A sneak peek inside the first Cooks | Bellecour in Edina

The biggest difference between the new Cooks | Bellecour and its two previous iterations is not just the name, which merges the former Cooks of Crocus Hill and Bellecour Bakery brands.

It's the parking.

When Cooks | Bellecour, the first of these operations to be built from the ground up, opens soon in Edina's Nolan Mains complex, anyone should be able to easily nab a spot in the adjacent ramp. That kind of convenience is a major upgrade from the other locations, in Minneapolis' North Loop and Grand Avenue in St. Paul.

Beyond that, much will be familiar, even if this is the first time Bellecour owner/chef Gavin Kaysen and Cooks owners and spouses Karl Benson and Marie Dwyer collaborated on the hybrid bakery-cooking school-retail shop from the very beginning.

"This is the first space that we've all been able to sit down together and say, 'Let's imagine this as one cohesive brand' vs. 'Hey, we're gonna be a pop-up and oh [wow], this works," said Kaysen, standing over a dusty blueprint spread out on what will eventually be the checkout counter. "It's this package opportunity for us, because you need to have more than one of these to really grow the brand and become more of a presence."

The first two evolved out of pandemic-related necessity. Bellecour, the Wayzata restaurant and bakery, had closed. Cooks, the venerable Twin Cities kitchen retailer and cooking school, was dark. And the North Loop had lost a couple of coffee shops. With Kaysen's flagship restaurant Spoon and Stable across the street from Cooks, there was already a relationship. Joining forces brought new opportunities for both businesses — and for the neighborhood, which was suddenly low on caffeine.

The first Bellecour Bakery at Cooks of Crocus Hill opened in May 2020, with the bakery utilizing the cooking school during the day to turn out pastry chef Diane Moua's croissants, cookies and iconic crêpe cakes.

"It was so happy," Dwyer said. "We put flowers in the flower pots, the birds were chirping, the air smelled like croissants. It became magical."

A second collaboration opened the next year as a kiosk inside the St. Paul retail store.

"This got us through" the pandemic, Kaysen said. "Financially, but also emotionally. For me, I had an opportunity to take my team at Bellecour and give them jobs somewhere else without having to pull the ripcord and be like, sorry. We had a home and they provided that home for us."

Still, "when we decided to do it, it was kind of a naive 'Yeah, let's give it a shot,'" Kaysen said.

It was more successful than the proprietors expected, and now, for their third outing, they're making sure they do it right.

Starting with the name.

"Cooks of Crocus Hill is a very powerful, iconic, 50-year-old brand. Bellecour is only six years old," Kaysen said. "It took us both time separately to figure out, OK, if this continues to grow, how will it go?" The mashed-up name they were operating under was "just too much."

"It's a word salad," Benson said.

But Benson, who has co-owned Cooks for 20 years, had no qualms about changing the name.

"Retail is like being a shark," Benson said. "If you're not moving, you're dying. If you're not evolving, you're losing the opportunity to maintain relevance." (The Edina location is, however, also a throwback. Cooks of Crocus Hill once operated at 50th and France for 19 years.)

The new spot will have seating for 24 inside, more in the classroom space, and six tables on the sidewalk under a black-and-white striped awning. An open kitchen is where savory grab-and-go food will be prepped, while croissants that have been laminated in the North Loop will bake up fresh on site, "so all the delicious warm pastry smells will be here," Dwyer said.

The menu is identical to the other two spots, with Moua's recipes still coming consistently out of the kitchen despite her departure from the company last year to launch her own restaurant.

"She built a good, solid ground for us," Kaysen said. "She left it in good hands."

The store's design is European-inspired, with homages to "our history and the history of cooking," Dwyer said. Retail displays from Cooks' former store in Stillwater have been painted white and copper. White tile in the kitchen contrasts with rustic wood barrels in the shop. "We're not going terribly general store, just a few to warm it up," Benson said.

The owners hope that the new spot can serve as living proof that the concept is replicable, perhaps on a large scale — even if the first step is getting the doors open in Edina.

"We're going to learn a ton," Kaysen said. "If it means we have a possibility for growth, I'm sure we'll go after it, whatever that looks like for us."

The new location, at 3934 Market St., Edina, will operate from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sat., 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sun. (A previously announced May 19 opening has been delayed.) The other two locations are at 210 N. 1st St., Mpls., and 877 W. Grand Av., St. Paul. cooksbellecour.com