Francois Behuet: Taking Shape

It’s a Time of Rebirth for the U.S. Pastry Team.
Chocolatier Francois Behuet is Helping to Mold, Engrave and Etch the Group to Success.

By Brian Cazeneuve

You’re not supposed to be here. Chocolate master Francois Behuet is sharing his masterpiece while it is still in masterpieces. A few touches here, some construction there and the shapeless is not just taking shape; it is emerging into a showstopping showpiece. The viewing, itself, is premature. It’s like opening the Christmas gifts on December 24 or checking out the future bride’s dress a week before the wedding. “Looks good, eh?” Behuet asks, as if there could be any doubt. It looks sensational, but further details will need to wait. Your secrecy is required.

The unveiling that matters will take place on July 25, in New Orleans, where the French-born Behuet will represent his adopted country, the United States, at the Americas Selection World Pastry Cup. It is a regional competition from which four teams will qualify for the major event on the world stage, the Coupe de Monde de la Patisserie in Lyon France on January 22, 2027. Every two years, the world’s best show off their finest efforts in three disciplines: sugar, ice and chocolate. Japan took home top prize in 2025, followed by France and Malaysia. The U.S. team has finished first once, in 2001. Since then, it has earned bronze medals in 2005 and 2015, but has not been back on the podium since. In 2025, the U.S. could not manage to field a team.

That is not the case this year. The U.S. pastry team has assembled an all-star cast of participants and support staff led by coach Stephane Cheramy. Think of the prep as an all-encompassing mis en place ensuring that there will be no regrets about preparation. “If you enjoy the process, you respect the process,” Behuet says. “If you respect the process, something good will happen for you.”

This prepare-for-luck mantra has followed Behuet since his days as an apprentice as a teenager in Caen, France where he caught his first whiffs of his future. “Every day my mom was giving me one Euro to buy a baguette in my small village,” he recalls. “This smell I can’t forget was very specific to the bakery.”

With the aroma still lingering, he started his career in 2004 as a teenage apprentice at Roussel Patissier Chocolatier. “Doing pastry even in France, it was a blue-collar job,” Behuet recalls. “The kids around me said, ‘but you’re good at school. Why are you going to the pastry?’ Me, I just loved it.”

Even Behuet’s school curriculum centered around food as part of his apprenticeship. “Mathematics was about recipes,” he explains. “English was about words we used in the kitchen. Two days a week we’d work on techniques.” Behuet earned his first diploma after two years, a time when many apprentices would choose to stop. His studies spanned eight years, including a five-year masters’ study in chocolate.

Bread was actually Behuet’s first emphasis, but it was not his first love. “I didn’t like it at the bakery,” he says. “We had to set up, wipe the floor, clean everything. But they didn’t let the 14-year old kid touch the dough. I switched to pastry where I could make tarts and work with my hands. Wow, it was so much better.”

At Roussel, Behuet found his comfort zone and confiserie zone making chocolate for holidays. “For me, chocolate was precision with temperature,” he says. “It was tasting with your finger or your lip. The boss told me one day I was very precise, that I really understood the process.”

Roussel helped find Behuet his next job at Marianik’s in Deauville, where he felt the simplicity of the location helped his development. “It was a pure old-school chocolate factory, working with the ladle, casting molds, no machinery, no tempering machine,” he says. “It was just a big tank where the chocolate was melted, and we refilled it all day with some chips to maintain the temperature. It was really how you learned to work with chocolate and understand it. Today with machinery, you don’t look at chocolate; you just press a button. When you work with your mold every day, you look, you taste, you see the texture, the viscosity.”

The rustic nature of his craft spoke to its integrity as it introduced him to the world’s sublime varietals of chocolate. “I fell in love with Jivara 40 percent,” he says. “I can recognize it with my eyes closed.”

He stayed at Marianik’s for three years and became immersed in chocolate both psychologically and physically. “You’re always thinking about chocolate anyway,” he explains, “but then in winter your hand cracks because you wash it so much that the chocolate goes into your hand and you can’t even remove it anymore. You smell chocolate. You become chocolate.” It was merely a rabid chocolatier plying his trade, but it was as if Behuet’s fingers had been thoroughly painted and drilled at Pierre’s (chocolate) Tattoo Parlor.

