Legendary chef Dominique Ansel has been a leading innovator in the world of pastries since opening his namesake bakery in 2011. Best known as the creator of the iconic Cronut®, Ansel constantly strives to evoke emotions and memory in every pastry creation. Some of his most popular inventions include the Cookie Shot, the Frozen S’more, and the Strawberry Jam Jar made using 3D printing. His latest bakery, Papa d’Amour, opened in May 2025 and brings together Asian and French bread cultures. Inspired by his wife and children’s Taiwanese and French heritage, the bakery features creative pastries like pretzel salt egg tart and a taro and mochi lace batter doughnut.
#newyork #bakery #legend
0:00 Intro
0:35 Mixing the Cronut Dough
1:54 Laminating the Cronut
3:04 Dominique’s Early Years in NYC
4:09 Frying the Cronut
6:10 Dominique’s Kouign Amann
7:32 Dominique’s Creative Inspiration
8:18 Papa D’Amour Opening Week
9:40 New Pastries at Papa d’Amour
11:40 Dominique’s Evolution
Credits:
Senior Producer/Director: Tom Daly
Senior Video Director: Murilo Ferreira
Camera: Murilo Ferreira, Connor Reid, Tom Daly
Production Sound Mixer: Bill Vella
Editor: Lucy Morales Carlisle
Executive Producer: Stephen Pelletteri
Head of Production: Stefania Orrù
Supervising Producer: Connor Reid
Post-Production Supervisor: Lucy Morales Carlisle
Audience Engagement: Frances Dumlao
Director of Production: Michelle Fox
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(machine beeping) – When I start thinking of a
new pastry, I think that one of the most important
thing for me is to connect with the person that’s going to eat it. How to translate an emotion, a memory. (upbeat music) It is not just like, oh, I like
chocolate and peanut butter. I’m gonna put them together. How can I make them feel
special with something that they might not recognize? I want to see, you know,
people coming to the bakery. I wanna see the smile on their face, to feel like warm. There’s always something
special in every single pastry. (soothing music) We are here at Dominique Ansel Workshop where we produce most of the
pastries for two locations and soon the the third one as well. So we make all the doughs,
all the croissants. So here we’re gonna mix the cronut now. So the cronut is our signature pastry, it’s a hybrid between
the croissant and donut. At the time with my
girlfriend, she’s now the wife and the mother of my kids, she
challenged me to do a donut. I look at her laughing, I
was like, “honey, I’m French. I don’t know how to make donuts.” And she insisted enough that
I had to make something. So I work on a recipe, I work
on a different type of flour, different type of mixing,
different type of fermentations, and I work on it for too long. I thought I was, I was about to push it aside, but I like the idea. So I kept on on trying it until it worked. Then we decided to launch
it for Mother’s Day. Blogger came, took a photo
of it and put it on the blog and he called me that
afternoon freaking out. He was like, “my article
went viral. I’m so excited.” Little did I know by day three, I had over 150 people lining up outside of the bakery before we even open. The most important here, you don’t want like overwork this dough. Once it’s mixed, we’re going to portion it and we’ll go through
the bulk fermentation. The next day we will do the lamination. So it’s a long process. Takes about three days to make a cronut. (upbeat intimidating music) It’s not like a traditional lamination, the butter is a little softer. It has to be softer because
I want the butter to break, but I don’t want lamination to be too perfect, it’s too perfect, actually,
the layers puff up too much, i think it gets too flaky and we don’t get the the perfect texture. So the perfect texture for me is like just between a croissant and a donut. So it should be like slightly brioche, but still have all those layers inside. So we’re giving three folds altogether. Over here, we’re going into
the blast freezer to chill, I’ve seen people scalping our cronut. We’re selling it for like
20, 30 times the price. I’ve seen people picking our trash, get the leftover of the cronut. It was just insane. We had to hire a bouncer for the our bakery just to
keep the line calm and quiet in the morning. You can see the butter
is a little bit broken, which is what we’re looking for. So we make a couple hundred
of this up to like 900-1,000 a day. We sell out of it every day, no
exception every single day. So once all the cronuts are
cut, we’re gonna bring them to the bakery and then we’ll fry tomorrow. I worked in Paris for 10 years. Daniel Boulud called me out of blue and was looking for pastry chef. Came to New York for a week and just fell in love, fell
in love with everything. I worked for Daniel for
close to seven years. I was the executive pastry chef there. I’ve learned a lot
definitely, for pastry chef, working in a restaurant,
it’s always a little harder because your food, your creativity
is not on the main stage. It’s hard to express yourself. It’s hard to like show
people what you can do. So launching on my own for
me was a natural next step. (upbeat music) This is my very first bakery, open in 2011 with only four employees. So I slept in this bakery in many, many different places here on the floor, also in the office. I was like spending all my days here, I was working 20+ hours every single day. I was just literally exhausted. So here we’re proofing the cronut. It is one of the last steps of making the cronut and
we’re gonna fry them. That’s the only place
we fry the cronut here. So we do small batches at the time. The temperature of the oil is 175 Celsius and we fry them quickly. We use grape seed oil. So this fries for just a
few minutes. It’ll be quick. I think it’s important
