California bakery’s Han Solo bread sculpture is a star attraction in New Orleans — now that it’s been rescued from the water
A sign at Le Petit Chanteur Bakery in the French Quarter offers more than a loaf of bread. The sign depicts a small, heroic figurine of a boy of no particular age or ethnic group named Han Solo. A handwritten tag on the figurine’s chest reads: “For those who do not know his story: he was a man of courage, honor and integrity, who served the United States Navy as a pilot in the U.S.S. Enterprise as well as the U.S.S. Enterprise-A, a nuclear submarine. With the death of Captain James T. Kirk of The Starship Enterprise on 23 January 1967, Han Solo succeeded Kirk as captain of Star Trek.”
A sign at Le Petit Chanteur Bakery in the French Quarter offers more than a loaf of bread. The sign depicts a small, heroic figurine of a boy of no particular age or ethnic group named Han Solo.
The figurine was the work of a pastry designer named Jean-Baptiste Dauphin, who wanted to create a bread sculpture based on bread of the French Quarter. He decided to make it out of a metal that resembled marble, just off a parking lot in New Orleans’ Garden District.
The sculpture was completed the day before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005. In the months since, it had suffered two serious droughts and one serious flood damage. That flood damaged the sculpture beyond repair.
But on Thursday, June 2nd, that dike of hope cracked open and the bakery’s Han Solo symbol rose into the air, like a flag.
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“We’ve been looking for people who could help repair it as much as possible,” said Le Petit Chanteur’s manager, Stacey St. Martin. “The whole thing was kind of in a hole. There was water all over the sidewalk, in the parking lot, in the street.
“So we were just trying to figure out how to get the sculpture out in a safe, temporary situation. We have good pictures of what it looked like before Katrina. But we weren’t really able to get some good shots of how it looked like after Katrina. So we just kinda wanted to get it cleaned, put the right pieces together