Shining in the City of Light

American Expat Chefs are finding their culinary groove in Paris

By Philip Ruskin

Paris is arguably the world epicenter of gastronomy. Nearly all culinary schools teach French Technique. Much of the language we use in association with food is French. Examples include the word restaurant (from the French word restaurer, to restore oneself), bistro, menu, chef/cheffe, cuisine, and so on. So it isn’t surprising that for so many pastry chefs, France — and Paris in particular — is their happy place, a frequent destination for R&R and R&D. The staggering number of patisseries and boulangeries is unreal. In short, the city of light (and dark chocolate) is the place pastry dreams are made of.

The 1920s saw “the lost generation” of American expat writers and artists descend on Paris for creative inspiration, giving rise to a whirlwind of artistic energy that has been a model for generations ever since. David Lebovitz and Dorrie Greenspan may have been the “Hemingway” and “Fitzgerald” of foodies paving the way for a generation of pastry expats finding their gastronomic groove here.

Several exceptional American pastry chefs who have settled in Paris have found success combining the best of French and American culinary sensibilities. Amanda Bankert, Jessica Yang, Alison Johnson and Frank Barron have taken different paths, but they ultimately led to Paris.

Jessica Yang (And Robert Compagnon), Le Rigmarole & Folderol

Jessica Yang’s love of ice cream didn’t lead to a life as a pastry chef. While studying chemical engineering at Berkeley, Yang worked part-time as a server in a restaurant and had always loved cooking on her own. Drawn to a more artistic direction, she changed her major to art history (and realized much later that both would serendipitously serve her well when life brought her to Paris…and pastry.)

After college, Yang wanted to go back to cooking. So to assuage her parents’ concern, she started looking into culinary programs in order to get a degree, and settled on studies at Ferrandi, the luxury hospitality and culinary school based in Paris (where she hoped to get a job before returning to the U.S.). Since she was older than the other students, Yang went for pastry, since by being in Paris, she could jump-start her career more quickly. She landed a position in the Michelin-starred kitchen of Guy Savoy, where she met her husband, Franco-American chef Rob Compagnon. In 2017, they opened Le Rigmarole, a tasting menu concept that has become one of the hardest reservations to come by in town. 

“Running a small business in France forces the owners to wear more hats”, notes Compagnon, whose responsibilities, with Yang, include sourcing, prepping, washing the dishes, taking reservations, serving and curating the wine list and, of course, cooking and baking. Yang is solidly in charge of desserts, which change every week and tend to be light. Yang often chooses ice cream. “I just think it’s the best dessert in the world and it’s easy to eat after a hearty meal”, she says.

Yang built a love of ice cream by spending time with her Mandarin-speaking grandparents. Since she wasn’t fluent in their primary language and they weren’t fluent in hers, enjoying ice cream together offered an instant, deep and universal form of communication.

It’s that love of ice cream that led the couple to open Folderol in 2020. Yang and Compagnon liked the whimsical and nostalgic sound of the word, which they used to name their strikingly original and successful ice cream and wine bar. Who better than an American expat pastry chef in Paris and her Franco-American chef-husband to bring the childlike glee of ice cream into the grown-up foodie world of France by creating a place where you can enjoy America’s favorite dessert while sipping on France’s famous wines and cocktails?

Folderol offers 12 rotating and seasonal flavors, which include chocolate, vanilla, olive oil (their signature and best seller), two non-dairy sorbets, two nut flavors, one or two American-style inclusions, such as Speculoos cheesecake, Maple pecan, strawberry shortcake, brownie cheesecake and two with infusions such as cold brew, orange blossom, and black sugar/fruit plus dairy (orange creamsicle).

Amanda Bankert, Boneshaker Donuts

Just as French Macarons took off in the U.S., American pastries and baked goods seem to be taking hold regularly  in France. There was Le Brownie (pr: brroony), Le Crumble (pr: crruhmbleh) and Le cookie (pr: coookie). American expat pastry chef-baker Amanda Bankert single-handedly made gourmet donuts a thing in France. Since 2012, when Bankert opened Boneshaker Donuts in Paris, French foodies have been standing in lines down the block for her sumptuous flavorful American-style donuts. In France! Lines for donuts! No, it wasn’t a life-long dream, but a foodie fantasy of a remarkable woman whose American energy and optimism was sparked by the magic of Paris.

