Marc Heu : Rise and Shine by Craig Neff

Inspiring Marc Heu Ascended from Modest Beginnings to a James Beard Nomination

On weekend mornings the line of customers can snake down the block. In a once-sketchy stretch of St. Paul, Minnesota, the Marc Heu Patisserie Paris — an auto-repair garage transformed into a chic boutique of treats — has become a destination, a cultural celebration, an improbable imagining filled with stunningly beautiful croissants, petit tarts, kouign amanns, eclairs, cakes and more.

“If you’re passionate in life, and you really work hard, you can achieve everything,” says the soft-spoken Heu, 35, who grew up in French Guiana as the son of Hmong refugees from Laos. Says his wife and patisserie-managing partner, Gaosong, “It’s a rags-to-riches story. It’s a very true American-dream story too.”

Heu has risen swiftly. At age 28, he began learning to be a pastry chef. By 30, he had graduated from the Lenôtre culinary school in Paris, worked at that city’s historic Stohrer patisserie and the three-Michelin-starred Le Pré Caletan restaurant, and honed his craft at Dominique Ansel’s namesake bakery in New York. At 30, he opened his patisserie, and this year he earned his first James Beard Award nomination. “I was speechless,” he says of receiving the news in a text message from a friend. “When I saw it, I thought about my whole life.”

That life has been a mille-feuille of layers, a family journey spanning four continents and tales of hardship, racism, kindness and love. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, his parents and more than 100,000 others in the Hmong ethnic minority fled Laos to avoid retribution from the communist victors. Many Hmong had fought for or aided the American side in hopes of protecting their land and 4,000-year-old culture. Now they desperately swam across the Mekong River to refugee camps in Thailand.

“My parents had so many horror stories,” says Marc. “People who didn’t know how to swim, but they had to. Some drowned because the current was too strong. My parents would share their stories with me and my five brothers and sisters to let us know how lucky we were.”

Many Hmong, including Gaosong’s mother and father, moved to the U.S. The largest concentration of Hmong ended up in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, currently home to almost 90,000. But Marc’s father hated the cold and knew a little French, so he and Marc’s mother went to France. They settled near Lyon, took jobs in factories, and started a family.

Life was hard. Having endured anti-immigrant bias and seeking a better opportunity, the Heus eventually moved 4,000 miles to South America, to sparsely populated, rainforest-covered French Guiana, where the French government gave them and some other Hmong families a chance to farm. Marc was three years old. “All of a sudden, boom, I woke up in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “A lot of bug and animal noises. It was the jungle.”

The family’s new home was a livestock barn with no walls, water or electricity. Marc slept in a cow trough for the first several years. Over time, his parents put up sheet-metal walls and started growing and selling vegetables and then tropical fruit. Marc and his siblings had to labor on the farm when not attending school an hour away. “I hated it,” says Marc, who often saw jaguars (he has a tattoo of one on his arm), and encountered snakes while picking in the passion fruit vines. “But the hard work was good training. I feel like my parents trained me my whole life for today without me knowing it.”

Marc’s scientific mind — an asset in the precisely measured world of baking — helped him win a national school rocket-drawing contest run by the Guiana Space Centre, the European Space Agency’s primary launch site. He dreamed of being an astronaut.

But cooking interested him too. Sometimes — “to bring a little joy into the family,” says Marc — his older sisters would mix simple ingredients to make what he calls “a very dry sponge cake. They let me whisk the egg white. That’s where my first love for baking came from.”

When musing on the joy and power of food, Heu says, “It’s about childhood memories,” evoking Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, in which a taste of a madeleine launches the narrator into 300,000 words and seven volumes describing his past. For Heu, a life-altering mouthful came at age 16, when he ate papaya mousse cake from a bakery in France. “It was amazing,” he says. Heu didn’t even like papaya; it reminded him of toiling on his parents’ farm. But he realized the magic a master baker could perform.

Heu’s parents had sent him to the French mainland at 14 to attend a boarding school because the nearest high school in French Guiana was of poor quality and two hours away. “Even if my dad is a farmer now, he was always an intellectual,” says Marc’s older sister Katy, who earned a Ph.D. in biology in France. “He did his best so we could go to school.”

Marc was a good student, but his teen years were a struggle. “When I left home, I was just lost,” he says. “All I knew was French Guiana. It was like I had been living in a small bubble.  [Mainland France] was a different world — a much bigger world. I didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with living on my own, far away from my parents. I lost all the tools I thought I had.”

As in grade school in French Guiana, Heu sometimes faced taunting and bullying because he was an Asian immigrant. He imagined being a pastry chef, but “I thought you had to be a white person to do it,” he says, because that’s all he saw. He decided that to make his parents happy he would become a doctor. He began pre-med studies.

And then, in 2012, at age 23, he took a vacation to Minnesota to visit relatives. Everything changed. His cousin set him up on a blind date with Gaosong, then a student at the University of Minnesota. She was smart and dynamic. They fell in love. Marc proposed two weeks later, and they were married within a month.

