Claudia Martinez : The Taste of Giving by Brian Cazeneuve

With Tireless Generosity_ Honors Her Family and Her Craft

The ingredient that graces all of Claudia Martinez’s creations came from a discussion with her father, Aquiles, in 2019.  Claudia had just been recognized as one of Eater’s Young Guns and was weeks away from earning her first nomination for a James Beard Award as the Outstanding Pastry Chef in the country. She was 26, a five-foot-tall burst of imagination, industry and will. Her non-conformity had begun shaping both her menu and her resolve among kitchen hierarchy; yet at every age, she always welcomed directives from family. “This is just the beginning,” her father told her. “People will see you. People will watch you. People will know you. You’re going to build a platform. What you going to do with it?”

Martinez understood. Throughout her life, the intangible fulfillment of generosity surrounded her as it coursed through her lineage and shaped its pedigree. Her parents emigrated from Venezuela and immediately sought ways not just to make a better life for themselves but to build better lives around them. Her father was a professor of religion at Reinhardt University in Waleska,  Ga., making extra time for students beyond prescribed office hours. Her mother, Nora, became head pastor at the Nett Church and a family advocate for Head Start, with faith organizations dedicated to immigrants.  Her older sister, Andrea, learned public health in Ecuador, then worked in the Peace Corps before taking a job with the CDC Foundation in Atlanta. Her Aunt Aura had a car as a social worker.

The family ethos wasn’t guided by a rigidity of rules or liturgical memorization, but rather the practical applications they compelled: don’t judge; be kind to people;  use your blessings to bless others; don’t just break bread,  but pass it around the room, so your neighbors can have a piece. With her family, Martinez didn’t just hear the words; she saw them in action every day. Claudia would have become a social worker, herself, had she not landed in the pastry world. It was an unlikely destination. “I didn’t really like sweets,” she recalls. “A lot of the sugary things people ate then were processed, and I come from a Latino background where we didn’t eat processed foods. We cooked every meal. The food was never fancy, but it was always local, always fresh. Food brought us together.” Claudia recalls sitting with her grandmother Julia, her “Abuelita,” who held court  and told stories in the kitchen while she cooked.

“Even though my grandmother came from a country that didn’t have a lot of resources, she always made time to bake and do wedding cakes out of the things she had in her house,” Claudia recalls. “Those are things you can repurpose, so there’s no waste.” To Claudia, dessert was a reflection of soul rather than a concoction of science,  even if her Dessert DNA was missing a few of the usual ingredients. “I’m the least artistic person,” she insists. “I can’t draw. I don’t get art.” But the girl who didn’t like sweets and couldn’t sketch her dessert ideas soon discovered a knack for blending colors and flavors, making them look and taste wonderful.

At 16, she won a local recipe contest by making Venezuelan egg rolls with sliced steak and braised beef, served with sides of beans and plantains.  Instead of an Asian dipping sauce, she mixed mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup. Claudia associated mealtime with family time and told her parents she wanted to pursue a career in food. They were hesitant, but not dismissive. Both parents valued education, so they encouraged Claudia to get a degree and complete her pursuit once she started it.

She attended Johnson & Wales in Charlotte, where she received a C in the basic Baking and Pastry class, but an A in Advanced Desserts. “Pastry class wasn’t like cooking class, where you could kind of freestyle it,” she explains. “In basic pastry, the instructors gave you a piece of paper and said, ‘do it exactly like this or you won’t do well in the class.’ I didn’t have the patience for soufflés. I did well in the advanced class because I liked plating and incorporating colors. Latin cuisine is always colorful. I did desserts more like a cook, making sure they were seasoned, balancing acid, fat, texture, sweetness. Let’s make a dessert with different fruits or let’s make a dessert with, I don’t know, radishes. Let’s have fun with it.”

Martinez returned to Atlanta, where she worked multiple stations at Restaurant Eugene, a fine-dining establishment that once hosted a family with a less-than-fine comportment. Martinez recalls serving a chicken confit dish to a threesome, when  the mother instructed her son to stop eating. “’Hey, put that down,’ she told him,” Martinez remembers. “’We’re going to get another course because we don’t eat meat close to the bone. Other people  do that.’ Then she asked me: ‘Can you get him another course?’ That was hard for me to hear. Everybody doesn’t have access  to the same food.”

When the dad went to pay the bill, the woman doubled down on her boorish entitlement: “Honey, don’t do that.  Give the card to the somm,” she told him. “You don’t know what she’s going to do with it.” Martinez froze. “The woman thought I was going to steal his information because of how I looked,” she remembers. “It was less about hospitality and more about being a servant. I was crying in the hallway. It was at that moment I knew I didn’t want to do fine dining anymore.”

Martinez stuck it out for months at Eugene, being moved from station to station because she was reliable at all of them.  She broke preconceptions with each task. “I’m small.” she says. “I don’t look like someone who can toss sauté pans around. They often put women on pastry and we were usually short-staffed there. I figured I might as well get good at it.” The restaurant offered her the role of pastry chef, but Martinez figured the promotion was a band-aid until they found someone more established. She declined the post.

At a culinary crossroads, Martinez DM’d David Vidal, a chef in Sweden whose work she admired over the internet. Vidal worked as the pastry  chef at Laholmen restaurant in Strömstad, a remote fishing town on the west coast of Sweden.  Vidal was different. Born in Canada, trained in Malta, he was soft-spoken, respectful, patient and encouraging. Officially, Martinez spent a month working for free to learn from Vidal, but he also wanted to learn from her. Could she show him how to make her best American apple pie? Maybe some other Southern dishes, too? They cooked together. Vidal had transitioned from a career as a savory chef, so he brought a less regimented approach to the world of pastry than she’d been introduced to in cooking school. He used his mind’s eye and the bounty of local harvests, beyond just the lingonberries people associate with Swedish cuisine. Her eyes widened and her career choice narrowed. Martinez was ready for full-time pastry.