To earn extra money at age 15, Bankert started working as a server in restaurants, but despite developing a real affinity for the industry, she went on to pursue her love of art as an art history major at Sarah Lawrence. (But she always loved cooking and would research recipes in her spare time, she confided.)

Bankert spent her Junior semester abroad in Paris and moved back just after graduating. “In order to be a legal resident, I had to be a student,” she reasoned. When she recalled hanging out with Cordon Bleu culinary students at her study-abroad residence and “how nice, fun, cool, and passionate they were about what they did – it really piqued my interest.”  Bankert enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, figuring, “worst case situation, I spend a year in Paris learning to make amazing desserts.”  At this point, she still didn’t know it would be forever.

Bankert graduated six months pregnant with her first child. She moved with her chef/husband (whom she met in Paris) to be near his family in Dublin, where she stayed almost ten years working in high-end restaurants. 

In 2012, Bankert moved back to Paris. “I’d always worked for other people, but the goal was always to open something of my own, though Bankert wouldn’t necessarily recommend opening a shop to other pastry chefs. “I was coming in blind,” she says. “A restaurant pastry chef’s life is very different from bakery work . . . “I didn’t know how much red tape there’d be here in Paris. I think if you know in advance you might not do it.”

Bankert also encountered a business environment that was less than supportive. “ I heard a lot of ‘non’(no),” she recalls. “For example, I  couldn’t get a loan. The bankers were convinced donuts couldn’t be popular in France.”

That only made her more determined and resourceful. “Our first space was in a derelict building (more affordable than the original space we’d found),” she says. “We borrowed from friends and family and did work ourselves. It was incredibly DIY.  The electricity was literally from the 1950s. A friend rewired [items] for us and another friend put in the floor. We built a display case out of Ikea.

“Boneshaker was built by a lot of friends with a lot of love. People discard things in the street, I found our first coffee bar, and picked up our first fryer at a yard sale for 10 Euros!”  Boneshaker Donuts had customers from the moment they opened the doors, and hasn’t let up since.

So how did a restaurant pastry chef transform into a donut baker?  “I’d never worked in a bakery,” she says.” I didn’t know there were fryers for donuts.” To source equipment, she (like Frank Barron) Googled photos and videos of artisanal donut shops, combing through images and freeze-framing to see what equipment they were using.

“Since there were no donut shops before us (in Paris) there were no options here, so I had to get everything from the U.S.. Her first big investment was Belshaw’s smallest pro-fryer, and she soon moved on to a larger one and a Belshaw proofing oven, which Bankert describes as “life changing.”

The small space turned out to be an unexpectedly huge asset. Through the window behind the counter, people waiting to order could see a real chef in a cloud of flour hard at work in the kitchen. They could tell the business was artisanal, which went a long way to counter the image the French had of donuts as fast food or industrial desserts. 

Bankert approaches the flavor creations for her donuts the way a pastry chef would approach desserts in a restaurant. “I think of flavor combinations exactly the way I would a dessert: flavor and texture,” she says. “You don’t want it to be cloyingly sweet; [you] want some fat, texture, flavor, salt, acid in balance.”

She mentions that when she visits family in the States, she finds desserts very sweet. In Ireland and France, chefs actually use whipped cream to cut the sweetness. “Here they serve tarte tatin with crème fraiche because it cuts the sweetness,” she adds. “I learned about the sense of balance here.”

Alison Johnson, Rose Bakery

Visit the Musee Romantique and savor the goodies in Alison Johnson’s garden café called Rose Bakery, including brownie cheesecake, carrot cake and scones. Johnson’s initial interest in natural foods, refinement of pastry and the lure of French culture drew her back to the place where she had taken food and chocolate courses in her younger days and spent four months working internships in boulangeries, where she often worked “la coupre,” a shift that ran from morning through the after-dinner close, with just a two-hour mid-day break. “As the Pastry Chef, I worked alone and of course was the last to finish,” she recalls. “Once the station was clean and the floors too, I went home. Needless to say, I didn’t get a lot of quality sleep during my time there.” Still, for Johnson, the lifestyle and culture more than redeemed the long hours.

