At just 36 years old, his rise to culinary greatness has been stratospheric. From starting out as sous-chef at five-star Parisian hotel Le Meurice in 2012, he climbed the ranks to pastry chef, soon earning such a reputation that he launched his eponymous La Pâtisserie du Meurice by Cédric Grolet in 2018. There, he honed in on one of his specialities, trompe l’oeil fruit: hyper-realistic recreations of lemons, mangos, nuts and more, exquisitely rendered in the form of elaborate entremet desserts. Next, in 2019, came Grolet’s own Paris boutique, Cédric Grolet Opéra, devoted to floral-inspired confections: like delicate tarts with wafer-thin apple slices forming a blossoming rose, and his take on a Mont-Blanc, with chestnut cream piped into elaborate ruffled petals.
Cédric Grolet’s flower cakes
Calvin Courjon
Drawing heavily on the beauty of the shifting seasons and his own memories, Grolet chose fruit and flowers as his speciality due to the resonance both motifs carry for him personally. As a child growing up in France, he was given a piece of fruit as he departed for school each day, and earned pocket money by working as a fruit picker at weekends. As for the flowers, it was a favourite sentiment of his mother to say that ‘with a simple flower, you can conquer the world; something Grolet has proven true in a very literal sense. And while the specificity of these memories may be unique to Grolet, there’s a collective nostalgia around baking that carries universal resonance, tapping into associations of comfort, contentment and carefree joy – which has clearly chimed with his hoards of devoted fans. Grolet’s work, however, takes these connotations and elevates them to dizzying new heights, creating visual masterpieces that look as remarkable as they taste. In an age when eating with the eyes has taken on ever more importance, he’s become a veritable Instagram sensation, racking up more than 2.2 million followers. He’s also an acclaimed cookbook author with three tomes to his name: Fruits, Opéra and Fleurs.