I have never been asked to sign an NDA for a bonbon before.
But this is the kind of thing that happens when negotiating with stars like Cedric Grolet, arguably the most famous pastry chef on the internet and, increasingly, in the real world.
Mr. Grolet has nearly 13 million Instagram followers, more than Martha Stewart (5.8 million), Ina Garten (4.8 million) and Bobby Flay (2 million) combined. His polished, mesmerizing videos unveil the craft behind his celebrated flower tarts, chocolate chip cookies and trompe l’oeil desserts resembling apples and lemons.
They’ve drawn people from around the world to his shops in Paris, where velvet ropes and husky gatekeepers enforce crowd control. Since 2022, he has also opened boutiques in London, St. Tropez, Monaco, Singapore and the posh Alpine ski resort Val d’Isére. By harnessing the power of social media, Mr. Grolet, 40, has in five years built the kind of empire that took previous generations of pastry chefs decades to establish.
In an interview conducted in French and English (and for which no NDA was signed), Mr. Grolet said he began rigorous pastry training at 14, in his hometown, Firminy in the Loire region. It was aimed at pleasing “clients de luxe,” the world’s .0001 percent who can afford the pleasures of haute patisserie. But in 2013, when a young sous chef pushed him onto Instagram, he immediately realized there was a larger audience for his work online. “It clicked,” he said.
On Saturday, Mr. Grolet will unveil his first chocolate shop, Cedric et la Chocolaterie, a Wonka-esque project three years in the making. The centerpiece, visible from the street, is a waterfall of melted chocolate that scents the air, endlessly pouring over a custom stainless steel wall. (The system holds 330 pounds of chocolate, mixed with oil to make it flow.) Chocolaty squares line the walls; the scalloped edges of the biscuit-brown counters evoke France’s classic LU butter cookie; and giant, glossy sculptures of whole peanuts, cacao pods and pistachio nuts hang from the ceiling.
Last week, when the paper covering the windows was momentarily removed, a crowd quickly swarmed the sidewalk, phones pressed against the glass, waving frantically to get Mr. Grolet to look into their cameras.
Such drama surrounding the opening of a candy store makes sense here in France, where respect for culinary skill and innovation is deeply embedded in the culture. (Pierre Hermé, Mr. Grolet’s predecessor as France’s pastry star, globalized the macaron in the 2000s and was knighted for his contribution.)
“When a famous pastry chef launches something new, it will be on the evening news, in the newspapers, on talk shows that are seen all over the country,” said Aleksandra Crapanzano, whose new cookbook “Chocolat” is a portrait of the Paris-centric world of haute chocolaterie.
In the city’s most expensive neighborhoods, bonbons are arrayed and lit like jewels in boutique windows. Across the country, competition is fierce to produce the most elegant gifts and most irresistible Easter egg nests and bûches de Noël. Right next door to Mr. Grolet’s new boutique, the chocolatier Jade Genin fills her tiny chocolate pyramids with flavors like lime-cumin and smoked black cardamom, and there are a dozen other haute chocolateries within blocks.
Dominique Ansel, the French pastry chef behind the Cronut, said Mr. Grolet’s simple aesthetic is what has made his work both influential and popular, regardless of social media. “It speaks to more people,” he said. “As a chef, I can appreciate the tuiles and the décor and the piping on a plate. But anyone can appreciate a strawberry that tastes like a strawberry.”
Not everyone is happy that Instagram and TikTok have brought chocolate orangutans, shirtless pastry chefs and XXL croissants to the masses. Ms. Crapanzano, who interviewed dozens of pastry chefs for her book, said that there is considerable resentment among older chefs about the sway of social media. Slowly earning respect from people who taste their work is no longer enough, and the new language of the internet is not easy to learn.
But Mr. Grolet had the vision for translating the hard work of pastry chefs, who have traditionally toiled behind the scenes, to millions. With impeccable technique, he works in silence with giant vats of ganache, sheets of puff pastry and armfuls of vanilla beans that fill the screen and telegraph to his audience that the work is more important than he is. In lieu of chef whites, a tall toque and a pastry bag, Mr. Grolet is in T-shirt and apron, plunging his tattooed arm into a bowl of berries.
With success comes scoffers. Food influencers from around the world film themselves waiting in line at his shops, sometimes for hours, for the privilege of buying a Grolet cake, then perform their disappointment in videos titled “My Honest Review” or “Does This Bakery Live Up to the Hype?” In Instagram comments and Reddit threads, people question whether Mr. Grolet’s 5-euro croissant is really that much better than a 1.40-euro croissant from Maison Kayser, a high-end national chain, and whether his pastries are designed for looks, not taste.
Mr. Grolet’s prices are in line with others in the rarefied world of haute patisserie. Like haute couture, it is not about accessibility; a Grolet apple, a thin chocolate shell filled with apple jam, fresh apples, apple ganache and cinnamon cake, bears about as much resemblance to an everyday apple tart as a Chanel gown does to a pair of Gap jeans. But as Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada” explains in the celebrated cerulean sweater monologue, it’s the creative, boundary-pushing work at the luxury level that produces shifts in the mass market.
In 2015, he created an edible Rubik’s cube as a sous chef at Le Meurice, the expensive Paris hotel where Mr. Grolet worked for 10 years and still directs the pastry program. His first dessert to break out, it was composed of 27 tiny, glossy cubes of cake, divided by thin sheets of chocolate and implanted with tiny plastic wheels to make them spin.
At high-end venues, Mr. Grolet said, desserts are expected to dazzle the eye with structure, color, texture and light. A lemon dessert might include a mousse, a meringue, a macaron and more, all arranged in a precise geometry that underscores the work that went into it — and convinces clients that the price tag is worth paying.
The dessert that eventually made him famous, Le Citron — a perfect trompe l’oeil lemon, decorated with a real lemon leaf — at first horrified Le Meurice management, who felt sure that customers would never pay 25 euros for a single item on a white plate.
“We were always adding, adding, adding,” he said in French. “Now I am removing, removing, removing.”
Since opening his first independent shop in 2018, Mr. Grolet has continued to buck haute-patisserie tradition. He embraces American ingredients like pecans and peanuts, deep-fries croissant dough to make beignets, and serves his giant chocolate chip cookies in pizza boxes. And he collaborates with brands like La Prairie and HighSnobiety, and influencers like the model Negin Mirsalehi and the auto influencer Georges Maroun Kikano, known as GMK.
But anyone who mistook Mr. Grolet for a mere influencer has long been proved wrong. His company employs 600 people globally, and moving into chocolate is a hardheaded business decision. Fragile pastries like Mr. Grolet’s are virtually impossible to ship, so production can’t be centralized; each of his six pastry shops has its own highly trained staff, an expensive proposition.
Last week, in a nondescript industrial park in the suburb of Nanterre, Mr. Grolet flung open the doors to multiple refrigerated rooms stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes of chocolates ready to be transported to the boutique in Paris and, eventually, around the world. Employees in hairnets and plastic bootees worked in an assembly line to mold, chill, pipe, level and seal hazelnut-shaped chocolates filled with deeply toasted, perfectly salted hazelnut paste.
The 134 new items he has created are typically straightforward: The mango-shaped bonbon has a mango filling; the long, thin chocolate stick embossed with a vanilla bean holds a white-chocolate ganache heavily speckled with black vanilla seeds. (The ones I tried were also typically delicious.)
In hindsight, Mr. Grolet said, the desserts he used to make seem fussy and overdone, even kitschy. “C’est trop patissière” he said. Too pastry-cheffy.
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Julia Moskin is a Times reporter who covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking.
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