Frank Barron (cakeboyparis)

Frank Barron moved to Paris in 2012 for his partner Rob’s job that was supposed to be a two-year stint. “And here we are 14 years later,” the affable, elegant and talented Barron explains. Barron didn’t set out with a recipe to create a successful cake-decorating workshop, a glorious book endorsed by the world’s most famous pastry chef, or to become one of the leading expat pastry influencers with nearly 50,000 followers on his cakeboyparis Instagram account. So how did a UC Berkeley art history major from California transform into a celebrated American cake master in Paris?

Barron initially took French classes at the Sorbonne, and wandered around Paris with a mission to try as many pastries as possible. By the second year, he got a bit homesick and missed his comfort food, American sweets, which weren’t that easy to find in Paris, so he realized he’d have to bake them, himself.

Barron had never studied pastry, so his mom sent him recipes, he watched countless baking videos on youtube, and he had expat friends come over for cake parties to road test his handiwork. By 2013, Frank started to notice a trend: the coffee shop scene. “These were my go-to places, where they served American-style pasties like banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, and muffins,” he says.  When Australian coffee shop owner, Chris Nielson tasted some of Barron’s baked goods, he declared them “awesome” and gave Barron his very first commission (paid partly in Cappuccinos). Word of mouth and social-media response were positive, and other coffee shops began ordering his cakes. In 2014, he worked on the first cake pop-up at the popular Boot Café, a pint-sized project that served up big flavor. It was a huge hit, leading to a series of pop-ups at specialty coffee shops around Paris. He says his most popular cake at those events was the classic American chocolate layer cake (made with French Valrhona Guanaja chocolate, of course).

Although they were well received and great fun, cakes didn’t bring in the cash. So Barron pivoted, launching a series of cake-decorating workshops using high-end ingredients. He wanted his Cakeboy Paris classes to incorporate a French sensibility with American-inspired desserts — cakes that are aesthetically pleasing, have balanced texture and taste, use seasonal ingredients and are not too technique heavy. Barron’s “guests,” who skew heavily American, still culminate cake decorating class with a sumptuous goûter (marvelous French tradition of afternoon snack) of cake and Champagne.

With his cake-decorating business, Barron had finally found a way to combine his art history studies with a passion for pastry. “I was inspired by the aesthetic beauty of the pastries I’d discovered in Paris,” he explains. Barron singled out Japanese expat pastry chef Mori Yoshida as one of his many inspirations, along with the godfather of French pastry, Pierre Hermé,

With his Cakeboy Paris workshops thriving and Instagram account growing, the next expansion of his brand didn’t happen by design, but once again, the magic of Paris led to his exquisitely beautiful and informative Paris travel-log cookbook, Sweet Paris: Seasonal Recipes from an American Baker in France.

Unbeknownst to him, a U.S.-based literary agent was following him on Instagram (his cakeboyparis Insta account has nearly 50,000 followers), reached out to him out of the blue and asked, “Would you be interested in writing a book about the life of a pastry chef in Paris?” At first Barron thought it was a scam and ignored it. But the agent persisted. She was taken by the elegant beauty of his cakes, his self-taught humble demeanor, authenticity and the visually striking life of a pastry chef he shared on social media. At one point, he had four publishers vying for him to sign.

It was quite a progression for Barron, who would stay on rue Bonaparte in the sixth arrondissement when he visited the city in his youth, just so he could be near Hermé’s flagship patisserie. Years later, Herme wrote a blurb for Barron’s book.

Barron has become one of the brightest shining American expat baking and pastry influencers in the City of Light, now on the guest list of countless openings and launches. His talent, charm and passion have made him instrumental in promoting American cakes in France. But he is not alone. For so many years, French chefs have brought their vast baking talents to the States, shaping the landscape of American pastry. Increasingly these days, Americans are returning the favor.

(This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)