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Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Eigen Ting had his future mapped out.
Pure science stream, strong grades, and a father who was an engineer.
The plan was accounting; it was sensible, stable, and — as he eventually admitted to himself — completely wrong for him.
“I realised I couldn’t do a sedentary lifestyle,” he said. “I’m not sitting there.”
So he enrolled in culinary school instead, and promptly became one of the worst students in his class.
I was performing very, very badly. I didn’t like it at all.
The subject that broke him was pastry.
Something as foundational as choux pastry — the dough behind éclairs and cream puffs — eluded him entirely.
His chef pulled him aside; why couldn’t he do what everyone else was doing?
The answer, it turned out, was that he didn’t yet understand why it worked.
Eigen Ting and his fiancée Josephin Tan at Sucre du Jour. The Malaysian couple met while working in Singapore before building their bakery in Melbourne.
The Pista-choux (right) — pistachio praline, whipped pistachio chantilly, toasted pistachio and genmaicha cremeux — and the Rosetta, layered with grapefruit confit, baked cheesecake, raspberry marmalade and strawberry chantilly: French technique, but lighter, and unmistakably Sucre du Jour.
Macarons at Sucre du Jour — delicate, precise, and in colours that make choosing feel like a small act of commitment.
The White Coffee Opera — a collaboration with Ah Huat White Coffee, the beloved Malaysian kopitiam brand — layers white coffee genoise, feuilletine and hazelnut crunch beneath a dark chocolate ganache: a dessert that tastes, quietly, like home.
A customer leans into the display case at Sucre du Jour — the kind of deliberation the pastries tend to demand. The crowd, like the kitchen, skews pan-Asian: people who recognise, perhaps instinctively, what Ting is doing with flavour.
The Moment Everything Changed
The shift came when Ting stopped trying to follow recipes and started treating the kitchen like a laboratory.
Pastry, he realised, was chemistry; ingredients reacted, and temperatures mattered.
There were reasons behind every step — and those reasons were exactly the kind of problem his science-trained brain was built to enjoy.
I started to realise it’s actually very interesting. There’s a lot more that needs to happen.
From that point, his trajectory became unusually deliberate; after graduating, he moved to Singapore — as many young Malaysian chefs did at the time, drawn by better pay and more international exposure.
He completed an internship at a five-star hotel, then secured a position at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
After that, Ting moved into large-scale production at TWG Tea, one of Singapore’s most recognised luxury brands, where he helped train the Malaysia team and got his first real look at how a commercial kitchen actually runs at scale.
Each stop was chosen with a specific gap in mind; hotel for foundations, fine dining for precision and production for volume – he was collecting contexts.
I strongly believe you can utilise more of your skill set because running a business encompasses so much.
A staff member — one of the international students from Southeast Asia who make up much of Sucre du Jour’s team — tends to the counter, a reminder that the bakery’s story of migration runs deeper than just its founders.
Two canelés from Sucre du Jour’s rotating assortment — the lacquered crust and custardy interior of a classic French form, reinterpreted: one dusted in vivid matcha, the other crowned with what appears to be a whole preserved fruit. Six make a pack, though choosing which six is its own small ordeal.
The Salted Caramel and Banana Travel Cake — its almond streusel crust catching the light, the dense salted caramel cake and caramelised bananas beneath it doing the quiet, serious work.
Ting and Tan, softly out of focus behind the name they built — exactly where founders belong.
A croissant topped with pandan cream and lychee — the laminated layers doing their job, the green a quiet nod to Southeast Asia — while Ting moves through the kitchen behind it, unhurried, as though the pastry needs no introduction.
Melbourne, A Visa, And A Lot Of Freedom
The move to Australia came through a sponsorship from a restaurant owner, whom Ting describes only as a well-known public figure.
Given unusual creative freedom to design his own dessert menu, he encountered something unexpected: seasons.
In Malaysia and Singapore, the same fruits are available year-round — in Melbourne, the menu had to change with what was actually growing.
It was disorienting at first, then liberating.
He runs Sucre du Jour with his fiancée, Josephin Tan — also Malaysian, and someone he met during their years working in Singapore.
There is something quietly poetic about that: two Malaysians who found each other in someone else’s city, then built something entirely their own in another.
The first year, we were struggling a lot. In our second year, we started to be a little bit more on our feet.
He began travelling — to Japan, France, across Asia — taking masterclasses with pastry champions and building a technical vocabulary no single kitchen could have given him.
