Over the years I've had many people tell me I should write my memoirs from the time I worked in France. I have a tendency to wax eloquent about my time in French pastry shops after a couple of glasses of wine, which certainly were incredible experiences. But having been more of a food writer than a writer writer, I'm a bit shy to jump into a new format. Seeking advice, I asked an editor whether I should consider a book of stories from a French pastry shop. She suggested I try out a few of them first here on my Substack first, and I have, and I'm happy to see they have been well received. So here is yet another, a story about one of the most fascinating chefs I have ever met — not Paul Bocuse, René Redzepi, or Anthony Bourdain. His name was Gerard. As for his last name, I never knew.
In the summer of 1989, I went to Lyon on the first of two stages I was to complete in France. I was 22 years old, and had finished two years of pastry school at that point. My original plan was to go to a hotel in Banff or Lake Louise, following my friends out to Western Canada for a summer of fun and debauchery. When my cooking teacher asked me about my plans and I mentioned Banff he scoffed and said, “You should go to France. I’ll find you a stage.” In my wildest dreams it had never occurred to me to go to France, and yet I spoke French, and even had an English passport, which back then helped with the paperwork needed to stage in Europe. I also never considered that I could work in a French pâtisserie, which intimidated me no end even though I had staged in an excellent French pastry shop here in Montreal the summer before.
Within a matter of weeks, my teacher had found a stage for me in a pastry/catering shop called La Minaudière. The chef was a man by the name of Thierry Froissard who had just won the first edition of La Coupe du Monde de Pâtisserie, so he was a Big Shot and therefore even more intimidating. I didn’t know what to expect but I already had some experience under my belt so I entered with a quiet confidence. Little did I realize I was walking into a hornet’s nest of personalities.
There were six cooks in the pastry department along with one other stagiaire, a young woman by the name of Mai from Japan. There was also one apprentice, all of 15 years old, by the name of Eric. The head of the pastry and entremets department was a keener by the name of Richard, and there were three guys working in the back of the room where all of the dough, bread, and croissants were made, a post called “le tour.”
The chef, Thierry, worked in all of the departments, but spent most of his time in the ice cream room, yelling at Eric, because his specialty, and the one he competed for (and won!) in the Coupe du Monde, was ice cream, which entailed everything frozen, from ice creams to sorbets to granités to entremets glacés to ice sculptures. And as it was summertime, and a hot summer at that, the ice cream department was in full swing.
Upon entering on the first Tuesday of June at 5:30 a.m., I met Thierry. Because there was nothing in the way of Internet or Instagram back in 1989, I had no idea what Thierry looked like. Expecting an old, greying pastry chef along the lines of all of my French pastry teachers back at home, I was shocked to meet a young man of 27, extremely good looking and as cool as they come. Somewhat destabilized by the rock-star gorgeousness of the man in front of me, I almost fell backwards on the stairs as he welcomed me with the French double kiss. Suddenly my summer, which didn’t get off to the best of starts, was looking up.
Thierry introduced me to Richard and said I would be working with him all summer. Richard was a nice kid, a year younger than me, who had a face like Pete Buttigieg and the most eager-to-please demeanour I’ve ever witnessed. The shop’s owner, Mr. Masson, loved Richard because, as he said daily, no one ever kept a refrigerator as clean as Richard, and whenever he said it, Richard would stand there beaming. This, of course, made Richard the target of everyone’s jokes once Mr. Masson left. And they wouldn’t do it behind his back either. No, they would call him the world’s biggest suck-up right to his face. The sweet and gentle Richard did his best to retaliate but it was useless. He was out of his league.
It only took me a few hours to realize the pastry shop dynamic was the guys at the “tour” vs the guys on the “entremets” side of the kitchen. I was with Richard so I had no choice but to put my head down and smile as they teased him mercilessly. Once they were gone, I’d console Richard, saying they were just jealous because he had Mr. Masson’s admiration and they were just the sweaty guys at the tour, the lowest level in the hierarchy of the patisserie. Secretly, though, I thought the tour guys were not only hilarious but made the best pain au chocolat I had ever tasted.
On my first day in, I crossed a guy walking out, who gave me the up and down before leaving. There was no missing his bowl-cut red hair and his jacket covered in cartoon strips. I also recalled his raspy voice as he lit a cigarette and bid good night to everyone as he left. A few days later, when I arrived in the morning, he was working at my spot, piping out cookies. Right when I was about to tell him to get off my counter, Richard intercepted and, in hushed tones, told me to move over to his spot. I did, and after piping out hundreds of cookies in just a few minutes, the guy was gone, but not far. He was now right behind me, manning the oven. Once all of his cookies were in, I walked over to introduce myself. He stuck out his hand and said, “Gerard,” before leaving for a smoke break.
I sidled over to Richard and asked him about Gerard. “He’s in charge of the ovens and baking everything. He has a terrible temperament,” he said, finishing with a not-so-reassuring, “be careful.” So I was warned, but since Gerard worked right next to me, it would be impossible to avoid him. And I didn’t want to, because it only took me a couple of days to realize that, pit-bull personality aside, Gerard was the most interesting guy in the place. When it came to taking the piss out of gentle Richard, Gerard was definitely part of the tour gang, and he was the master of the takedown, saying things like, “When your only talent is cleaning out a fridge, you have to ask yourself some questions…” There was also a class issue at play here, as Richard came from a bourgeois family and the tour guys were really just a bunch of hooligans with a talent for making pie crust.
As much as Gerard was team tour, he would often cross into enemy territory and wander around our side of the kitchen between bakes, sticking his fingers in a bowl of mousse, telling Eric the apprentice to get out of his way, or reading over the orders pinned up over the sink, saying things like, “Look at that… caviar and foie gras in that dinner. They must be rich,” or “Look at these idiots who ordered blanquette de Limoux, obviously too cheap to drink Champagne.” The running commentary on the order forms was constant and highly entertaining, interrupted only when Gerard would amble over to the oven to remove trays of quiches or tortes.
I never once saw Gerard pull anything out of his oven that wasn’t perfectly baked, which made me realize that ultimately, the chef working the ovens is the most important person in the shop. Gerard knew it and didn’t let anyone near the oven without his permission. Eric once tried to reheat a croissant in the oven when Gerard was in the store room, and the yelling that ensued was so fierce that Eric never left the ice cream room again.
One day when we were piping out various shapes of pâte à choux to make éclairs, choux à la crème, glands, pommes de terre, and carolines, Richard, knowing the next step was to bake them, looked over at the oven and froze. Richard had the authority to use the ovens, but he knew he’d have to get Gerard’s approval first, and he was literally trembling. Seeing this situation unfold, I suggested to Richard that I could ask Gerard. The look on Richard’s face went immediately from fear to relief, and for a second there I thought he’d hug me.
Trays in hand, I walked over to Gerard and asked him nicely if I could bake the pâte à choux. He nodded and opened the oven door. It was as easy as that. It was not only a moment of relief for Richard but a moment of acceptance for me. That gesture of opening the oven door was the equivalent of Gerard saying, “You know, Canadian girl, you’re OK.”
From then on, we were fast friends. And I grew to admire Gerard even more every day, not only for his acceptance of me, but for the quality of his work and the path that led him to La Minaudière some seven years before.
More to come…
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