Patch Portrait: From Romania with Love

This week's Patch Portraits was produced and edited by Casey Cora, Philip Downie, Andrea Hart, Carrie Porter and Quintin Slovek. Check back on Mondays for the next installment.

Also showcased, an Oak Park resident , and an Evanston resident , including nine children and escapes from mental hospitals.

Since the summer of 2009, Tania Averian has served as the Romanian pastry ambassador to Skokie. From her cheery little store, Le Patisserie  at 3455 Dempster St., Averian sells a variety of European desserts, from staples such as carrot cake and cookies to the seven-layered dobos-torta, a decadent Hungarian delight that’s held together with butter cream.

"Not a lot of bakeries do that [dobos-torta]," she noted. "It takes a half day, depending on how productive you work.”

Her bakery specializes in Romanian--and occasionally Hungarian--dessert delicacies such as amandina (Romanian chocolate cake), savarina (bread dough soaked in rum syrup), diplomat (a type of fruit cake) and especially cozonac (Romanian sweet bread with raisins).  

Averian, a former schoolteacher from the Black Sea city of Constanta in Romania, moved to Chicago eight years ago but it was only recently that Le Patisserie came into being.

“Skokie chose me," she said. "I was looking to rent a place and start building from scratch, but one of my friends told me about this place, which had been closed for around a year.

"I called the landlord and he said the space was for rent, but I had to buy the equipment, which was great because [everything] was all in place," Averian recalled.

“It was a lucky accident. I was looking for a place to rent on the North Side of Chicago, and I already found it and was about to sign the lease when I found this place," Averian said. "I’m grateful for this place, I like it . . . I’ll stay here until I do very, very well here.”

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