Slowly, a personal style emerged: French technique as the foundation, but lighter, more delicate, less bound by European tradition.
Flavours that were familiar but not predictable.
In 2020, during the pandemic, he and his wife opened their first shop.
The Bakery That COVID Accidentally Helped
The timing looked terrible on paper.
Melbourne was entering what would become one of the world’s longest cumulative lockdown periods.
But Sucre du Jour — the name means “sugar of the day” in French — opened in Camberwell, with a simple setup and almost no branding.
It worked, partly because the timing was right and partly because the product was genuinely different.
People had discretionary income and nowhere to go; orders came in, and the business grew.
The lockdown actually helped our business a lot. We started with really minimal branding, minimal everything.
Five years later, Sucre du Jour has a second location in Melbourne’s CBD, at Shop 24, 250 Spencer Street, open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.
The team is small — four full-time staff and a handful of part-timers — but the production is precise.
Everything is made in-house; celebration cakes are designed to be last-minute friendly, sent out with instructions so customers know exactly how to serve them.
The Bakery He Killed, And The Cake He’ll Never Change
Not everything survived; for a time, Sucre du Jour ran both a bakery and a celebration cake business.
The bakery side — bread and everyday items — was doing well commercially, but Ting found himself unhappy.
The product wasn’t making me happy going to work. There was a little bit of internal conflict.
He shut the bakery side down and doubled down on fine French pastry and celebration cakes.
It was a deliberate narrowing, and by his own account, the right call; two items have stayed on the menu since the beginning and will not be leaving.
The first is a lemon tart — built from whole lemons, using every part of the fruit across multiple preparations.
The second is a cereal-based dessert inspired by a trip to New York, where he encountered a version with cereal ice cream that struck him as genuinely playful.
He rebuilt it from scratch, incorporating a chocolate component the way a French pastry chef might, and the result became one of the bakery’s signatures.
Then there is the Mont Blanc — a French classic, traditionally made with chestnut cream.
Sucre du Jour has made a different version every year for six years, and this year’s is Japanese-influenced; previous versions have included black sesame and blueberry.
The chestnut version, done once, was inspired by a version he encountered from a celebrated chef whose interpretation he found extraordinary.
We tried to reinvent the whole thing. We enjoyed it. My team enjoyed making it.
The White Coffee Opera, up close — the whipped white coffee chantilly piped in generous peaks, a shard of dark chocolate ganache and a crumble of feuilletine and hazelnut crust visible beneath it, a broken brownie-like fragment perched on top as though it simply belonged there.
The display case at Sucre du Jour, where the labels do their best to help — Lemon Tart with yuzu curd and whipped lime chantilly, the Pista-choux with pistachio praline and genmaicha cremeux, the Macadamia Cereal Tart with vanilla caramel and cornflake praline — each one AUD16, each one a small argument for staying longer than you planned.
The pandan and lychee croissant, up close — every layer of the lamination earned, the pandan cream vivid against the deep amber crust, a scatter of freeze-dried raspberry and a curl of lychee flesh finishing it off. French in form, unmistakably Southeast Asian at heart.
The Pear-fection — almond sponge and hazelnut cremeux beneath osmanthus and vanilla mousse, crowned with a glistening dome of nashi pear compote and a scatter of dried osmanthus flowers — the kind of pastry that earns its name.
The Salted Caramel and Banana Travel Cake — caramelised bananas and rich salted caramel beneath a rubble of almond streusel — holds its ground in the foreground while a staff tends to the counter behind it, unhurried.
A Loyalty That Outlasted the Address
Labour remains his biggest challenge — a problem he says is common across Melbourne’s hospitality industry, and one he believes will force food businesses to operate smarter in the years ahead.
He is already working on the systems and processes that would allow Sucre du Jour to scale, with a third location as a stated goal.
Someday, he hopes, that expansion might reach Malaysia — a homecoming of sorts, bringing back everything the years abroad have built.
But the part of the business he describes with the most warmth is simpler than that.
“They started as customers,” he said, of the regulars who have followed the bakery across locations and years.
Then they became our friends. Then we did their wedding cake. Then we did their baby shower.
He paused.
That’s the part that’s very rewarding.
This article was produced following the Cool Escapes to Melbourne and Beyond familiarisation trip, organised by Visit Victoria, 24–29 June. All photographs were taken by the writer.
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Dining and Cooking