He really wanted to be a chef. But in Denmark back then, if you aspired to learn kitchen work you had to apprentice at night. That turned out to be a problem for young Flemming Pedersen. “I played soccer,” he says, which is what boys did where he lived, in a village you’ve never heard of, outside of a slightly larger town you’ve never heard of, outside of Copenhagen. “Soccer practice was also at night.” So there went that plan. A friend who was apprenticing as a baker during the day convinced him to try that, instead.
Four decades later, he’s sitting loose-limbed and relaxed at a table in Chef Flemming’s Bake Shop, on Henderson’s Water Street, the day’s shift over(ish) at 1 o’clock — he rolled in at 3:40 a.m. so he doesn’t have to rush the baking. The display cases are packed with an I want THAT and THAT and THAT selection of cookies, tarts, rolls, breads, bread puddings and much more. As Pedersen talks, the words lightly frosted with a Danish accent, his eyes sweep across a bakery-themed mural painted by his wife. Seven S. Water Street is his own small, delicious corner of the world. He thinks back to his apprenticeship in Holbæk, the slightly larger town, which you’ve now heard of. “I apprenticed with seven different men and women,” he says. “I’m the only one still doing baking.”
Water Street? Not exactly a hotbed of foodie enthusiasm. But the intimate feel of it takes him back. “I’m from a very small town in Denmark,” Pedersen says. “When I graduated, there were 130 kids in the whole school.” So he’s comfortable here. He took over the store from some guy in September 2008 — Hello, recession! Try a cookie? — in part because the city, in those palmier times, was talking about seriously sprucing up Water Street, and since he lives 10 minutes away, he wanted to be a part of that. (Didn’t quite happen.) Though Pedersen wishes more people would drive in from, say, Anthem — really, folks, the freeway is right there — Flemming’s Bake Shop has built a solid clientele of locals who appreciate the difference between his handmade pastries and the over-sugared glop you snatch off supermarket counters. That was a struggle for a while — he says people complained that his products weren’t sweet enough. “We pride ourselves, as a European bake shop, our products are not so sweet,” he agrees. He and his employees don’t trowel the frosting onto the Danishes, for example, in the American-standard too-much-is-never-enough manner. “That’s just part of being European,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be sweet to be flavorful. We probably use 40 percent less sugar.” It’s a distinction you can taste.
So, a guy calls Flemming’s Bake Shop a few months ago. He needs a specialty Danish cake for a convention of expatriate Danes. “‘Can you make it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he asked, ‘How did you come over,’ and I told him” — brought over in 1976 by a Scandanavian restaurateur who had a big restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia — “and he’d come over the exact same way. The same restaurant had hired him. He left the year before I got there.” Pedersen eventually made his way through a number of Las Vegas pastry kitchens — the Showboat, the Trop, the Flamingo (twice), culminating in 16 years at the Golden Nugget. Now, as his own boss, he can futz with offbeat recipes — tip: try the walnut-onion bread — and indulge customers who bring in family recipes penned in granny’s spidery handwriting. “If I make something special for you, that you request, and I like it, I’m gonna put it in my showcase!” he says, laughing. “Not long ago, someone asked me to make Rocky Road cookies. I had never made them. So I made them. Man, they were good! So they’re now in my rotation. You’ve got to keep it current.” In his enthusiasm you can glimpse the younger Flemming Pedersen, the one who wanted to get into cooking for a simple but compelling reason: “I really felt good doing it.”