“Marc’s good looking, but his mind was the most attractive thing,” says Gaosong. “He is such an expansive dreamer. His ideas, and how he sees the world, it was so much more than I had ever known growing up in Minnesota. He really saw the possibilities for the world that he wanted to live in. It was just so inspiring. To this day I’m inspired by Marc — just his dreams and aspirations.”

“That’s why we got married so quickly,” says Marc. “We share the same vision about family, community, entrepreneurship. We were like, ‘What can we do to have not an ordinary life but an extraordinary life, to have an impact through our work?’”

While Gaosong finished school, Marc took a job in supply distribution at a hospital in Minneapolis to support them. One day, to surprise her, he tried baking his first croissant. He had to look up a recipe on the Internet. Gaosong was amazed by how fabulous it was. “You have a natural, God-given talent,” she told him.

Later, when he was due to resume his pre-med studies, he confessed to her that he really wanted to be a pastry chef. “You owe it to yourself to follow your dreams,” she told him. “Nobody wants to go to a doctor who’s only half into it. You have something special, and it would be a shame for it to go to waste. The world wants to eat what you have to offer.”

After looking into U.S. culinary schools, the Heus decided Marc’s most authentic pastry-chef training would be in France. He couldn’t afford tuition, however, so he returned to French Guiana and worked for eight months on his parents’ farm, keeping all the proceeds from sales two days a week. He then dug into a three-month pastry-arts program at Lenôtre.

While strolling in Paris near the end of the program, he and Gaosong wandered by a small pastry shop with a long line outside. It was Stohrer, the oldest patisserie in the city, founded by King Louis XV’s pastry chef in 1730.

Though nervous, Marc talked his way into the kitchen, where he met head chef Jeffrey Cagnes. “I said I was a big fan of his work, even though I had no idea who he was,” Marc says with a smile. “I just lied and said, ‘I pretty much just want to be like you. I’m in school right now. I’m finishing my program in about two weeks.’ And he looked at me in a kindly way and said, ‘Hey, you know what, do you want to come and start with me when you’re done?’”

“Every time I talk about that, the tears want to come to my eyes,” Marc says. “Like right now. I can’t believe so much kindness coming from another person. And I knew at that point it would change my life.”

For six months — during which the unpaid Heu had to go on public assistance to support himself—Cagnes was an exceptional mentor and role model, spending extra hours to teach him every fine point about pastry making and running a patisserie. “I was always the first one there [at Stohrer] and the last one to leave. I had nowhere else to go,” says Heu. “I was there for only a limited amount of time, so I had to absorb as much as possible. Sometimes I stayed so late, there were no trains home. I had to spend my food money on an Uber.”

“Marc was my best stage,” says Cagnes. “He worked with me for six months. He’d tell me, ‘If you get in at five o’clock [a.m.], I’ll be there at five o’clock with you. If you finish at three o’clock, I’ll stay there until three o’clock with you.’ Every day. He worked very, very hard. He’s a very good man with a very good mentality. Having him there was perfect for me.”

Today Heu starts work as early as 2 a.m. He moves briskly around the rooms of a large kitchen, checking the whiteboard to-do lists and offering tips to his young, multi-ethnic staff members, who at 4 a.m. on a recent morning are slicing fresh raspberries to place atop passionfruit-raspberry tarts and plucking single leaves of cress to adorn bright yellow, bite-sized citrons. He takes time to pipe elegant swirls of pistachio buttercream filling into a Paris Brest cake that he later decorates with edible flakes of 24-karat gold.

“We do everything from scratch every day,” he says, citing the importance of the French butter and chocolate he uses and the attention to detail in every item. “You would think that making a croissant would be simple, but it’s a three-day process; you cannot take any shortcuts on any step. You have to check the humidity in the room. Even when you’re rolling it, when you’re laminating, the pressure, sometimes you have to add a little bit more milk or water than you should…it’s very technical.”

Heu credits his father for his perfectionism. “My dad always set the bar so high. It’s never good enough. So I always try to do better, every single time,” he says.

From its modest beginnings — “We started in my parents’ basement, with Marc making king cakes [galette de rois],” says Gaosong — the patisserie has grown rapidly along with Marc’s reputation. “I already see him as the avant-garde French pastry chef in Minnesota,” says David Fhima, one of the Twin Cities’ most accomplished restaurateurs. “He’s somebody who needs to be talked about.”

The modest Heu is quick to share credit with his energetic and creative spouse, who besides being co-owner and COO of the business is a singer, actress, director, videographer and arts educator.  “I just do the baking, which is nothing — that’s like 10 percent of the business,” says Marc. “Gaosong takes care of everything else, like the marketing strategy and anything financial.” She even stayed up all night to help him make 4,000 bite-sized desserts on short notice for fans at a Minnesota Timberwolves playoff game last spring.

The Heus are constantly inventing. In July Marc made Olympic-themed croissant donuts to honor Minnesota’s athletes, including St. Paul’s own gymnastics gold medalist, Suni Lee, who is Hmong. He and Gaosong put together a Bastille Day soiree featuring some of the savory pastries he may soon branch into. “I have so many ideas,” says Marc as he thinks of future possibilities.

“Marc’s so young and he’s got so much more to go and to offer,” says Fhima. “I just can’t wait to see what he’s going to do with it.”

Photos Courtesy of Marc Heu

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