to keep small batches because really control
every single product, so you can watch and focus
on all of them individually and make sure the quality
and the consistency is there. At a time when people were
telling me to cash out and mass produce it. I refused to do this, I decided
to myself that the quality and the integrity of the
idea was the most important and I didn’t want my creation
to kill my creativity. The sugar is just here for adding a little bit of the texture. Remind you a little bit
of the classic donut. So this is our filling for this month. The flavor is orange
blossom and pistachio. So the flavor we offer here
changes every single month. We actually have never ever
repeated the same flavor. So every time you come
to a different month, you have a different flavor of the cronut. That’s something that
people will come back for because it’s special, it’s unique. (soothing jazz music) The cronut is turning 12 on May 10th, a special date for me as well. It’s the birthday of my
son and here you have it. You can see the two fillings,
this nice golden crust and all those layers inside
that we carefully built. The cronut, I think, opened
doors to our creativity and more inspiration for me to show the world what I could do. I think it’s fascinating to me. That’s why I love food, it’s
why I love of traveling. Different culture will have
different childhood memory, different connection with food. It’s not because you’re from a place that you cannot adapt to another one. With my skills, my
knowledge, I can translate to like such a deep core
memory of American culture and bring both worlds together. Traveling, adapting, learning, being curious about food is what I love. That’s who I am. So the DKA, Dominique’s
Kouign Amann, I call it the DKA because Kouign Amann is hard to pronounce even for French people. It is our best seller in
every single location we opened. So this is just a perfect
lamination, a nice stretchy dough with a perfect elasticity. You see there’s nothing breaking,
that makes me very happy. I’ve had people from
Brittany coming to the shop. They asked me what to try
’cause they heard of the bakery. I told them to try the
DKA and they refused. They told me like in Brittany, they never eat Kouign Amann for breakfast. So I give them one. I told them to try and come back to see me and they came back five minutes later with a big smile on their face and they told me they’ve never had such a great Kouign Amann. It’s not just for show, it’s like really something
that you can taste, you can taste the difference,
the quality of it, we making between probably
600 to a thousand a day. This is really the the
most popular pastry. This is like the omelet of pastry because like it’s such a simple pastry. It is just a dough with
some butter and sugar but it’s so easy to mess up. So I see like, this is like hot. It’s like a little gooey in the center, it’s caramelized on the outside and then you can see all these
like flakey light layers. That’s the beautiful DKA. (upbeat music) When I think creatively of food, I look in a lot of different industries. It’s easy to get
trapped into the same feed and to have like the same
ideas and same inspiration. I’ve looked at nail art many times before just for the painting,
the details, the mixing of the colors, the tools they use. I think when you look
at different industries, you put yourself out there with your creativity and with your ideas. The entirety of my life, people always tell me this cannot be done, that it’s too hard, don’t move to New York. It’s too hard to work in the fine dining. Don’t open your own shop,
don’t try something new. Just do the classics. That’s bad advice after bad advice and I always pushed away all these ideas and this way of thinking, which is not me. (soothing light music) – We got here early, waited in the rain. No one does what he does
and just the creation and innovation behind
everything he does is great. – There’s definitely a
degree of like polish and like finish that I think is different than a lot of other bakeries. – It’s not really many places
where they make something that innovative and make it that well. So yeah, I’m just excited
to to check it out. The idea behind Papa d’Amour was to bring Asian bread culture and the French culture as
well within one bakery. My wife is from Taiwan. Our kids are half Taiwanese, half French, and of course they’re born
here so they’re also American. – [Cameraperson] Say cheese. – I’ve spent so many years giving people like new experiences within
every location I’ve opened. Having to have a chance to
like show my kids how I connect with the food is is very important to me. Hi guys, good morning. Good morning everyone! Final days before opening,
this was stressful. Very little sleep ’cause you
worried about everything. You want everything to go well. No matter what happen, how like tense I can be, I see the kids, it’s like a sunshine in my heart like hey, I love them so much. On the menu at Papa d’Amour, we have an egg tart, gonna use a bit of pretzel salt within the vanilla sable and it’s nice light custardy cream and then we’re gonna finish it. We’re gonna brush it with a
bit of brown butter on top, it’s crunchy, it’s creamy, it’s beautiful textures that
you haven’t seen before. I was inspired by traveling to Taiwan, this bread that they do for
breakfast, scallion bread, and they fluff before they serve it. So I’ve created this pastry
where you have to like kind of crush and break this two texture pastry and eat it with the scallions. One of our signatures is
also our taro puff donut. So it’s inspired by the dim sum. So first we make a taro mix,
there’s some starch inside, a bit of salt, sugar, can
wrap it around the mochi that was previously steamed.
