You probably know what 5 Points looks like.
You might have waited for a table to open up on a Sunday, loitering on Stone Avenue with hipsters in western chic and neighborhood cuties out for brunch. You’d recognize their dining room, flanked with natural wines and a pantry that looks like the coziest, bougiest farm stand in town.
You may have even enjoyed a Negroni at their bar for their new dinner service, with ricotta and house-made focaccia for dipping with friends. But if you get past the cashier and adjacent cake stand, always tempting, you’d slip down the service station into their kitchen.
When you’ve been there, the hum of servers, cooks and friends catching up over wine has probably distracted you from the silent engine of the operation: in an undisclosed location, perhaps in plain sight, there is a cookbook that contains the wealth of recipes collected over the 10 years the restaurant, 756 S. Stone Ave., has been open.
At the end of each page of the cookbook, initials mark who last edited the recipe. Here remain the voices of chefs that have passed through this kitchen, their indelible mark: BP — Bonni Pachecho (now Pacheco-Castillo), who developed their kouign-amann and is now a teacher. SS — Savanah Sandate, who is now a pastry chef at local restaurant Bata.
“Even in recipe writing you can see their voice when they write it,” Chandler Donald, 5 Points’ current bakery manager, said. “I was reading a recipe from Savanah yesterday. This is a very Savanah recipe. If you’re trying to do it this way, do this, if you’re eating this right away, add the gelatin at this point.”
Chandler Donald, head baker at 5 Points, works on a brown butter cake at 756 S. Stone Ave. on March 8, 2023.
“I haven’t talked to [Bonni] in months and months but I hear her while I’m baking: Chandler, can we mise out?” he said, referencing mise en place, the prep-heavy cooking style practiced in many professional kitchens, that Bonni taught him.
Chandler is now in charge of stewarding these recipes. The legacy of these past chefs is alive in the voices he hears while he works, in the consistency of the breads, pastries, cookies and cakes that come out of 5 Points’ ovens.
I came to him to talk cake.
My mom has the kind of sensitive stomach that forces her to eliminate many, seemingly random ingredients from her diet: peppermint, for instance, causes inflammation. So do tomato seeds and, for her, chocolate. She can’t often eat dessert without hurting herself. But she could eat the gluten-free hazelnut cake Chandler built for a 5 Points dinner service, topped with stabilized whipped cream frosting and caramelized hazelnuts. It was the first cake she had eaten in recent memory, and I resolved I would find the person who made it.
Chandler Donald applies a black cardamom infused orange curd to his brown butter cake.
5 Points’ cakes are special, as magnificently flavored as they are decorated, and rarely repeated. I don’t know what kind of cake will be at 5 Points on a given day, but I know I will be delighted by it.
For a shiny price tag of $9, I can buy happiness in the form of Belgian chocolate cake with orange whipped cream and salted caramel Swiss buttercream, or a Lemon and Arbequina olive oil cake with local peach curd and Sonoran honey Italian meringue buttercream. The unconventional flavor combinations are often authorized by “The Flavor Bible,” which is like a thesaurus of tastes 5 Points owner Jasper Ludwig trusts almost as much as the Maillard reaction.
Don’t be scared, trust the process: if you see something loud like lavender in the ingredients list, “It’s mostly a grapefruit pastry cream with someone saying lavender in the other room. [Grapefruit] is the most floral of the citrus fruits so I like to pair it with more floral flavors like jasmine,” Chandler said.
The only way to guarantee your favorite cake will be present is to custom order one, a service used for events as elaborate as weddings or as simple as one woman’s bimonthly carrot cake habit.
Chandler Donald, bakery manager at 5 Points, applies the Sonoran honey Italian meringue buttercream onto a brown butter cake.
Chandler’s days begin with a bake-off, to achieve the requisite number of scones, cookies and kouign-amann. He’ll also bake a few cakes that will then be frozen to be built out later, with different frostings and decor. Building cakes is one of the more creative aspects of the job, but it’s fueled by necessity: what does he have to work with, and what hasn’t been done before?
Cakes’ flavors are dictated seasonally, depending on what produce is at its peak in the area. Last winter, his first full-time winter on staff, Chandler was overwhelmed by citrus.
“My mind is deep in citrus season,” he said. “That’s the only fruit that’s in season that we can get locally this [time of] year. Last year I was struggling not to make the same stuff every time. Now I’ve had a year to think about it, how I’m going to use all these different citrus fruits.” Chandler has since gotten a cross-section of an orange tattooed on his arm.
Cakes’ flavors at 5 Points are dictated seasonally, depending on what produce is at its peak in the area.
An avid hobby baker, Chandler started his baking career under the guidance of Kayla Draper, Bata's pastry chef, when she worked at Flora's Market Run.
Chandler grew up in Apache Junction, the farthest east suburb of Phoenix. “There are no bakeries there. There are a few small businesses that are restaurants and things but it’s mostly Little Caesars, Jack in the Box, Walmart. Why I loved Tucson so much when I moved here was that there are so many small businesses here. Food is really important to people.”
His dad is a pastor and some of his earliest memories of baking are the church ladies — his mom and aunts and other congregants — bringing baked goods to Sunday service. Chandler’s mom is a talented cook and he started baking with her, first making pizzas when she was cooking something he was too picky to eat.
“Because my dad was the pastor we’d be at church until noon or one. There would be all these leftovers because all the church ladies would bring all these baked goods and there was always too much,” he said.
Chandler Donald, head baker at 5 Points, holds the brown butter cake he made at 756 S. Stone Ave. on March 8, 2023.
Chandler grew away from the church, but he still carries himself with the grace of someone who grew up steeped in the concept. On his own, back in college, or now at work or home with his wife (and muse), Chandler spends time with people who grew up differently than him. “In the restaurant industry there’s a lot of ... people who feel no shame in having fun,” he said. “I can be proud and happy and not preoccupied with sin.”
“Being a baker is a hedonic job. I’m all about pleasure, I want you to have the most pleasurable experience, without any thought of this needs to be conserved or in small amounts, or that there’s some shame associated with it,” Chandler said. “For a lot of people, maybe there’s shame associated with eating things like that, but I try to break away from that.”
“Baking is a very simple joy, but it’s an uncorrupted joy,” Chandler said. “There’s nothing bad about enjoying a cake.”
5 Points
Location: 756 S. Stone Ave.
Hours: 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily (to get your hands on their most popular pastries, get there when they open). Dinner service runs from 5-9 p.m. Thursday-Saturday.
For more information (or to custom order a cake), check out their website.
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