THOMAS RAQUEL

Alumni to Pierre Hermé (Paris) and Laurent Gras @L20 (Chicago) became Pastry Chef at double-starred Acadia before joining, at only 27, Eric Ripert’s three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin as Pastry Chef.

I. Uno de los mejores chefs de Nueva York. Quizás del mundo. ¿Dónde empezó todo?

I. One of the best chefs in New York. Maybe the world. Where did it all start?

TR. My grandmother loved to cook. I’m Filipino, and I grew up with my grandparents because my parents divorced when I was three. She loved to bake. The funny story is that she had diabetes, but loved sweets. I would catch her in the garden, eating cookies and candies, and I would help her bake. I never thought I would get a career out of it, you know, because when I went to culinary school, cooking was not as cool as it is today. The chef profession in America was still a blue-collar job, and my mom said: You’re going to hate it. It’s hard work, blah, blah, blah. It’s not as glamorous being a chef as people think today. Even at the tail end of my tenure at Le Bernardin, the restaurant I was at, the interns’ motivation for cooking was …to be famous, to be on TV instead of actually doing it for the craft. There’s nothing wrong with being on TV, but I feel like you need to focus to learn the basics and know how to work hard.

I. You are a famous chef now, or should I say: A pastry chef?

TR. I went to culinary school to be a savory chef. I thought, I’m going to work in the kitchen, not in pastry… but when I started, I stuck to doing pastries because they were easy for me. Maybe it fits my personality, although I hate that it’s almost a cliché that everybody thinks what a pastry chef is…blah, blah. I try to take a different approach in pastry. I take the approach of cooking at home, but with a different architecture, I think of forms and shapes. People eat with their eyes…

THIS IS A SAMPLE FROM THE INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS RAQUEL

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