Restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Tru and Per Se all have alumni of the French Pastry School in their kitchens.
José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative
Chicago has long attracted ambitious immigrants from all corners of the world. World champion bakers from tiny Alsatian villages are not usually among them.
Pierre Zimmermann may well be the first when he arrives in August to join the faculty of Chicago’s French Pastry School. Mr. Zimmermann stands out in the tightly-knit and highly competitive international baking scene as the latest in four generations of his family who have run a boulangerie-patisserie in Schnersheim.
Mr. Zimmermann, 45, won the World Cup of Baking as a member of France’s gold medal team at the 1996 Coupe du Monde de laBoulangerie and coached France’s 2008 World Cup of Baking championship team.
The pedigree, and Mr. Zimmermann’s deft touch with a baguette, made him such an attraction that the Loop school pursued him for four years.
That he chose to give up his job as “the little baker of my village,” as he put it in a recent e-mail translated from French, is a testament to Chicago’s importance among food cognoscenti and the French Pastry School’s growing reputation.
“The school is wonderful, they make pastry chefs for the whole country,” said Jacques Torres, a New York chocolatier. “Those guys are well known in the whole world now.”
Restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Tru and New York’s Per Se all have alumni of the French Pastry School in their kitchens. Sebastien Cannone, the co-founder, is a native of France and one of only five pastry chefs in the United States to be awarded the French government’s highest honor for artisans, the “Meilleurs Ouvriers de France.”
“Kings of Pastry,” a documentary following Jacquy Pfeiffer, the co-founder, and his unsuccessful pursuit of the coveted M.O.F, will have its American premiere in the fall. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the award-winning documentary film makers, directed the picture.
The recruitment of Mr. Zimmermann is a major step for the 15-year-old French Pastry School, where Mr. Zimmermann has worked as a guest instructor. The school was formed in 1995 to teach traditional French pastry-making, using elements of the European master-apprentice model, and this summer will take over a renovated floor of the City Colleges of Chicago administration building in the shadow of the Willis Tower.
This is all clearly gratifying for the gregarious Mr. Pfeiffer and his lower key counterpart, Mr. Canonne. Before forming the for-profit school that receives accreditation through Kennedy-King College, the pair were executive chefs at Chicago hotels: Mr. Pfeiffer at the Ritz Carlton and Mr. Pfeiffer at the Sheraton. They met at a local pastry competition in 1992, bonded over their similar culinary backgrounds and saw opportunity in the absence of anything comparable in America.
“I told Sebastien, ‘This country put a man on the moon and you cannot get a decent croissant in a bakery,’ ” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “So we said there’s definitely a need here.”
By 1995 the men had left their restaurant jobs and were teaching classes full time out of Mr. Pfeiffer’s loft on West Grand Street. Class sizes swelled after the two received media attention from their role on the silver-medal winning United States team at the 1997 Coupe du Monde de la Patisserie.
The school outgrew its space, and by 1999 Mayor Richard M. Daley had cleared the way for it to move into the City Colleges building, taking over a cafeteria that had stopped being used.
Though both founders insist they had no blueprint — “it was just a handshake partnership,” Mr. Pfeiffer said of starting the school — they were driven by a sense of purpose: The need to improve what they saw as the sad state of pastry in the United States.
“It’s going to take another 10, 20, 30, 40 years until it’s really where it should be,” Mr. Pfeiffer said, “like in Europe where people wake up in the morning and refuse to eat a cake that is full of chemicals and shortening.”
Mr. Zimmermann shares the sense of mission, and said he is eager to help.
“If tomorrow people think they must come to Chicago to find a top-tier program in baking and pastry, our goals will have been met,” Mr. Zimmermann wrote.
“Taking up this challenge is a huge gamble, but the prospect of doing something beautiful, of marking Chicago, without any pretension, with our little bakery stamp, that motivates us every day.”
Translation by Lia Bosma and Juan-Pablo Velez.
“By 1995 the men had left their restaurant jobs and were teaching classes full time out of Mr. Pfeiffer’s loft on West Grand Street.” By referring to Grand Avenue as “Grand Street” I think you leave the impression that this article was written from well outside of town, by someone without any local knowledge of Chicago.