So everything is made by hand one by one. So it’s a long intensive process. Traditionally people use pork lard because it’s savory dim
sum, but we don’t do that. We use butter, a nice butter actually and it fries up essentially the butter and the heat of the oil. Everything kind like fuses through. They take about a minute
and a half to fry, it’s pretty quick, they fry to order. I actually fry them all myself yesterday and today we’re making 200 today so they all fry like two
by two in a small fryers. Important for me to make small
batches throughout the day so we don’t overdo it and keep
the quality of everything, we serve one by one and we finish this with a little bit of powdered sugar here. So this is like not sweet at all. That dough is like super
crispy on the outside. It’s like chewy and tender in the center. It works very well, I love this one. So I’ve had a little bit of
luck with the donut thing and hopefully, you know, we can come up with something good with this one. I don’t know, you tell me if it’s the next cronut. I don’t decide this. When people come to Papa
d’Amour, I want them to see different cultures
through my eyes and my hands. For me, creating is fun. It’s life. I don’t wanna do the same thing
forever for like 30 years. No one wants to, we all want
to grow, we all want to change. And seeing your business changing and your customers appreciating and coming back for the new person you are every single time is, it’s amazing. You can be part of their life and you can can be sharing
those experiences with them.
35 Comments
Cultural appropriation 101
Over rated. I live near here. Don’t believe everything you see
Hell yea son! We don’t parlyvoo France around these parts 😤
i went to his japan branch and hongkong branch it was magical, i hope he returns to asia
I love how many of his best ideas come from a loving husband making exciting creations for wife to try. My wife and I have a similar relationship, and we both get a lot of joy out cooking crazy fusion dishes or making exciting new drinks for each other.
45 eurod for a little pastry. Oh well.
The cronut is alright but the DKA is spectacular. Especially if u can crisp it slightly in the toaster oven.
This is art no just mastery.
loved the story of how the cronut came to be. first time hearing this story since his cronut became a hit over 10 years ago. i've never tried the cronut but it really makes me appreciate this pastry even more.
I WANT ‼️
Where is this place ‼️
(Yes I’m gonna Google it but a little more info upfront would be better)
Never trust a skinny chef … 😂
And this is the pinnacle of western civilization? No thanks NYC
he is a very creative pastry artist and deserves all the credit, success and wealth
Cronuts are overrated
I heard about the cronuts from 2 BROKE GIRLS. I never thought that I'd hear about it from the chef who created it. Everything looks scrumptious.
Ads every every 3 minutes is crazy
Hii Marcus
the pretzel salt egg tart @9:45 are not very good at all, and thats coming from someone who both loves pretzels and egg tarts (pastel de nata), there are other places in nyc where its much better
Wait… There was a pastry craze… Like, ever?
Huh?!
I only visit NYC once every few years but without a doubt, this is a place I insist on visiting every time, especially for the cronut. Only wish I can more often so I can try more things.
What a truly wonderful chef & lovely human being.
Amazing that it was viral in just 3days, and that it takes 3days to prep! Respect that he doesn't wanna mass produce his creation, also love that he loved NYC enough to stay to keep giving us his pastries!
Oh man, I wanna try everything! It's incredible how much prep these take and that it's all done by hand! Wow
Eclairs are French so by that logic, bro should know how to make donuts
Yet another trashy product that will make people be even more sick. 70% of americans are fat already and diabetes and cancer are making the country weak, but hey who cares if we're eating ourselves to death.
So happy that he doesn't want to compromise the integrity of his pastries by mass producing them.; this is one of the reasons why his pastries are so delicious. He is a genius and a true artist!
Hilarious accent / Clown level !
What an incredible man! Excellent work ethic and so passionate and knowledgeable! Really inspiring
Seriously, how high is the ad setting on this? Thirty seconds of ads every 2-3 minutes of video.
I really admire his creativity, his new inventions, great entrepreneur, a chef always warm welcoming his customers and a family man. such an inspiration, hopefully i will be like him one day – on progress 😊 wish me luck🤞
"my wife is Taiwanese, I am french, our kids are both and American since they were born here"
Not anymore according to trump and this would have never happened under trump
Ok the outside texture of the taro donut omg
I'm always a skeptic when a food becomes TOO hyped. It's more often less because it's good food and more about some other circumstance around virality, but the cronuts are legitimately super delicious. Hope to try more of their stuff eventually but got to be in the mood to wait in the line! Loved the interview and the chef gives out good vibes.
Damnnnn, that Taro Donut is such a genius invention! 😳😳🤩🤩
So refreshing to hear from a true artisan!!😊