Nina Metayer, the first woman to win one of the world's most prestigious pastry awards, offers precise and traditionally inspired creations that shy away from extravagant surprises.
The opinion
Her impeccable sweet creations have just earned Nina Metayer the World Confectioner Award. In 92 years, this is the first time the award has gone to a woman. And don't expect the 35-year-old to follow modern trends or low-fat options. On the contrary: "I like cakes with butter, gluten, eggs—not without," she confidently asserts to the microphones of thelocal.fr. "I work on the principle that we shouldn't create products with various tricks and subterfuges. When we eat a cake, it's for pure pleasure." After all, tasty and high-quality ingredients inevitably reduce the amount of added sugar, so the selection should be made upstream.
Nina earned recognition without being (to date) the pastry chef of a renowned restaurant, and without even working in a store. Instead, she manages a delivery service in an industrial area just outside Paris. Busy preparing her new mango tart, she stated that the key to success lies in precision and implementing small surprises, not in taking originality to the extreme. "I don't have the obsession to invent crazy recipes that no one has ever done before," she says. "It's about having a natural instinct but also being precise to the millimeter: everything is weighed, calculated. We have micro-scales so that we can reproduce them down to the last element of a dessert."
Trained as a baker, Metayer found it challenging to enter a world dominated by men in French boulangeries when she started 15 years ago. Switching to cakes "was not easier," she said, but with perseverance, the young pastry chef landed jobs in the kitchens of acclaimed chefs like Yannick Alleno and Amandine Chaignot, eventually earning top awards from guides. "Nina represents everything that is best in modern pastry. She is really advancing the industry," said Marc Esquerre of the Gault et Millau guide.
Metayer moved to a large industrial area three years ago to build her own business. It's a setting that allows her to avoid waste and directly fulfill customers' desires. Often posting online videos of herself making cakes with her two young daughters, she claims to want to show that it's possible to be "a female chef, an entrepreneur, and have a happy family." The team has grown rapidly from 3 to 30 people. But while orders increased after last month's award, Metayer's husband, Mathieu Salome, who helps manage the business, said they don't want to expand production volumes too much. "We are artisans, not workers."