Martinez returned to Atlanta refreshed and inspired. After a stint at Atlas restaurant in Buckhead,  she became pastry chef at Tiny Lou’s, a brasserie in the Hotel Clermont that was a departure from Restaurant Eugene.  It had a whimsical vibe. It had no dress code. Heck, it was located above a strip club in the hotel. Martinez was able to be herself, and she embraced everybody. She created one dessert for a stage dancer named  Blondie, who performed downstairs crushing beer cans without, um, using hands or feet. The Chocolate Stiletto  dessert featured a brown butter blondie topped with curried  bananas flambe, buttermilk ice cream, and hazelnut cremeux

When  Covid struck, Martinez created a pop-up out of the hotel kitchen named  Café Claudia, making cookies, cakes and brownies that she and her mother delivered to neighbors. She used the proceeds to write checks to her fellow employees so they could buy groceries when the restaurant was shut down. “I kept telling myself: hey, put yourself in other people’s shoes,” she says. “It made me understand I had more power than I realized.” As restrictions eased gradually, her philanthropy kicked into overdrive. Each Sunday, when the restaurant was closed, she collaborated with chefs who had been laid off and let them keep all their sales rather than charging them a customary commission of 30 to 40 percent.

Soon, Martinez took a call from Steven Satterfield and Neal McCarthy, co-owners of Miller Union, a restaurant in a refurbished warehouse in what used to be Atlanta’s meatpacking district. They were big fans of hers and invited her in to talk about  the restaurant

Martinez wasn’t sure, but McCarthy and Satterfield spoke more about mission than menus. They knew how to win her over. “It wasn’t really an interview; it was more of a conversation,” she recalls. “Neil started talking about immigration with me. It’s something I’m passionate about.  It’s how my parents got here. It makes up a lot of the restaurant workforce here. It felt really good to have a conversation with an owner about values and kitchen culture.  I didn’t want to go through a chain of corporate command to be able to speak up and be who I am. I told them wherever I was, I would be using my position to give back to the community, and were they okay with that as a priority?” When  Martinez heard the magic words just be yourself, she was in.

Her distinctive emphasis on robust seasonings mixed with local produce would earn a second James  Beard nomination in 2022 and a new wave of devotees. At both Tiny Lou’s and Miller Union, each dish featured savory, spicy, what-are-those-flavors-I-taste surprises

A strawberry mousse with almond sponge cake, lime-basil sorbet and a black-pepper crumble kicked in some heat at the end thanks to the pepper. An Araguani Chocolate Ganache Cake with passion  fruit, and toasted coconut also enjoyed a warm floral dash of cardamom. Honey chevre included strawberry ice cream, port reduction, yuzu pickled green strawberries and citrus shortcake. The Quesillo, a Venezuelan flan, added whipped dulcey, caramel popcorn, grapefruit and rum raisin.

Martinez featured microgreens in desserts; she made a celery ganache and a kumquat marmalade; she put satsuma in a chocolate hazelnut mousse. A trip to Colombia with her father introduced Martinez to lulo, the beguiling cross between rhubarb and lime that looks like a tomato. Martinez was so enchanted, she brought back a puree of the distinctive fruit and made a globe of dulce chocolate with lulo and whipped mango with toasted pistachio.

“Especially in Georgia, people like what they’re used to,” she says. “A lot of times I don’t even list the weird stuff because it keeps people from ordering it. Pink-peppercorn bavarois is one of my favorite desserts. I had trouble selling it. So I took the peppercorn off and just called it bavarois, and people would say, ‘Ooo, what is this spicy something?  It’s good.’”

Martinez made sure each imagining also carried a sprinkle of philanthropy and a dollop of community.

Miller Union had a regular event called Monday  Night Brewing. Martinez didn’t drink beer. Brewers began working on a version based on her Venezuelan oatmeal cookie. They produced a beer with Venezuelan chocolate, vanilla, coconut, cardamom and sea salt. Her share of the proceeds went to Giving Kitchen that provided emergency assistance to food service workers.  When  Luis Sanchez, one of the staff at the restaurant, contracted cancer, Martinez started a dessert cocktail popup to help him cover his medical bills

She ran another pop-up for a non-profit that helped  Latinos to open businesses, not just restaurants, so they could learn about marketing and raising capital funding. She donated product to 399Fridge, a place where those who have can drop off food to those who need.  She created a partnership with Stolen Goods, an organization enabling Atlanta chefs to donate to the Edna Lewis Foundation that issues grants to minorities in the areas of culinary arts, agriculture and farming.

Later this summer, Martinez will open a cocktail and dessert bar called Bar ANA; a passion project with savory food, wines, fun drinks – look for tamarind cocktails — and, of course,  great confections, including tasting menus and plated desserts. Appropriately, the initials each represent a member of her family. “I want everyone to have a space where they can have a really great experience but still feel comfortable,” she says. “They can come in sweatpants or in a suit on a nice date.” For staff, there will be internships, fair wages, menu engagement and ample chances for advancement. Frequent philanthropic partnerships will emerge as needed, she says, “because you can’t always predict  the areas of need.” New accolades and prizes may well follow, too, although Martinez pays less mind to the hardware than the intentions they represent. “I don’t need  a lot of stuff,” she explains.

But there is a particular honor  that came from that memorable discussion with her father that she holds close. “You could win 500 awards,” he told her. “None of them change one thing. Just know that I’m proud  of you.”

She cherishes that one.

(This article appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)