Edible Food Find: La Saison Bakery
Photos by Linda Campos
As a child growing up in Tehran, Soheil Fathi would eagerly await his family’s visits from the United States. His grandparents and aunts, who lived in the U.S. in the 1980s, arrived with suitcases full of treats not available in Iran, like gummy bears and cereal. But his favorites were the tins of Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies.
“If you ask me what is the smell of America, I would say that cookie, its browned butter. I can still smell it,” he recalls.
Sitting outside La Saison, the bakery he opened in November 2020 on Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Fathi tells the story of how he worked for six months to create his own version of a Mrs. Fields–level chocolate chip cookie. When a customer who wasn’t privy to the backstory proclaimed that Fathi’s cookies, which are also made with browned butter, reminded him of the ones inside those famous tins, “It almost got me to the point of crying,” he says.
Those cookies are just one example of the all-natural, non-GMO delights that await inside La Saison, many of which pay homage to Fathi’s Iranian roots as well as to the immigrant stories he and his wife, Sarah Moridpour, have bonded over with many of their employees.
On this particular morning, I snacked on a pistachio rosewater cookie, whose signature Persian flavors are encapsulated in a crunchy shell and chewy center. At least a half-dozen people approached the bakery only to learn it’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays; the following Sunday, not surprisingly, the line stretched out the door at the small bakery that serves between 600 and 900 people each day.
At La Saison, you’ll also find scones with marzipan, orange and cardamom, and feta and za’atar; French staples like pain au chocolat and kouign-amann; and sourdough breads in varieties such as fig-walnut, cranberry-pecan and apricot-pistachio. And in a throwback to Fathi’s mother’s kitchen, Madagascar vanilla bean pound cake and marble brownies featuring ripples of cheesecake and chunks of chocolate.
But Fathi is quick to point out that La Saison defies definition. “We don’t say that we’re a Persian bakery or a French bakery. We are a bakery,” he says. “We do whatever we feel is good, delicious and presentable. It’s no boundaries. I think that philosophy goes to the kitchen, too. We are all immigrants who have one thing in common and that is pastry and the work and the respect we have for it and the customer. That is our mutual language in the kitchen.”
La Saison marks a new start for Fathi and Moridpour after putting down roots in the U.S. about five years ago. Growing up in Tehran, Fathi treasured his mother’s baking. When his father’s business went bankrupt, the family had to quickly turn her pastime into a source of income. Fathi remembers afternoons scraping cake pans and delivering pastries to local coffee shops and bakeries. Following his father’s starts and stops in the baking industry and Fathi earning degrees in English literature, material engineering and business management, Fathi took an entrepreneurial leap of his own as the owner and pastry chef at Cookie Box Group, which features retail stores and a café-bakery and sells wholesale to more than 400 businesses in Tehran. At one point, it included a high-end chocolatier, La Saison (that endeavor folded due to U.S. sanctions, but Fathi decided to keep the name for his Cambridge venture). While successful, Fathi had set his sights on being more hands-on. That hope came to fruition when he was hired as a pastry chef at Flour. But after he was furloughed due to the pandemic, he and Moridpour saw a chance to make a go of it on their own when the former Brit Bakery space on Concord Avenue became available. It was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up.
“This is my dream,” he says. “The brand La Saison was so fancy back in Iran, but this isn’t fancy. It’s just high-quality. It’s minimal, it’s chic. It’s like reclaiming our story.”
This story appeared in the Winter 2022 issue.
