Nasir Armar: Leap of Faith

Nasir Armar Left Behind Two Michelin Stars to Open Parachute Bakery. The Gamble Brought Him Obstacles, Curveballs, Geometric Workstation Puzzles . . . . And Finally, Success

By Brian Cazeneuve

Outside his kitchen at the Ferry Terminal Building in San Francisco, Nasir Armar has quite the view. The Bay Bridge radiates upon the glistening water of the San Francisco Bay. Geese converse randomly with pedestrians happily alighting boats or sitting on benches along the Embarcadero to snack on delicious items from inside the Beaux Arts beauty. A person can easily exhale and lose track of time here. It is the kind of respite every bustling city craves.

Inside the kitchen, the view is different. Armar stretches his arms wide to alert you the 10-by-10 dimension of the workspace that produces a thousand pastries each day, each more creative and scrumptious than the next. Armar’s arms can’t quite span the workstation end-to-end, but it only seems that way. Bustle is everywhere. Trays dodge collisions in cramped quarters. “What we do here is hard to believe,” he says, without exaggeration. “How?”

In a sense, the kitchen is a workshop, an enlarged petri dish that reveals what happens when you take an elite pastry chef away from his trimmings and trappings, his tools and accoutrements, leaving him with the elite sensibilities he carts with him from a Michelin kitchen. The process is laborious, but the results are rather wonderful. Tortured process; textured products. And you’re sure to want more than one.

I felt like chocolate and pastry came very naturally to me. I didn’t have to overthink it.

It’s only fitting that the bakery Armar operates is called Parachute. The chute in the logo looks like a croissant, designed by Armar with his co-owner Alex Hong, who operates a sister restaurant next door. Leaps of faith can use soft landings that parachutes can provide. The name notwithstanding, the journey has been eventful and at times bumpy.

As for parachutes, Armar originally wanted to be a pilot when he was growing up in India. A week in aeronautical engineering school dissuaded him. “As soon as I got there, I realized I didn’t want to be at a desk studying for the next five years of my life,” he recalls. “My dad owned restaurants, bakeries and ice cream shops in India. I wanted to be like him.” So Armar traded aeronautics for aromatics.

He recalls growing up in Chennai, India a city of seven million known more, because of its British colonial influence, for bakers rather than pastry chefs, Armar had grown up with jelai and gulab jaman, fried doughs soaked in simple syrup that was infused with rose or saffron, but once began working in sweet shop under Girish Nayak, a veteran of kitchens at Jean Georges and Le Bernardin, his sights widened. “I started off in savory for two years,” he says. “I felt like chocolate and pastry came very naturally to me. I didn’t have to overthink it. I turned down a big scholarship at one of the biggest hotel chains in India because they couldn’t promise me I could do pastry. Being with chef Girish in that space doing the same four plated desserts for a whole year just opened my eyes.”

I had to reimagine things in a way a classic bakery wouldn’t.

Armar then worked in India and Singapore before crossing another ocean and a milestone. After several stints. he has now been in California for a decade. Armar first joined Hong as pastry chef at Sorrel in Laurel Heights. He left to take over the pastry kitchen at Saison, a dynamic eatery near the city’s China Basin. The fiery restaurant utilized flames in its preparations to build bold flavors and a stellar reputation, eventually earning two Michelin stars. Namir recalls two signature desserts. The first was an elevated S’mores dessert that was surely worthy of an Eagle Scout badge.

“First we would drop a small fire pit on the table while the guests were getting a kitchen tour,” Armar describes. “We used the coals from the almond wood and we’d put a little bit of 100% alcohol infused with pine needles to get the campfire smell going. We’d also drop frozen marshmallows that had a white chocolate ganache infused with pine. After we grilled that over the fire, which we would light tableside, diners would get a drop of the chocolate with graham crackers and a warm chicory foam finished off with graham cracker ice cream. It was a three-drop set, a complete experience of a dessert that went on for 20 minutes while the guests roasted their marshmallows and they ate it while enjoying the other set.

