Dominique Ansel

I didn't grow up with much, and then as I started working in restaurants, everything you need to know starts around a table - how you serve your guests, how you treat people with kindness and generosity, how you share what you love with people. It's part of who I am.

And then, more than anything, our guests and our fans keep the team inspired. We have such passionate guests who constantly inspire us to keep pushing forward with our creativity. At the end of the day, when you see a guest smile when they try one of our creations, it makes it all worth it!

It was at Fauchon where I really learned the techniques and artistry of pastry. That brought me to New York, to become executive pastry chef of Restaurant Daniel. Working with Daniel Boulud was a wonderful experience, and he instilled in me the importance of hospitality and entrepreneurship, and led me to start my own bakery here in SoHo in 2011.

It is a passion and drive we are born with. If it’s what’s you’re meant to do, then you don’t need the inspiration to pursue your career and it’s nearly impossible to ignore it!

A solid understanding of cooking fundamentals and pastry techniques is of course important but we look for talent that have a natural sense of hospitality. At the end of the day, even if you’re in the kitchen behind-the-scenes, you still need to be a hospitality-minded person.

Our guests mean everything to us, and a little goes a long way, whether it's serving hot chocolate or warm madeleines to our guests outside in line during the chilly winter months or lemonade during the summertime to cool them off.

Baking is a science, everything needs to be measured and precise, and I love that you can take a few simple ingredients like flour, butter, eggs, and with the right techniques and a bit of creativity, you can create almost anything.

When I was sixteen, my family couldn't afford to send me to school, so I started working in a local restaurant out of necessity to help my family pay the bills. So I suppose there wasn't really an "a-ha" moment for me; it was something I had to do to help my family, but I grew to love cooking and, of course, baking in particular.

We couldn't do what we do without our team and our loyal guests from over the years. We first opened the SoHo Bakery in 2011 with just 4 employees - 2 cooks, 2 baristas. We wanted to create a small neighborhood bakery serving French pastries, and I remember building much of the shop with my own hands, painting, tiling, electrocuting myself when installing the lighting. I told myself I would never become a factory (my dad worked in a factory back in France), so for us, it's about staying humble, maintaining quality, and growing steadily.

And at the same time, surround yourself with good people - family, friends, colleagues, who you know you can spend time with away from the kitchen and enjoy the time that you have.

From a non-kitchen perspective, our daily schedules and sales are kept organized with our scheduling apps and POS systems.

Over the years, as the shops got busier and we welcomed more guests, that meant our production also increased. We were able to build out our Workshop location in Flatiron to house a full production kitchen, bring on more team members, and invest in new equipment and technologies - like a depositor for evenly piped macarons and choux, and a press that helps us make tart and pie shells with much more speed. It's definitely helpful when we have to make more than a thousand apple and pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving!

We bake our own sourdough to sop up all of that sauce too. It's comfort food for the team during a time when I know we've gone through an incredibly busy holiday season and we're almost to the finish line.

Just nine weeks after I left Daniel, we opened our doors to our little bakery in SoHo - we painted and tiled, old friends and coworkers came to help clean and sweep, we befriended our neighbors and the local chefs in the neighborhood who have now become our family.

It could be something as simple as taking a long walk through the city by yourself, spending time with friends exploring somewhere new, or trying that new restaurant you've been eyeing.

But more than anything, I think what's most essential is having an open mind and the willingness to work hard and learn from the team around you,

For example, we use Isigny St. Mère butter and Les Grands Moulins des Paris flour from France, as well as fresh ripe fruits whenever we can get them.

Building our team and seeing our guests enjoy the pastries that we make together, guests who come visit us time and time again, it makes it all worth it.

For our kitchen team, it's regularly having new recipes to work on and new techniques to learn; and for our FOH team, being able to share the excitement of something new with our guests - many who come back for every single launch and event we do - definitely keeps us going.

If you have that hospitality mindset and it drives you to want to bake for someone or take care of guests, that's a trait that's invaluable. It's why we do what we do, to help our guests to celebrate a special birthday or anniversary, or make someone's day with a simple croissant or a slice of cake.

So that can mean you have experience in hospitality, training from culinary school, a genuine passion for baking, or a combination of it all.

We don't necessarily always look for candidates who have years and years of professional culinary training; while that's definitely helpful to see, it's also about having the right attitude and an eagerness to learn.

Being here in NYC, there's so much diverse talent - everyone is pretty much from somewhere else, moving here for opportunity, so naturally that feeds into building our team.