Locale has a new cafe that features this home baker's brioche donuts

When searching for a hard-to-find treat, one that isn’t available in Tucson’s restaurants or in specialty grocery stores, I turn to Facebook Marketplace. There, cottage bakers and home cooks can sell without a middleman, from a Louisiana-style seafood boil to elaborate Arabic desserts.

If you pay close attention to pages like Take-Out In Tucson, you’ll see small-business owners promoting, for instance, Vietnamese feasts of Bún Thịt Nướng (vermicelli noodles and grilled pork), rotisserie chicken and egg rolls. That’s where I found Caleb ‘Cal’ Orellana’s perky cartoon logo, connected to photos of pillowy brioche donuts, covered in a crystalline dust of sugar. He makes bright conchas for breakfast sandwiches at Sonoran Brunch Company, peanut-butter-filled donuts for Thunder Bacon Burger Co. and neatly spiraled raspberry-lychee kouignoù amann.

When midtown Italian restaurant Locale opened their new bakery and cafe attached to their sunny back patio early this month, Cal posted a picture of their pastry board: his cronuts and his Ferrero crunch brioche donuts, next to frangipane bars covered with sliced almonds and polished-yet-rustic scones made by Locale's in-house bakers. “People think I baked them all,” Cal said. “That’s just impossible.”

Locale Café Italian restaurant, 2022 counter — The bakery takes up an area that was the Lunt Avenue Marble Club for 13 years.
Courtesy of Locale

Locale’s in-house bakers make most of the board: the elegant pear tarts and the finely latticed croissants. But Deb Tenino, a co-owner of Locale, recognized Cal from his time at an iconic French bakery in Oakland, California, La Farine. He had applied to work at Locale before he launched Cal’s Bakeshop; Deb asked him to join the team once he was already underway with his own project. When Deb started Locale’s bakery, she asked Cal for a sample of his donuts.

“She knew La Farine, so she knew I could deliver,” he said. Croissant donuts were invented in 2013 at Dominique Ansel Bakery in New York. Thanks to Cal, they’re now at Locale, in Tucson.

Cal ended up in Oakland after he rocketed through the Job Corps program. He had been working at the Fry’s grocery store down in Sahuarita, and a friend had recently come back from a workforce training program in Utah. “I thought it would be really good if they offered culinary,” Cal said. “My friend said there was, but you have to look for it.”

Job Corps provides training to young Americans in high-growth areas: the program Cal got into, in Darby, Montana, advertises programs in welding, cement masonry, and carpentry. He snagged a spot in their culinary school.

“I had a choice, and I wanted to travel. I wanted to pick somewhere completely different than Tucson,” he said. He did so well in the program they encouraged him to join their advanced pastry program in San Francisco, where he worked — at the landmark restaurant Cliff House, at the traditional French bakery La Farine — until the pandemic brought him home to Tucson.

kouign amann.JPG — You can find Cal's kouign amann through his online bakeshop, or at Locale's rotating menu.
Courtesy of Caleb Orellana

He considered working for restaurants here, and applied to a few places, but his friends and family encouraged him to start his own business. “By the time I was looking for a job, my parents said: ‘Why don’t you just sell your own pastries? You know how to bake, you know how to cook,’” he said. So he started Cal’s Bakeshop, a cottage bakery at his home on the northwest side, which now has thousands of followers and a 5-star rating on Facebook.

As a home baker, he works closely with Locale to be up to food-handling standards and recently applied to register for Arizona health service’s cottage food program. He aspires to one day open a brick-and-mortar shop. “I want a cafe where people could have a coffee, have a pastry, just hang out,” he said.

He got his start in Tucson with brioche donuts, made to order from his online shop. “The first thing I did here was something different — I had never seen the brioche donut here,” Cal said. He concocted adventurous fillings: berry with coconut and lemon, tropical jams. But the brioche stands on its own as well: he also sells sugar and cinnamon donuts, even plain. Each is available on a rotating basis at Locale. You can check his Insta stories for daily menus, or to place an order directly.

“My favorite dessert I don’t make is tiramisu,” said Cal. “It’s the type of dessert I don’t try to find. If I find it at a restaurant, it’s more of a surprise. I don’t want to get tired of it. I can’t eat the same thing over and over,” he said. When it comes to his desserts, though, he has to try it each time, to make sure it’s up to his standard.

“At Cliff House, we offered these fries, with truffle oil and parmesan. I can’t stand the smell of truffle anymore,” Cal said. “But my brioche? … No matter how many times I try it, I never get sick of it.”