Sara Brook

CEO, Founder & Award-Winning Pastry Chef

For Sara Brook, it’s been a sweet life.  “I was born loving desserts, especially chocolate,” said Brook, a fifth-generation Houstonian and the youngest of three children. “I have always had a passion for baking – I enjoyed looking at pictures in cookbooks and coming up with my own recipes, or perfecting others.”

Sara Brook fondly recalls her earliest childhood memory as “a 4 year old in preschool, taking turns mixing cake batter in class.”  Although the setting has changed and the audience is much broader, Brook, CEO, founder and award-winning pastry chef for Dessert Gallery Bakery & Café, still enjoys mixing up fabulous cake batters and all kinds of other all-American, buttery, rich, homemade desserts.

But she didn’t start out as a chef. After graduating first in her class from The University of Texas with a degree in computer science and sociology, Brook was working at a law firm and studying for the LSAT when she glanced around the room one day and decided that everyone in the law office seemed a bit too serious.  “I was determined to come up with a plan to spend days doing what I loved,” she said. Bye-bye law.

At the age of 21, Brook launched her first dessert business, and hasn’t looked back since. “The Executive Sweet,” which flourished from 1979 until 1988 before she sold it, was a hit.  One week later, without skipping a beat, Brook launched “Sara Brook Desserts,” a dessert catering company she operated out of the River Oaks Grill.  When customers repeatedly asked for a chocolate sauce she had created, Brook decided to devote full time to marketing and selling her sauce, “The Great Chocolate Cover Up,” nationwide through specialty and gourmet food stores.  In 1992, Brook sold that company and continued working with the new owners as a consultant for two years.  In 1995, Brook founded her third dessert company: Dessert Gallery Bakery & Café, Houston’s premier dessert bakery.  Since opening, Dessert Gallery has consistently been recognized for “Best Desserts in Houston” by a wide variety of publications.  In 2001, Brook received the prestigious “Award for Culinary Excellence” as “Pastry Chef of the Year” from My Table Magazine. 

Today, the woman-owned enterprise includes two Dessert Gallery locations in Houston, a third location in Sugar Land and a Houston-based commissary.  She now has over 60 employees and ships her desserts nationwide.  “It’s always been a family affair, first with help from my grandmother and now from my teenage daughter, Jen,” said Brook.  That family also extends to Brook’s employees, many of whom were hired through the YMCA refugee settlement program and have been with her for 5, 10 and even 15 plus years.  “My employees are very loyal, passionate and dedicated,” she said. How sweet it is.