marche mon pitou, jesse jonathan hawes, triet duong, french bakery, folioyvr, helen siwak, vancouver, BC, yvr

Marché Mon Pitou: The Warmest Corner of Fairview

Before there was a café, there was a farmers market tent. Before that, a flight and a fruit crumble. And before any of it, there was a grandmother named Gabrielle who moved through a kitchen the way some people move through a room full of friends — with warmth so instinctive it left a mark on everyone nearby. Jesse Jonathon Hawes carries that inheritance with him everywhere he goes, and nowhere more visibly than at Marché Mon Pitou, the bakery and specialty food store he co-founded with his partner, Triet Duong, in the Fairview neighbourhood of Vancouver in February 2021.

The café did not arrive quietly. It arrived in the middle of a pandemic winter, with a vision, a team of believers, and two English bulldogs named Ru and Jellybean waiting in the wings. What followed was something that no business plan could have fully anticipated: a community did not simply discover Mon Pitou. It adopted it.

marche mon pitou, jesse jonathan hawes, triet duong, french bakery, folioyvr, helen siwak, vancouver, BC, yvr

TWO VERY DIFFERENT ROADS

Triet Duong grew up inside a grocery store. For twenty years, his parents ran one in East Vancouver, and the rhythms of that life — the early mornings, the vendor relationships, the understanding that a neighbourhood business is also a form of service — settled into him long before he could name it. He went on to complete a degree in Health Sciences, then built a career in biotech recruiting, eventually working across global projects touching customer experience, sales, marketing, finance, and IT. He is, by every measure, someone who knows how systems work and why they matter.

Jesse’s path looked nothing like that. He spent years as a flight attendant, learning to read a room in seconds, to anticipate what someone needed before they asked, and to understand that a few moments of genuine warmth could shift a person’s entire day. He is, in the most precise sense of the phrase, a bon vivant — someone who does not simply enjoy the pleasures of a well-lived life, but who actively constructs them for the people around him.

That these two found each other, and then found Mon Pitou, feels less like coincidence and more like logic.

marche mon pitou, jesse jonathan hawes, triet duong, french bakery, folioyvr, helen siwak, vancouver, BC, yvr

THE SOUL OF THE PLACE

Walk into Marché Mon Pitou on a weekday morning and the difference is immediate. The music is considered. The greeting is real. The shelves hold products that Jesse and Triet have personally loved — many of them discovered on their frequent trips to France, brought back not as novelties but as memories made available to anyone willing to seek them out. The Angelina hot chocolate from Rue de Rivoli. The Alziari olive oil. The Les Terres Blanches fleur de sel. Each one chosen because it passed a simple test: they would not sell what they would not genuinely enjoy themselves.

“At its core, this slogan is a way of living for us,” they have said of the café’s guiding philosophy of celebrating everyday indulgences. “It’s about finding small, meaningful moments of joy in the everyday.” That is not marketing language. It is, in practice, the operating principle of the place — present in the music selection, the care behind every pastry, the way a team member remembers not just your order but your name, your week, the thing you mentioned last Tuesday.

The Mon Pitou Cookie Collection — Classic Chocolate Chip, Double Dark Chocolate, Cranberry Dark Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and the gluten-free Almond Dark Chocolate — captures this perfectly. It is unpretentious, generous, and deeply considered. Jesse is, after all, someone whose personality lends itself naturally to sitting down with a cookie at any hour, no justification required. Triet keeps dough in the freezer for last-minute guests. The collection did not emerge from a gap in the market. It emerged from who they actually are.

marche mon pitou, jesse jonathan hawes, triet duong, french bakery, folioyvr, helen siwak, vancouver, BC, yvr

JESSE AT THE TABLE

Some hosts invite people over. Jesse Jonathon Hawes constructs an experience and then steps back so everyone else can inhabit it fully. Through his blog and his Instagram account, @jonathonhawes, he shares what he calls “a vision of living well”: how to set a table, how to build a mocktail worth lingering over, how to spend a weekend in Paris, how to make a home feel like somewhere worth returning to.

“I’ve always believed that the way we live at home is deeply connected to how we welcome people anywhere,” he has said, “whether it’s around a dinner table or across a café counter.” The blog, the dinners, the catering — they are not separate endeavours. They are the same philosophy expressed in different rooms. Jesse navigates between them with ease, drawing people in not through spectacle but through the kind of considered warmth that makes guests feel they were the ones being looked forward to.

It is a quality that traces directly back to Gabrielle. Not through a recipe card — Jesse has acknowledged he does not have one — but through something less tangible and more durable. A standard. A question he returns to often: how do I want people to feel when they are here?

TRIET FINDS HIS FOOTING

For Triet, Mon Pitou represents a world that is, on the surface, far removed from biotech and backend systems and data integrity protocols. And yet he has never been more at home. The discipline his former career demanded — the documentation, the organisation, the trust in well-built foundations — transferred seamlessly into a hospitality context that most people would find overwhelming. He set up the café’s POS system the night before opening, alone, after the provider missed the training call. He built a Google Drive system with the kind of structural clarity usually reserved for pharmaceutical companies. He oversees the full employee lifecycle with the same care he would give to a complex global project.

What surprises people, perhaps, is how naturally the warmth came too. Triet is not performing comfort. He grew up watching his parents build something real inside a community, day after day, and he absorbed the lesson that showing up consistently is its own form of generosity. Six years into Mon Pitou, he and Jesse count many of their regulars among their closest friends. That is not an accident. It is the result of a great deal of quiet, steady, deliberate presence.

marche mon pitou, jesse jonathan hawes, triet duong, french bakery, folioyvr, helen siwak, vancouver, BC, yvr

RU AND JELLYBEAN

No account of Mon Pitou is complete without Ru and Jellybean. The English bulldogs are the café’s mascots, its social media constants, and the unofficial centrepiece of a small but devoted community of bulldog lovers who have found one another through the shop. The name Mon Pitou — which translates as “my pooch” but also means “my love,” or “my munchkin” — was Jesse’s childhood nickname, given to him by Gabrielle. Pairing it with the dogs felt not just fitting but inevitable.

“They also serve as a gentle reminder not to take ourselves too seriously,” Jesse and Triet have said, “which is important when you’re running a small business and everything can feel urgent all the time.” On social media, the bulldogs appear with the same frequency as the pastries — which is to say, often, and always to great effect. They have become the emotional shorthand for everything Mon Pitou represents: warmth, humour, a refusal to be precious, and an abiding commitment to the people and creatures you love most.

marche mon pitou, jesse jonathan hawes, triet duong, french bakery, folioyvr, helen siwak, vancouver, BC, yvr

WHAT THEY ARE BUILDING

What Jesse and Triet have constructed in Fairview is not simply a café. It is a place that has woven itself into the fabric of people’s days, their routines, their comfort. Neighbours contribute to the shop’s seasonal presence in ways that feel organic and shared. Regulars receive soup when they are unwell. New parents find meals at their door. Community giveback, as they understand it, is not a programme or a campaign. It is presence — open, consistent, and genuinely glad to see whoever walks through the door.

They are, in the truest sense, the warm and aromatic centre of their corner of this city. And they show absolutely no signs of stepping back from it.

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Luxury Lifestyle Observer: Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury lifestyle niche. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read industry magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and consults with many of the world’s luxury heritage brands. Always seeking new opportunities and challenges, you can email her at [email protected].