By Ruth Melville

Four years ago, Audrey and Sam Leary were living in Brooklyn and looking for a place to start a new life—they found it in Canaan, Conn.

The couple met in New York, where Audrey attended culinary school. After leaving school, she worked briefly at a Michelin-rated restaurant in the city before deciding she preferred baking. She got a job at a bakery, but what the Learys really wanted was to start their own business, buy a house and eventually have a family—all prohibitively expensive in Brooklyn. It was time to leave the city.

They scouted around New England, looking at Burlington, Vt., and Portland, Me., but when they learned that the Black Forest Bakery in Canaan was up for sale, they jumped on it. Sam grew up in Suffield, Conn., about an hour east of Norfolk, and knew this area well from fishing trips in his youth. The Learys went to work fast, moving to Canaan on a Monday and opening the café the very next day.

Much of the menu is made up of American diner classics, such as burgers, BLTs, omelets, grilled cheese and turkey club sandwiches—not all that different from what the previous owners had offered. But there are little touches that hint at a more adventurous spirit in the kitchen, like a ham and Brie baguette, a beet and goat cheese wrap and a quinoa salad.

The daily specials, especially on the weekends, are particularly enticing. You can choose from three kinds of Eggs Benedict: traditional, an Italian version with prosciutto instead of ham and one with smoked salmon. The chicken hash is a tasty concoction of chicken, peppers, onions and corn, with fried eggs on top.

Audrey Leary pulls a pan of freshly baked apple strudel from the oven.

The high quality of the ingredients and meticulous preparation does not go unnoticed. Pastries are made with real butter, and fresh local ingredients are used whenever possible. Audrey, with the aid of two assistants, does all of the baking, including homemade English muffins, plain and chocolate croissants, macarons, brioche rolls and several kinds of bread. The Learys brine their own corned beef for 10 days, and the soups—a recent menu offered cream of broccoli and chicken kale lentil—are made from scratch daily.

Audrey has also started making her own gluten-free flour blend. “I like a challenge,” she says, and she’s willing to take on special orders.

The bakery case would tempt the most diligent dieter. The range of treats include berry pies, chocolate strawberry cakes, éclairs, lemon bars, blueberry cinnamon muffins, strawberry vanilla scones, apple turnovers, cookies, raspberry cream cheese bear claws, chocolate salted caramel bars and almond lemon teacake.

Holidays don’t go uncelebrated at Blackberry River. Audrey has baked Irish soda bread for St. Patrick’s Day, cookies and Yule logs for Christmas, hot cross buns for Easter and sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts) for Chanukah, but the truly unusual, and unexpected, items on the menu are the ethnic dishes. A recent weekend had Korean pancakes, which were so good that customers were recommending them to people waiting in line for a table. These were the creation of head chef Johannes DeVries, a man who likes to spend his days off scouting the Asian markets in West Hartford.

DeVries, a childhood friend of Sam Leary’s, has a strong background in different cuisines, having cooked at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley and a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco. He also prepares slow-braised oxtail tacos and a Moroccan chicken special that comes with house-baked pita bread.

As their customer base has grown, the Learys and DeVries have felt emboldened to add dishes that are “more out there,” as Audrey puts it. And the new dishes have caught on. “Everything sells really well,” she says.

Bit by bit the Learys are starting to renovate the old interior, which is open, light-filled and cheerful. One wall is decorated with copper and tin jelly molds, and a large green mural with white and yellow flowers is painted on another. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming, and the diners are a mix of local regulars and visitors passing through.

Audrey says they wanted to live where it was “pretty, quiet, friendly,” and adds that they feel very at home here now. But most importantly, they get to run their business the way they wanted—doing it themselves, on a small scale.

The Blackberry River Baking Co. is on Route 44 in Canaan, across the street from Stop & Shop. Hours are Sunday and Monday, 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., and Wednesday to Saturday, 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Breakfast is served all day. The menu and specials are posted on their website, www.blackberryriver.com.

Photos by Bruce Frisch.