Behuet earned his final diploma at 23, nearly a decade after his career began. He returned briefly to Paris for a stint with the artisanal chocolatier Jadis et Gourmande where he specialized in laser printing both personalized and company logos onto bars and boxes.

Behuet’s father had passed away, so he would drive back to Normandy each weekend to spend time with his mother. That summer, his girlfriend of eight years had been assigned to New Jersey for work. Behuet had never been abroad and never been on a plane. So they planned an adventure after several months passed.

What a great opportunity to share a wonderful romantic adventure with his sweetheart during her stint in the U.S. But she had news. She was breaking up with him. The distance was simply too hard. She didn’t want him not to experience New York, so she waited until his arrival to tell him. And, oh, could he sleep on that sofa over there for the next two weeks? Broadway shows were not supposed to work like this, but what could he do? He did what any other aspiring chef would do: he toured the city’s bakeries, pastry shops and chocolate shops. This would be a sweet trip one way or the other.

One day, he walked into Francois Payard’s eponymous store in the city’s Soho neighborhood. Payard was a legendary chocolatier, author, James Beard winner, pastry chef at Michelin stalwarts such as Daniel and Le Bernardin — and Behuet knew nothing about him. “I walked in and started speaking to him in French, this happy kid with a big smile,” he says. “He couldn’t speak French to anyone for two weeks, so he was excited.”

When Payard gave the aspiring chocolatier a tour of his office and the three-story kitchen, the introduction left him in awe. “Hey, tomorrow morning I’ll be making chocolate,” Payard told him. “Want to give me a hand?” Behuet could have said yes in 50 languages before Payard finished his sentence. He needed a good tempering machine to muffle his enthusiasm. From the sofa he texted friends and family until his hands tired. “I’m going to work in New York!” he exclaimed. Fill in the emojis.

The next day, Payard noted the newbie’s efficiency and helpful attitude. By the end of the afternoon, Payard offered Behuet a full-time post. Now what? His breakup was final, he was told. His life was back home. His boss wanted him to stay, but his mother encouraged him to go.

By nature, Behuet was not one to lapse into extensive routine. He craved challenges. This was a big one. He returned to France and sold his car, his motorbike and his apartment, then hopped on a plane back to the big city.

Payard mentored the protege for two years before leaving the company, so Behuet then moved crosstown to the fancy shop Petrossian that was better known for caviar than sweets, but didn’t quite last the year.

When the owners of Bottega Louie, a sprawling restaurant, café and market in Los Angeles, reached out to him, he jumped at the cross-country move. The kitchen was massive and included a team of 45 pastry cooks to handle a finishing station, a production station, a chocolate station, a macaroon station, everything he could want. It was all arranged. But that was both a blessing and a curse. The assignment came with a book containing photos of pastries with detailed instructions about heights, sizes and colors. Modifications were no-nos. “It was very structured and difficult to create,” Behuet explains. “There was always a certain way to work. It was very corporate.”

At least Behuet enjoyed one unplanned highlight of sweet serendipity, meeting his future wife, a Salvadoran-born colleague, at the restaurant.

His next move took him across the city to Pendry, a restaurant in West Hollywood run by Wolfgang Puck. The Puck mantra decried that chefs flocked to farmers’ markets to buy the freshest ingredients, damn the cost. Chefs made fresh sauces and creams daily. Ice creams would not sit in freezers overnight. Puck hated freezers. Since Puck prioritized taste over style, Behuet wasn’t held back by step-by-step instructions, but there still weren’t great opportunities for new creations. If a chef called out at the last minute, someone else had to step in and make dishes, well, at the last minute. Very little was prepared.

Behuet had spent his customary two-to-three years at Pendry. Now he craved a place where he could count on professional support and stability, attach his creative stamp, enjoy enough variety in the work to make him want to stay. All of that in one place? C’est impossible, mon ami.

That was until Eric Branger contacted him from the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott L.A. Live just ten miles Southwest. First, the good news: It was a beautiful facility, and since they were just emerging from the pandemic, Behuet would be able to build his team and pastry program. The bad news: It was also a facility that simply hadn’t been maintained during the pandemic; there wasn’t much of a pastry program or a working kitchen. It was in disarray, just functional enough for a staff of two to produce cookies. But Behuet saw potential. “There was space, equipment, and lots of support,” he says. “Right away I saw what it could be.” Behuet liked what he saw and what he heard from management. They wanted a robust rebuild with a strong pastry program.

