Superstar chef’s creations have fans drooling
PARIS: When Cedric Grolet takes out his pastry knife, millions of mouths water.
The Frenchman, named the top patissier on the planet last month by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, is an Instagram superstar.
Videos of him slicing through the exquisite fake fruit he creates to reveal their tastebud-teasing interiors get millions of views.
Millions more drool over images of his hyper-realistic pears, apricots, lemons, peaches and even tomatoes, with Vogue – a magazine not known for its championing of high-calorie desserts – saying they “leave you wanting to lick the screen”.
“His fans cry, fall into his arms and demand autographs” and selfies, said the usually sober French daily Le Monde.
His work is pure “food porn”, it declared, with only a select few getting the chance to consummate their desire every day at the top Paris hotel where he works.
With high tea at Le Meurice featuring his cakes sometimes booked weeks in advance, he opened a tiny boutique there in March. Its shelves empty within hours every day.
His Rubik’s cube cake – which pivots just like the real thing – has become a cult favourite on the fashionable Parisian dinner circuit,
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although at 170 (RM806) for a cake for six, only those with deep pockets can afford it.
The son of a hairdresser and truck driver from a small town near Saint-Etienne in central France, Grolet’s moment of revelation came when he was only 13.
“A farmer gave me a basket of strawberries for helping him pick his crop and I made a strawberry tart for my grandfather, who ran a small hotel nearby,” he said.
It went down so well that he left
school early to apprentice himself to the village baker.
He later studied fine patisserie and began winning prizes before leaving to make his name in Paris aged 20. There he worked for the French gourmet food and delicatessen chain Fauchon.
It was also at Fauchon that he worked alongside Christophe Adam in its research laboratory, developing new recipes.
Like Adam, who has since founded the L’Eclair de Genie chain in France and Japan, Grolet has been crowned French patissier of the year
and hailed by macaroon guru Pierre Herme as “one of the most talented patissiers of his generation”.
Grolet followed Adam to the exclusive Le Meurice, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. He now works there as a pastry chef under celebrity cook Alain Ducasse.
“Visual beauty attracts the customer, but it is the taste that makes them come back,” said Grolet, who as a millennial himself knows that Generation Y eats with its eyes.
The fact that his creations are not overly sweet has also endeared him to the calorie-conscious beautiful people who queue every day outside his mini-boutique, the first of what Grolet hopes will be a handful across the world.
He began perfecting his extraordinarily delicate fruit six years ago, with their highly worked lifelike skins made from chocolate, with a mousse or marmalade interior made from the real fruit.
“The idea was to do away with the biscuit, the eggs, all the things whose taste doesn’t really do anything and to concentrate on the taste of the fruit,” Grolet said, describing it as “naked patisserie”.