story, originally published on June 24, 2024, was written not long after Hana Quon moved from Boston to Honolulu and began providing her renowned sweets and sandwiches at The Curb in Kaimukī. On Jan. 22, she was named a semifinalist for a James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker, one of nine industry professionals from Hawai‘i in the running for different JB awards. 

Photo: Courtesy of Hana Quon

Rare these days is an Instagram-beautiful dessert that’s also exquisite in taste. Hana Quon nails both. Eight months ago, she moved to Honolulu after closing Café Madeleine in Boston, where she was a partner for 10 years. Her pastries are so beloved that when Katy Perry filmed American Idol on O‘ahu, she put in a special order. Quon’s textbook-perfect canelé showcase crunchy exteriors and custardy insides, eclairs serve as vessels for an almost fudgy Honoka‘a Chocolate Co. pastry cream, fresh figs and honeycomb are set like jewels on danishes. At The Curb in Kaimukī, where she provides the sweets and sandwiches, these will likely have sold out by the time you read this.

At Café Madeleine, Quon executed a mostly classical French patisserie, she says, and like many pastry chefs and bakers across the country, over the years has begun to incorporate Asian flavors (she is Korean and Chinese) into European techniques. “I don’t think it’s as simple as just black sesame this or matcha that,” she says. “You can’t just be like, ‘Oh, it’s this fun, Asian trendy flavor.” She wants to treat Asian ingredients with the same reverence usually reserved for whatever’s French and fancy by association. “Before I use anything, I like to use the best possible version of it and learn about its history. Getting to know the ingredient really well is important to me, even those I grew up with—I can’t bring it up if I don’t do the work.”

SEE ALSO: My 9 Favorite Bakeries in Honolulu

For her, that has meant learning that “black sesame actually shines the best when you balance its natural savory and bitter notes and add more sugar than you’d like to” and delving into matcha’s different flavor facets—for instance, a prized matcha might have an “umami flavor profile that doesn’t work very well for baking.” What does pair well is the “complex bitterness” of “Tsujiri’s ‘Old Days in Kyoto’ matcha” with Honoka‘a Chocolate Co.’s 85% dark chocolate “that works to support the earthy notes in the matcha and not overpower it.”

Quon moved to Hawai‘i to start a life as intentional as her pastries. She earned degrees in English literature and linguistics at the University of Maryland before turning to pastry, a career that led her to study and work in Paris and Lyon. After 10 years running Café Madeleine, a moment in her personal life jolted her, “where I was like, this is a little bit too much,” she says. She decided that “closing and starting a new era with more intention would be best. [Otherwise,] I feel like you just keep going into a black hole of working forever.”

Photo: Courtesy of Hana Quon

Quon is also the rare mix of artist and businessperson. She says that Café Madeleine’s wholesale accounts—providing baked goods and sandwiches to coffee shops—gave her the financial stability for creativity at her own shop, a model that she hopes to replicate in Honolulu.

So until she finds a bakery storefront of her own, the best place to get Quon’s offerings is at The Curb, where for breakfast there is a soufflé egg between shiopan, a fluffy, lightly salted bun; and for snacks, a pressed sandwich of serrano ham, black truffle and honey. Other choices in the past have included a roast beef sandwich doused with barbecue sauce that was astonishingly messy to eat, but worth it. Get there early for the full selection of pastries, which might include fresh lychee and cherry tarts or black sesame Rice Krispies Treats—a mix of high- and low-brow associations, all of it prepared with a high level of detail.

@hanaquon