Shaun Velez: Keeping the Promise

by Brian Cazeneuve

Taken an Inspiring, but Unlikely, Path to the Height of the Pastry World

Shaun Velez was a hopeful teen when he told his grandmother, Leonilda, that he wanted to become a chef. The response from Leonilda, who raised Shaun and nine siblings in the rough-and-tumble Co-Op City part of New York’s South Bronx, was direct and insistent. “Don’t do that,” she told him. Leonilda had modest reference points for careers in food, once the family arrived from Puerto Rico. She was employed in the kitchen at a city school near the family’s home. Shaun’s grandfather, Victor, had worked as a short-order cook for years. He would also make platillos and pastelitos and sell them in the street, shoving his cart, lugging his treats and begging for cooperative weather. To Leonilda, a food career was unglamorous and unpromising. Instead, she implored Shaun to pursue a future in science, since the boy was a good student whose diligence could give him hope for a promising life. Where exactly could a career in food actually lead?

“My grandmother was right about a lot of things,” Velez recalls, laughing, “but maybe not everything.” These days, as Executive Pastry Chef at the celebrated restaurant Daniel, the flagship New York location helmed by Daniel Boulud, Velez keeps one of the most prestigious jobs in the pastry world. His elegant, but creative, classical desserts have earned wide praise from customers, critics and, most important, from the expert palate of Boulud, himself. So Grandmother might have whiffed on that one.

And, whether intentionally or not, Leonilda kick-started Shaun’s ambitions. From her small kitchen in Co-Op City, she tried to make daily fresh meals on a shoestring budget. “We never ate anything extravagant, Velez recalls, “but the kitchen was her domain. She made a lot of rice and chicken, mostly Spanish food. She didn’t do much baking. She used to make cornmeal muffins from a pre-made mix and then she’d add blueberries to it. My older brother handled birthday cakes. With nine siblings and two grandparents, there was a new birthday cake every month.” When there were no celebrations, family meals were more predictable. “We didn’t have much,” Velez recalls. “We’d go to the market and I’d admire these colorful boxes of cereal, but we went home with Corn Flakes.”

Still, Velez aimed higher. “Food Network was blowing up at that point,” he recalls. “I saw Lydia [Bastianich] and Barefoot Contessa [Ina Garten] on TV. I’d fantasize about all this great food.” Velez started selling cheesecakes and apple pies he’d bake in his home kitchen. “My grandmother was very patient,” he recalls. “I pretty much decimated her kitchen.” Later, he attended York College in Queens studying biology and began taking culinary classes at night. After one semester he dropped out of York and took a job at a library during the day to pay for the loan he took out for culinary school.

The initial experience nearly broke him. “I started with savory, but I didn’t love it,” he says. “Honestly, I was afraid to put my hand over the grill.” Two weeks of pastry classes would change his life. “I had grown up buying pies at the supermarket, because that’s all I knew,” he says. “Suddenly, I was cracking eggs, adding milk, flour. I mean I had never seen a vanilla bean. It’s like, ‘how do I use this?’ It blew my mind. I grew up eating Hershey’s. Now, doors started opening up.”

Velez mitigated his naivete with an exceptional work ethic and the hope of possibility. He attended a career fair and saw that Gray Kunz was looking for cooks to work at his new restaurant, Café Gray, right below Per Se in New York’s Time Warner Building. “I was so nervous, I was shaking like a leaf,” he says. Half an hour into the stage, Velez jabbed his finger and started leaking. “Oh, I’m okay,” he told people, unwilling to compromise the opportunity in front of him. Velez tried to hide the wound with towels, but started bleeding through them. Soon, a protective glove was filled with blood, too. Yet he stayed through service, hiding the hand whenever possible and experiencing his first staff meal. “I ate everything they put in front of me,” even though I didn’t know what most of it was,” he says.

Kunz’s group offered Velez a post as a cook at the new restaurant. Working for Kunz, he learned the chef’s preferred techniques, even if he didn’t always care to mimic them. “He’d come by the pastry station and tell me: ‘Add more butter. Add more butter.’” Velez explains. “We’d go thru three cases of butter a day.’”

Once settled at Café Gray, Velez felt intense pressure to deliver in a way that was not always healthy. It came to head one day when The New York Times was visiting the restaurant and the staff was walking on eggshells. Kunz’s chef, best left unnamed, was a temperamental screamer. In his calmer moments, he insisted Velez call him Papa and had similar instructions for other young chefs. During The Times’ visit, Velez overcooked a tart and the chef was ready to bake him. “He threw a hot tray at me,” Velez recalls. “Of course it wasn’t okay, but I was green and I didn’t know what to do. My arms were burned, so the savory cooks came and bandaged me up. Today, I understand that of course it was my fault for making a mistake, but it was also a place with no systems in place. You can’t operate a restaurant, whether it’s the kitchen or the front of the house, when people don’t know what they’re supposed to do.”

