Pierrick Boyer has worked with some of the top chefs in the world, the likes of Alain Ducasse, Christophe Michalak, Pierre Marcolini and Stephane Leroux. Pierrick himself, has won many awards and most recently was acknowledged as the Gault and Millau Pastry Chef of the Year in 2017. What’s even more impressive is that having closed his business last year due to loss of business from the construction going on across the road, he has now picked himself up, re-opened his Prahran café, Rêverie, and has two more venues opening this month. That shows grit and certainly needed the passion for his career that Pierrick talks about in our conversation.
Bonjour Pierre. Let’s start with how long you’ve been a chef.
I’ve been a chef for 30 years. It sounds like a really long time. I started young, when I was 15.
In France?
Yes. Interestingly enough, I knew very early on that I wanted to be a pastry chef because when I was about four or five years old, we lived next to a pastry shop. My dad was a plumber and my grandfather was in the coal business, getting the coal from the station, putting it into bags and selling it from his shop. He sold butane gas bottles and hardware stuff. I knew I didn’t want to do that. I’m the type of person who knows what they want. I like the warm weather and I didn’t want to work outside when it was cold. In the kitchen you are working in an environment that is controlled and you can eat delicious food, so why not?
Did you go straight into an apprenticeship or did you go to culinary school first?
I did a pre-apprenticeship for a year when I was 15. It was basically cleaning and wasn’t much fun. It was a bakery, in Yvelines, in the west of Paris. Then I had a good apprenticeship and there were only four of us doing pastry with a chef and and a baker.
What do you think it is about pastry that is appealing to you? Is it the creativity?
I think when I was young, I wasn’t really thinking about creativity. In the first eight or so years of your career, you learn from others and then after you develop your skills to start creating. Don’t get me wrong, some people are never creative, but that’s about personality. Providing pleasure for people is a big part of our hob. We work hard to make something people can enjoy and have as a treat for the week, or an everyday thing or for an important celebration in their life, like weddings or big anniversaries.
Being a chef is a hard job. You work long hours and have time pressures, and maybe when you started, there was still the shouty chef mentality…
It was a lot different to what it is now. I’ve been in Australia for 15 years, and even before that it had started to become more relaxed. But the younger you are, in your early twenties you work long hours, you work hard, and very early on you are pressured with food costs, quality, service, timing. A lot of other jobs don’t give that amount of responsibility until people are in their late twenties or thirties.
Only certain people would be able to cope with that.
There is a natural selection. My first chef, I worked in Bordeaux for Canelés Baillarden, the father…I wasn’t making the canelés but we were making old school pastry, desserts. The owner was there and he didn’t really work because he was in his seventies but I was a little bit in charge and then after I was at Club Med in Italy and there were just four of us working seven days a week, from 7am to 3pm because of breakfast and lunch service. We’d have a break from 3 until 5 and then work from 5 until 9pm, so when you look at it, we were working from 7am until 9.30pm with a two-hour break. Then after a few weeks, we started at 6am so we could have an extra hour in between to go to the beach. We did that seven days a week for six months.
Maybe you can only do that if it is for a limited period of time.
When you are in your early twenties you can do that. When you reach 35, you can do it, but it’s a little bit harder.
I was talking to another chef last week, James Kummrow, and he talked about working those kind of hours with Dan Hunter at The Royal Mail Hotel. He said it was a good time to do it and it was a good way to get his hours up and do some solid learning. It fascinates me, that passion chefs have to pull them through all that. Did you always know you wanted your own place?
Yes. I had it quite late in my life. But yes, always. Before this I was at the RACV and I created Le Petit Gateau for them. I was the Executive pastry chef.
Is it easier to have your own business in Australia than France?
We can’t generalise. The law is different in France. Where I was at the Plaza in Paris, we only worked four days in a row and we had to have two consecutive days off. When I went to America, I worked six or seven days and working only 42 hours a week was like a holiday. Even now, we’re not at full gear yet, but I do 53 hours a week. We’re not a full gear because of the construction out there, but we are opening a second store next Thursday afternoon in Westfield, in Doncaster then we’re opening in the CBD by the end of the month.
Congratulations.
It has been such a turnaround from having to close down for financial reasons and for construction reasons, all that going on in front of us. Then to turnaround and come back…it wasn’t planned at all. I found a business partner who was prepared to inject some cash.
What is your speciality?
We make all our own cakes and we specialise in large cakes for special occasions, like birthdays and weddings.
Do you do a lot of recipe creation?
Yes. I like coming up with new desserts for functions and so on.
How do you come up with your ideas?
Sometimes it just comes to me. It really depends on your inspiration and what sort of personality you have. When you look at my desserts, they don’t look like Zumbo, Purchese. I want to be different. I like to have a productive approach, simplistic in some ways. My desserts are simpler than a lot of those other ones because I am planning for three stores and maybe four or five, so I cannot do cakes that have way too many steps. It’s a personal choice. I like simple, clean-cut desserts, like the mud cake. I think it’s a beautiful cake. I kept the recipe I created for the RACV. I’ve changed it; the size, the height, the decoration. It’s a mud cake but it tastes great.
Last week, I thought about streamlining the cheesecake we do. I was talking to my chef and he said, what about Neapolitan, the ice cream. I kind of knew what that was, but wasn’t completely sure. I’m Australian, but I wasn’t born here…Australian with a French accent. He explained it was chocolate, vanilla and raspberry. We looked at doing perfect layers and it was possible but everything is hand made so I always look for efficiency. So we marbled it and it looks like a marbled Neapolitan.
When you first came to Australia, did you have to adapt your recipes?
Yes. I was trained in France and Belgium and Italy then I moved to America for six years, came back for a year and a half and that was when I was at the Plaza Athénée and then I came here. I had to adjust the dairy, cream, butter ratio here. There is a higher fat content here than in the States and in France.
What would your advice be to a young person who wanted to be a chef or a pastry chef?
Work hard. Be passionate. A former chef of mine put on Instagram yesterday something that was taken from other people, “Be passionate and you won’t have to work a day in your life.” It’s a nice saying, but yes, at the end of the day, you have to work and the more in love you are with it, the easier it is to work harder. Do things for passion and don’t do things expecting anything in return. That’s a personal thing. If you expect something in return, it is a recipe for disaster and you will be disappointed.
31 Izett Street, Prahran