Petite Soeur’s shoppers have a tough choice as soon as they leave the shop: Painstakingly photograph all their picturesque treats, or devour them all as soon as they can. Located in a well-lit space with modern minimalist design on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, the chic confectionary specializes in hand-painted bonbons, gold accented chocolate bars, buttery sablé cookies, and dainty one-bite treats, like dark chocolate fudge and mango-passion fruit caramels. The newly opened shop is helmed by Ashleigh Pearson, a veteran of Thomas Keller’s Michelin 3-star Per Se in New York and Marcel’s by Robert Wiedmaier in D.C.
Though every product must be eye-catching and elegant, Pearson is primarily guided by taste. “Flavor is always first,” says the 32-year-old chocolatier. “Nothing goes to the design phase until I’m more than content and pleased with how it tastes. You can stare at something all day, but if you bite it and it doesn’t give you more joy than when you looked at it, then it’s a fail.”
Don’t expect crazy options. Pearson loves classic, clean flavors. Bonbon choices include cocoa mint, s’mores, Small Planes coffee and cream, almond butter and jelly, and maple walnut crunch. Sea salt speckled chocolate bars hide miniature reservoirs of butter caramel and crunchy bits of toasted almonds. Her sablé cookies – crafted with only butter, flour, sugar, and salt, plus a flavoring component – come in vanilla bean, espresso, dark cocoa, and chocolate hazelnut. Expect to see new flavors introduced during the Christmas season, and for future holidays.
It has taken a dozen years in the hospitality industry for Pearson to open Petite Soeur, which means “little sister” in French, a nod to the nickname her three brothers call her. It isn’t where she expected she would be at this stage in her life.
Born in Woodbridge, Va., she and her family bounced between her father’s hometown of Baltimore and Southeast D.C., where her mother was from. Both parents inspired her interest in food. “My mom is the best cook and the worst baker,” says Pearson, unable to contain a chuckle. “She would kill me for saying that. Something she always instilled in me was doing the best with what we had. She would go into the pantry every night and turn nothing into the most beautiful, most special meal.”
Meals rarely ended with something sweet. She and her father, both self-proclaimed “dessert buffs,” began making simple treats to satiate their cravings. Pearson never considered what she was doing might become her career. Science was always her first love; she believed her work would someday be in that realm, and attended University Maryland Baltimore County to study biology.
Still, her love of baking grew over the years. So did her kitchen skills. While in college, she won a baking competition at her church, taking down the longtime champion. The summer before her senior year, she decided to get a kitchen job to indulge her passion for pastry. She knew it had to be at a French restaurant, because she was obsessed with their pastries, inspired by seeing a fruit tart that was “as shiny as a rocket ship” while visiting Paris as a child with her grandmother.
She approached Robert Wiedmaier’s Marcel’s full of hubris and enthusiasm, despite any professional experience. And why should we hire you? they wanted to know. “I just got an A in organic chemistry, I don’t see why I can’t work in the pastry department,” Pearson shot back.
They hired her as a pastry cook, but “if the dishwasher called out, I was the dishwasher,” says Pearson. “I did whatever was asked of me.”
The hours were long, the work grueling, the environment challenging. There was so much to learn, starting with the language, since French terms were commonly used. Pearson wrote those she didn’t know down in a journal, so she could go home and figure out their meaning before her next shift. “I would be broken down every single day,” she says. “Then I’d wake up the next day with the feeling ‘I’m ready to do this again. I’m ready to go harder than I did before.’”
At the end of the summer, the chef gave her an ultimatum: She needed to continue working at the restaurant full-time. But that would mean abandoning her last year of college and forgoing the career in the sciences she had been imagining since childhood. After thinking about it for weeks, she decided to stay. The decision was difficult. Telling her parents was even harder. Her mother began sobbing, thinking her daughter was ruining her life. To her surprise, her father was very supportive, telling her, “Do what makes you happy.” (Ultimately, her mother came around to the idea and both parents are huge supporters of her career.)
Pearson began switching between Wiedmaier’s restaurants – including Brasserie Beck and Mussel Bar – helping wherever needed. By the time she left the company in 2015, she was the head pastry chef of Marcel’s. After two years in France, where she studied at Le Cordon Bleu, she made her way to New York for a stint at the legendary restaurant Per Se.
Throughout her travels, she studied and read all she could, quickly learning the foundational knowledge. “As soon as I learned the rules, I learned how you could break them to be creative and innovative,” she says.
In 2019, she came back to D.C. and started Petite Soeur, working out of Marcel’s kitchen after service ended late at night. She sold her goods at pop-ups and markets, and to wholesale accounts, including Little Acre Flowers and the George Town Club. During the pandemic, she began producing her sweets out of what was then Glen’s Garden Market in Dupont Circle.
After honing her recipes and making sure the space was equally appealing, Pearson opened Petite Soeur at the end of October. She already has a steady stream of customers, many motivated by seeing her chocolates on Instagram. “We are a society that is hyper-focused on imagery and aesthetics,” she says. “I think people start noticing the brand for the aesthetics, but they come back because we deliver on flavor.”
Petite Soeur is located 1332 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Open Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