Today, the hotel sports four Latin concepts in one, including the fancy Sandero on the 24th floor, as well as more casual fare, a chef’s table and an agave room. The hotel already had a Californian-Italian restaurant, a café for breakfast, in-room dining, a rooftop patio and different clubs for banquets. A celebrity event can host 600-800 people, each receiving one of Behuet’s plated desserts specially curated for the affair. Attendees of ceremonies and banquets receive a mini-showpiece in their rooms as amenities.

Behuet has also had ample chance to create the larger showpieces that highlight his talents. Some appear at events; other grace display cases in the hotel hallways. Each Summer, he starts on the Christmas projects that fill the hallways with holiday cheer. He’s made large angel wings out of chocolate. There were penguins spinning inside pots, and life-sized mermaids. This year will feature a gingerbread fixture with men twirling about inside the interior. You’d almost expect to see corncob pipes, button noses and a one-horse open sleigh trotting through the hallways. “We need to think of people photographing the pieces,” Behuet says. “It takes months of design. How do we place the lights? Which accents say Christmas? Our whole staff works on ribbons, eyes, coats.”

Behuet’s piece de resistance is a signature he created as a tribute to his Salvadoran wife’s Latino culture. In Sandero, diners can order the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead or All Souls’ Day) in honor of the November occasion. On top lies a sheet of rice paper that disintegrates when lit aflame. The extinguishing reveals a skull head filled with Valrhona white chocolate and surrounded by cocoa crumble, passion fruit compote, chocolate mousse and pepita brittle. “The face of the restaurant is a dessert,” Behuet says with appropriate pride. “That’s pretty cool.”

Behuet’s cool work is an intersection of refined technique and delightful whimsy, just the right recipe to be the chocolatier on an international pastry team. It’s a year-round commitment of practice, repetition, stumbles, adjustments and schedule manipulation. Anything less and the team won’t reach its culinary capacity. Behuet first qualified as the team’s chocolatier in 2019. Set to compete in 2021, he had to wait two years when Covid postponed the event.

In 2023, the team traveled to France with limited support. Team members arranged flights, facilities, Airbnb lodging, transports of personnel and equipment. Team members made their own molds. In the continental qualifier in Chile, the display piece broke. Andy Chiebana worked tirelessly as the squad’s coach, but there was no elaborate support staff to bolster the team. Still the squad placed a respectable seventh at the final in Lyon. The theme, chosen for all teams, was global warming. Behuet created a robot. Instead of mold, he composed pieces of plastic bottles and cans. Everything was recycled. He used Starbucks cups to make the body, and straw for the neck. The performance was good, but Behuet was among those who wanted better.

The effort in 2026-27 is more coordinated. In August 2024, Cheramy was appointed the team’s coach for the 26-27 cycle. He created a pastry conference and helped build an extensive board of directors to invite collaboration from the brightest minds in the industry. Donald Wressel, a national team member and world bronze medalist, was chosen as Operations Director. En-Ming Hsu, a member of the only U.S. team to win the World Cup in 2001, was named a vice president. Sponsors began pitching in. The team undertook monthly tryouts in Chicago to mimic competition conditions, with hotels, flight and palate transport paid for. Behuet did a tryout that followed a step-by-step timeline, trying to maximize preparation. “You cannot think; you just do it,” he says. “When I did a tryout, I wrote down 115 steps. First, clean hands. Second clean table. Third, start chocolate. I use this tray. It goes back there after I’m done. One-hundred and fifteen steps.”

Behuet and the U.S. team know to anticipate surprises because they are sure to encounter them. For the regional qualifier, the humidity in New Orleans, even at the indoor venue, will impact textures and presentations. Doors will open and close. An empty hall will fill up with warm bodies. Solids will hold and melt differently throughout the day. Flour will rise differently and so will the tension.

Assuming the U.S. qualifies for the final, it will arrive in France 12 days before the competition, with ample time to fight jet lag, while navigating trays and racks that will be shorter and electricity that will be different. Surely something will be turned back at the border. “We hope for no problems,” says Behuet,” but we must be ready for all of them.” Once again, the creative wizard is preparing for luck. The building block always seems to find him.

(This article appeared in the Summer 32 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)