“The second was a tobacco and date dessert. I found a way to get whole tobacco leaves into California and we would candy them for a couple weeks, bake them slowly in the oven and halve the center of the leaf, cut the exact shape of the plate that acted like a tuile. On the bottom we had a brown butter warm mousse coming out of the side. And we would have a date cake that we would grill over the heart as the dessert was fired. A little bit of pickled dates, pickled with blackberry liqueur and brown rice vinegar added acidity to the dish. We added smoked tonka bean ice cream. We left the tonka bean ice cream base in the smoker overnight. So there was a lot of smoke, but it didn’t feel overwhelmingly smoky.”

I don’t take anything for granted. So many people would kill to be in my shoes.

It was a perfect match: a sweet combustion of blazing, spirited composition, with an intense talent set to light the ignition. Everything seemed perfect. But Armar felt something was off. He had been thinking that his time in fine dining was running its course and that change was in order. The physical question mark was probably just the pit of uncertainty at the bottom of his stomach. Perhaps that was all it was. Perhaps it was something else. Armar went to get checked and discovered he had a life changing illness. He doesn’t discuss particulars other than to confirm that it kept him hospitalized for 2 ½ months. As one would in such circumstances, he re-focused his life. And re-prioritized its challenges and opportunities. “Knowing life is short and things can change made me appreciate how far I’ve come,” he says. “I don’t take anything for granted. So many other people who would kill to be in my shoes. I make sure to practice gratitude every day.”

Around this time, Hong contacted him about a new direction. Would the chef consider opening a companion gelateria or a bakery with his new restaurant, Arquet? Armar was ready for a change. “I knew nothing about how a bakery worked, nothing about operations, what flour works, how I should hire, how to make a croissant, how to laminate for a croissant. It was a lot of self-belief. I always believed if I could make it out here in San Francisco, I think I could make it anywhere. I just have to be grateful that I’m in a city. When I’m surrounded by what I need like talent, produce, best of the best ingredients, why not at least give it a try?” These challenges were daunting, indeed, but not life threatening.

“I do not plan things ahead. I do things on the whim, or at least a calculated risk involving knowledge I’m about to learn, I’ll say yes. Even today if there is something I can learn from a cook, I’ll spend my time with them if there is something I don’t know. I just felt like I was hitting my ceiling at fine-dining restaurants. I believe fine dining restaurants in the U.S. don’t believe in pastry chefs as much as the French fine dining restaurants. Trying to make a thousand pastries on a ten-by-ten block of wood is very challenging. I’ve always been blessed along the way.”

Armar left Saison at the end of April, 2025, but knew that he would need proper seasoning, much like his pastries. So he spent three months in Europe, dividing his home-base time among Madrid, London and Copenhagen, and visiting 111 bakeries, some a dozen times. On a one-day side trip to Paris, he visited 11 bakeries in a single day. He asked questions until they became inquisitions. He worked for free. The immersion had to be comprehensive.

“I tried to get as many stages going door to door, tried to learn from people who were good at what they did,” he recalls. “Some of them were very welcoming and took me in. I watched very closely and took down every aspect of what they did. It felt like I was coming out of school again. It put that new life back into me. Coming from a fine-dining background, my canvass was empty, so I had to reimagine things in a way a classic bakery wouldn’t. Some see it as a disadvantage because there are too many touches to the pastry. It’s more like a fine-dining environment the way we work. When you walk into our kitchen, you don’t see a speck of flour on the floor.”

Attention to detail was fine planning, until the details derailed. “We had a lease we needed to honor by a certain day,” Namar says. “I felt underprepared. I have a team of 16 in the back of the house now. There were just four then. We thought initially that work space was supposed to be a chef’s counter where we were going to take all the fresh products. We realized we couldn’t open the proofer door without having the barista stop pouring the milk. We didn’t have space to package any of our thousand pastries on the first day. This entire café went to the front of the house. That derailed our goal of baking throughout the day and giving people fresh products. We threw those plans out the window within a day.

“We’ve had many challenges working in a room that’s almost 32 degrees Celsius (89 F) or 34 (93 F) on a summer day – way more than a proofing temperature, which should be 27 (80.6F) max. We have a sheeter across the fish station, with a gust of steam coming onto the laminator, with an ice machine right next to it. To be able to do that every day, it’s just an ode to this fantastic team we have.”