Velez knew he had to leave. He moved on to Tabla, where the environment was less hostile. The restaurant served fine dining upstairs and fast casual downstairs, so Velez worked at both. It was at Tabla where he first learned to utilize a vast variety of spices that he would not have expected to incorporate into desserts.

In 2010, he joined the Boulud team, working as a pastry cook, first at Bar Boulud for 18 months and then Boulud Sud for eight months. At both locations, he worked under Ghaya Oliveira, who ran the pastry kitchen that was both small and, at times, chaotic. “We did 500 covers,” Velez recalls. “I remember I’d have the waffle maker on top of the ice cream chest. I’d have to get off the line with the waffle maker, but I’d say, ‘wait, wait, I still have tickets. The people need their waffles.’” Velez giggles at the memory. “I mean it all worked, because we had a good system and good people. But we were crazed sometimes.”

When Oliveira became the executive pastry chef at Daniel in 2013, Velez went with her as the sous. Oliveira’s approach changed his professional life. “Ghaya was adventurous, really fearless” Velez recalls. “I remember she made a strawberry tart with ricotta and black pepper. The spice put it all together. It cut the fat from the ricotta and balanced out the palate. Ghaya forced me to think like a savory chef. Nothing she ever made was just sweet on sweet on sweet. There was much more depth and balance.”

With the Boulud team, Velez learned technique and professionalism at its highest level. Still, he wanted a chance to run his own kitchen, and in 2016, he started a two-year run at Deuxave in Boston as its executive pastry chef. “We had a tight-knit group of young chefs there,” he recalls. “Once I got into a rhythm of doing tasks and assigning tasks, it was a great experience.”

Composing a menu for the first time, Velez put together a Baba au Calvados with ginger biscuit, orange cream and quince glace; a crème brulee with hazelnut mirliton, passion fruit diplomat and hazelnut glace; and a Meyer Lemon Vacherin with Meyer lemon sorbet, black pepper Chantilly cream, red currant gelee and matcha paper. Each dessert was an artful mix of sweet, tart and acid, with textural compositions, too.

Still Velez saw himself entering a comfort zone in an uncomfortable way. “I needed to keep growing,” he explains. “Boston likes what Boston likes. If I had a creative idea, I didn’t know how it would be received.”

In 2018, Velez came home to run the pastry kitchen at Café Boulud, where he earned a reputation as a chef who could highlight compatible flavors without resorting to the three cases of butter from his earlier employment. One dish might have green apple with dill; another would feature coffee with figs; a third might have pistachio with orange blossoms. He was also creative, at one point spinning a plate on a phonograph to create a wheel shape for a Chantilly blend. It was imaginative, playful precision at work. Velez spent two years at Café Boulud. When he came to the flagship restaurant to borrow some chocolate one morning, Oliveira had a pointed instruction for him. “I’m leaving,” she told him. “You must take over. Daniel will talk to you tomorrow.”

Velez barely had time for a double-take. “I was shocked. I was intimidated,” he says. “I thought of the pastry titans in the city like Michael Laiskonis [formerly of Le Bernardin] and Jiho [Kim] at the Modern. Did I belong with them? I didn’t think so. I thought about following Ghaya. She’s a tough act to follow, too. When Boulud asked Velez how he felt about the offer, the chef replied honestly: “Scared.” Boulud appreciated the honesty. “I understand you’re scared,” he said, “but can you do it?” Velez nodded. Boulud reassured Velez that even when he offered critiques, they would be supportive critiques. This was quite a departure from having a hot tray tossed into his arms. In 2020, he dove headfirst into the spotlight, running the pastry kitchen at Daniel.

Nearly every dessert menu had a Vacherin, such as a Passion Fruit Vacherin with milk tea ice cream, passion fruit sorbet, Darjeeling meringue, Chantilly, lemon omani, calamansi confiture and almond Florentine. The dessert was fresh and light. Others were light, while utilizing bold spices, such as a California Linzer Torte with Anabuki sake mousse, long pepper sable, red plum spiced jam and ginger ice cream. “I don’t want to dismantle the classics,” Velez explains. “I want to elevate them.” In 2024, France-based La Liste named Velez Pastry Chef of the Year, a fitting honor for Daniel’s emerging star.

“Daniel is the best,” Valez says. “And he loves desserts — I mean, loves them. He always talks about how important it is to have a strong finish to a meal. He lets us do our thing, but his comments are really constructive and detailed. Sure, he’s a businessman, but at his core, he’s very much a chef. He goes to each restaurant every day. When we have menu meetings, he likes to understand his chefs’ palates. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll tell you. You have to have that strong classic base. I mean, you just do. But he wants us to have our own interpretation. He really wants everybody to succeed. I think that’s why we do.”

From his elevated post at Boulud’s Dinex Group, Velez has fulfilled the mandates of one of the world’s great restaurateurs. He also fulfilled the promise of the young boy who traded test tubes for teaspoons in search of a better future. The Velez and Boulud families are grateful for the choice.

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