Dominique Ansel's Earliest Dessert Memory

Dominique Ansel is certainly a famous name in the pastry world — he was proclaimed "World's Best Pastry Chef" in 2017, earning the title as part of the World's 50 Best Restaurants annual awards. For someone so in tune with the sweet things in life, we were curious about Ansel's earliest forays into the dessert realm.

Food Republic bumped into the famed French chef at the 2024 New York City Wine & Food Festival, and we asked him about his earliest dessert-related memory. For Ansel, who was raised in a small town north of Paris called Beauvais, his answer centers around his grandmother and a staple of French cuisine. "I think it was actually making crêpes with my grandma," he said. "I was very, very little. My mom was not baking around in the kitchen, but my grandma was, so I spent a bit of time with her."

This early experience with his grandmother was only the beginning for this prince of pastry. Ansel is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Cronut, a croissant/donut amalgamation that took the food world by storm in 2013. He is also the creative mind behind other unique desserts, including the Cookie Shot and DKA (another croissant-like treat, perfect for fans of rice paper croissants or TikTok-viral croffles). He is a recipient of the coveted James Beard Award, and owns multiple world-renowned bakeries. His Caesars Palace location, Dominique Ansel Las Vegas, is one of the celebrity chef restaurants not to be missed in Las Vegas.

While he is world famous today, Dominique Ansel originally had no culinary aspirations. His first food-related gig was washing dishes in a restaurant as a teenager, a job he took to help out at home where money was tight. He later moved up to food prep and then chef training. Rather than going to an expensive institution, Ansel participated in an program at a free culinary school in Beauvais, where he started out in savory cuisine before ultimately turning to pastry. It was in the dessert realm that Ansel found his calling, and it sparked a career that has left an indelible mark on the food world.

Ansel is adamant about originality, and he adapts the menu of each of his bakeries to suit and honor the establishment's surroundings. A second Paris Las Vegas bakery named Dominique Ansel Marché takes inspiration from the open-air marketplaces in his home country, featuring croissants, fruit tarts, crêpes, and other quintessential Parisian offerings. But while crêpes are on the menu, they won't be made using his grandmother's recipe that started it all. "They didn't keep any recipes back then, unfortunately," Ansel told Food Republic. "But I still use the basic French recipes that work very well."