In fact, Armar encountered an entirely different metabolism of running a bakery – its rhythms and concerns – to be different from the Michelin restaurant he knew. A bakery has a living organism of its own,” he says. “There’s a different temperature every day. One day slow proof; tomorrow fast. Controlling that is so special. The levels and standards we are held to in fine dining was incredibly high, but we knew who was coming in. We knew how many guests, at what hour, what the allergens would be. But a bakery, some days we show up and the bread is overproofing, so an entire cycle is broken. You just don’t know.”

Still, Parachute opened on September 25, 2025 and sold out 800 items in 90 minutes. The praises and purchasers are still coming. In June, Armar’s Parachute made a last-minute entry into the contest for Best Croissant in San Francisco at the city’s Royal Sonesta Hotel. Armar forgot his cutting board and was slicing pastries on box covers, but the treats were undeniable. The man who hadn’t laminated a croissant two years earlier won the top prize.

A remedy for the ornery bakery process is in the works. Parachute will open a second location, targeted for Springtime, and likely in the neighboring East Bay, with ample space to bake at will, and proximity to transport goods promptly to the Ferry Building. The cadence in Namir’s voice quickens when he describes the possibilities in detail: “We’ll have our own chocolate room, our own chocolate retail program,” he says. “We’ll have a separate set of bakers and laminators, and the goal is to open a pantry station outside that has its own retail line, books: chocolates, jams, spreads, cordials, all things related to pastry.

“Space helps for people to be able to move freely and not be in a closed room where it’s hot, especially when you’re dealing with butter that melts and yeast that rises. We’ll still bake and garnish on site and this will help us to bake throughout the day. I want to honor seasonality; not putting a cherry on when it’s halfway through the season. When the first batch of peaches come out, we want to have something ready to put on the menu. Once we move, it will feel like a walk in the park for the people who have been working here.”

This is not your cousin’s confectionery. It’s an attempt to peel back the ceiling away from the traditional limits of lamination and infuse it with panache often reserved for fine china and tablecloths. Seasonal offerings are seasonal. But allow Namar to be your narrator for the summer menu in the pages to follow . . .

Parachute Pastries

M1- Early Grey and blueberry tart: It’s a croissant. We use a frozen dough. We make the tart shell without proofing it. On the bottom we make blueberry and bergamot marmalade. In between there’s Early Grey pastry cream finished off with fresh blueberries from the Triple Delight farm.

M2 – Almond croissant: This is unusual because this one doesn’t have dry marzipan inside. We folded vanilla mascarpone pastry cream into the marzipan to keep it gooey all day. It takes eight minutes for one person to fill each croissant by hand to get that unique look. All the nuts are toasted evenly, so you don’t have some almonds that are super toasted and bitter on the top, while others aren’t. Once you have that bitter almond, it takes everything away that you had in the rest of the croissant.

M3 – Gochujang Pimento Cheese Twist: We add Gochujang paste and charred peppers: serrano, poblano and jalapeno. We sear them, chop them up and fold them into the pimento cheese mix and we have a turmeric dough to complement them. We finish it off by dusting with dehydrated scallion dust. We add Old Bay seasoning and a few other seasonings that taste like a Dorito dust.

M4 – Pain au Chocolate: We get custom-made batons from Chuao that are eight grams, so that’s 16 grams per pain, compared to some that are three or 4.5 grams per baton. The chocolate also has notes of caramel and vanilla. We use cross-lamination, which means every bite is crunchy, so you have that moist interior with a bite of chocolate in it. Usually, it can take a fourth or fifth bite to get into the chocolate layer nestled on the bottom of the bar, usually overcooked because it’s in contact with the tray for 20 minutes during its baking process. With ours, you get chocolate in every bite. Coming from a fine dining background, I think every pastry should have a bite of everything in it; not an overcooked edge, undercooked edge with a portion that is wet and soggy where the other portion is not.

M5 – Old-school croissant: We use French butter, French flour, 33 percent butter-to-dough ratio. We bake it three times a day. Being in the Ferry Building with so many open doors, open spaces, ten meters from the heat, things tend to dry out faster than they should. We plan on having six bakes a day rather than two or three.

M6 – Everything bagel Kouign Amann: If an Everything New York bagel had a baby with a Kouign Amann, this would result. It’s sweet and savory, ten percent sugar folded into the dough while we laminate with 33 percent butter and then we dust it with everything-bagel seasoning that we make in-house before we fold it and shape it. Every morning we fill it with cream cheese scallion filling.

