An apple is an apple by any other name. Except when it’s a dessert by Paris’s hottest pastry chef.
Cédric Grolet is known for his striking trompe l’oeil creations. What looks like a fig or lemon is actually an impossibly thin shell of lacquered white chocolate, which cracks open to reveal layers of fluffy ganache and spiced fruit.
Grolet's devotion to aesthetics and painstaking techniques have won him the title of Best Pastry Chef in the World from Les Grandes Tables du Monde as well as an Instagram following of more than 618,000 people. But the 32-year-old chef is far from complacent.
“I don’t revisit anything.” Grolet says during a visit to his kitchen. “If I pick up a classic French recipe, it’s to see how I can push it forward.” As executive pastry chef of le Meurice since 2013, Grolet has brought a new energy—and a new generation of diners—to one of Paris’s most esteemed palace hotels.
Consider afternoon tea at the Meurice’s Restaurant le Dalí: Each table is greeted with a triple-decker tray of sandwiches, scones, and muffins, plus a sampling of the season's photo-friendly desserts, signed by Grolet. Right now, that means edible sculptures depicting gleaming candied apples spiced with juniper berry and nubby lemons made of white chocolate and mint cream. At a time more often reserved for client meetings and traveling couples enjoying their golden years, the ladies who lunch are now joined by a fresh-faced, fashionable set that has been little interested in the lengthy, wallet-busting gastronomic meals typical of the city’s five-star hotels.
In the evening, yes, guests can still work their way through a two Michelin-starred dinner by Alain Ducasse before getting to Grolet’s dessert—or they can mix high and low. Just as today’s Parisian might pair a Uniqlo t-shirt with a Chanel handbag, nothing’s stopping you from following up ramen at a dive-y Japanese bistro with drinks and signature dessert at Le Meurice's bar.
Beyond the visual appeal of his desserts—a search for #tarteauxpommes (French for apple pie) on Pinterest or Instagram brings up hundreds of reposts and imitators for Grolet's star-making version of the dish, in which thinly sliced apples are twisted into the shape of a rose—the chef is hardly neglecting taste. He aims to preserve the original flavors of a fruit, not to mask them with sugar and butter.
“I want to respect the product that nature gives us. I look for simplicity.” Grolet says. He prefers to pair a fruit with the right herb or spice to set it off. “It’s important to me that the clients understand what they're tasting.” (His first photo and cookbook, released last month, is aptly and simply named: Fruits).
That isn’t to say simplicity is easy: Grolet and his staff of up to 25 chefs and apprentices spend their days peeling and dicing, juicing and reducing in order to concoct intensely flavored fruit solutions before sculpting each cream-and-white chocolate shell by hand.
While Grolet has seized the international spotlight, he is just one of a new guard of pastry chefs shaking up the dessert scene in the French capital that long gasped under the weight of a million multicolored macaroons.