Ramstad: Part French, part Korean — a bakery chain shows how ideas travel

If you are a Minnesotan who keeps up with Korean celebrity weddings, then your social media feed probably lit up a few weeks ago about a new bakery in Richfield.

If you're not, then let me tell you about Tous les Jours, which opened recently at 66th Street and Nicollet Avenue.

The name is the French expression for "everyday" or "all the days," and customers do encounter croissants, croque monsieurs and fruit pastries as soon as they walk in.

But the shelves also contain things not associated with French bakers, like red bean buns, matcha bread and kimchi croquettes.

Tous les Jours is a Seoul-based chain with 1,600 locations worldwide. It emerged in South Korea during the 1990s and early 2000s, when the country's economy was super-charged and people's tastes changed as their affluence grew.

Its arrival here could be seen as another tale of international commerce, or a sign of the Twin Cities' status in the globalized economy.

But I see it as part of something even bigger and less structured. It's the slipstream that academics, politicians, diplomats, business people and journalists can't measure. It's how ideas, products, services, art and food spread from one place, get reworked, shipped back and then changed to ricochet again.

It's the great global conversation.

At any given moment, the Tous les Jours in Richfield is filled with people who know it from somewhere else, along with others seeing it for the first time.

"A lot of our customers are Vietnamese," said I Chang, one of the managers. "There's a lot of Tous les Jours in Vietnam and so a lot of Vietnamese customers say 'Yeah we have one' and they're happy that it's here."

Tous les Jours is a unit of a large business group called CJ. One CJ unit several years ago bought key assets of Schwan's, the Minnesota food company. Another unit makes movies and K-dramas. And CJ's founder also started the sprawling Samsung group of companies.

The Richfield bakery, owned by a franchisee named Sheng Zheng, is the first in Minnesota. Another is planned for the Asian food mall called Pacifica Square that's being built in Burnsville.

Bread and pastries were never a big part of the Korean diet, but that changed as Tous les Jours and its rival Paris Baguette came along. (Another Minnesota entrepreneur plans to soon open a Paris Baguette location in Maple Grove.)

As someone who spent six-plus years living and working in Seoul, I dropped everything when I saw photos of the Richfield Tous les Jours in my Instagram feed. When I got there, I found a line of people, empty shelves and a sign that said the restaurant needed to close for a few days to restock.

Not knowing what the response would be, the managers ordered enough ingredients and supplies for an average weekend at one of the 90 other Tous les Jours outlets in the U.S., said Dennis Lin, another manager. "We thought we would be busy, but we didn't think we would be that busy," he said.

On weekends now, the shelves are stocked, but the lines are long. That's partly because the cafe is still in hiring mode and it takes time for new staffers to familiarize themselves with products and processes, Chang said.

When I moved to Seoul in 2006, Tous les Jours was one of the few places you could buy multigrain bread. It's there in Richfield, though now billed as plant-based.

"We also have a plant-based olive bread," Chang said. "The green tea bread, the sweet potato bread and milk bread are the same."

Lin has seen Tous les Jours in Asia and other cities in the U.S. But the chain was new to Chang, who has worked for other big brands, including Starbucks. When I asked for her favorite Tous les Jours product, she said it was the garlic cheese bread.

It's a bun, cut into sixths or eighths, stuffed with a sweet cream cheese, dunked in mixture of melted butter, garlic and parsley, then baked so the mixture forms a crust.

I told Chang I'd never seen that in South Korea. Then, I contacted some friends in Seoul, who told me that garlic cheese bread became a social media phenomenon about four years ago and is now made in many bakeries there.

Chang is right. It's crazily delicious, especially when it's still warm.

What will the next ricochet be? Maybe a baker in Minnesota will create a twist on it. Maybe take it to the State Fair.