M7 – Blood orange yuzu Danish: It’s everything citrus. It’s like an entremets with a Danish shell on the outside. On the bottom is a blood orange marmalade. Next to it is an olive oil cake and on top of that is a yuzu cremeux finished off with a black sugar meringue with yuzu-infused sesame seeds and yuzu-infused olive oil.

M8 – Morning sticky bun: We toss it into a 25-percent sugar ratio with eight spices: cardamom, cinnamon, cayenne, cloves, licorice, black pepper star anise and vanilla powder. Once out of the oven, it’s dunked into brown butter followed by a sticky glaze. Then we bake it again for two minutes to caramelize it further. It’s super indulgent. It definitely wakes people up more than their coffee.

M9 – Asparagus pastry: We blind bake a croissant shell like a puff pastry, more like a mille-fueille shell. On the bottom is fennel jam. Above it is a whipped sheep’s milk ricotta and we finish off with the asparagus. The fennel jam takes eight hours of constant stirring. We share the asparagus hearts with our sister restaurant, Arquet, so we use all the peels and we char the heart over almond wood. Then we infuse it in grapeseed oil and steam it overnight. We spoon out the oil and marinate the asparagus in its own oil. The next day, we grill it over almond wood until we get the charred, smoky flavor. We put a little bit of garlic blossoms on top to round it out.

M10 – Black sugar canelé: The black sugar comes from Okinawa Island solid as a brick. We break it down. It’s a very laborious process. It has a lot of umami, minerals, molasses and impurities that give it that mushroom-like flavor. We coat the shells in traditional 50-50 beeswax and clarified butter mix and we age our batter for four days. It has a very brown molasses-y interior to it.

M11 – Pecan financier: Elliot Pecans are only grown in Georgia. They have a higher fat content than a regular pecan. We take the trims and grind them into a flour, then toast until golden brown. We mix it with the same malt used in beer. On the underside are nuts that have been soaked in malt and brown butter for a month before we candy them. Once it comes out of the oven, we dust it with an English toffee dust, brown butter and caramel. It becomes a solid candy. We grind it up, turn it into a powder and dust it up to give it that shiny finish.

M12 – Yuzu and sesame cookie: We use yuzu-infused Valrhona chocolate. We use sesame paste from a third-generation family I visited in Osaka that only farms black sesame. We use black sesame paste into the cookie dough instead of butter and we fold in a lot of yuzu white chocolate chips. We coat it in a mix of salted black sesame, roasted black sesame and Sobacha to give a smoky kick to it. We add more chocolate chips and Malden salt before it goes into the oven.

M13 – Signature chocolate chip cookie: We use lots of 66-percent Caribe chocolate from Valrhona, almost one-third ratio of the cookie dough. We also use the same English toffee we use in the financier. Instead of turning it into a dust, we chop it up into even cubes, and fold it into the batter, so when it bakes, there are pockets of caramel in there. We also roll the entire cookie into fueilletine for added crunch when it bakes, and we layer chocolate chips as soon as it comes out of the oven to make it that perfect emoji that’s on your phone.

M14 – Strawberries and cream: We make a red dough inside that elevates the visual appeal of it. It’s made with dehydrated strawberry dust to get that red-dough interior. Inside is light crème fraiche mousse with honey and fresh strawberries chopped and folded in with strawberry jam.

M16 – Matcha cheesecake: We make matcha cheesecake with pectin and we cook it separately from the vanilla cheesecake layer. We top it off with more Basque cheesecake batter, and hit it for three minutes at 300 degrees Celsius until we get the char on the outside. We wanted to use layers in the cheesecake without overbaking it and we found we could do it by using pectin.

M15 – Chocolate Cake: This top represents our logo. We have eight layers of chocolate inside. Everything starts with Valrhona. Outside is a 70-percent shell we spray with a 44-percent milk chocolate to balance the bitterness. Inside there’s a chocolate cremeux, a mousse, caramel, a devil’s food cake, hazelnut Feuilletine crunchy and a chocolate Feuilletine layer as well. We use Maldon salt to balance out the chocolate and sweetness of the caramel. The caramel, itself, we take to a very high degree, so it balances out the sweet. Just one person does this filling these entremets and another person is coating the entremets shells and then another person sprays it.

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