Nina Métayer, 36, was elected best pastry chef in the world by the International Union of Bakers and Pastry Chefs, a highly honorary distinction which for the first time has been awarded to a woman. And not just any one. A small guy with immense talent and a strong character who, as a child, never set foot in the kitchen and who, by his own admission, “had to break down doors to get there”. At the awards ceremony in Munich, the moment she heard her name, she first thought of her teams, without whom she could not do anything, then of her family, who always encouraged her . Sitting in a small office in her laboratory in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in Hauts-de-Seine, the young business leader, with a busy schedule, tells her story with joyful and infectious enthusiasm.
At work from a young age
With her two sisters with fairytale names, Pandora and Paloma, Nina, the eldest, spent her childhood in La Rochelle with a father who was a developer of new technologies and a mother who was a lifestyle journalist. With her good-natured parents, “everything revolved around the table,” she says, bursting out laughing. Everyone was in the kitchen, Nina was content to set the table and clear things up. In fourth grade, she fell in love with a boy whom she called every evening on his cell phone. We are then at the beginning of the digital era, and the bill is turning out to be steep. “My mother calls me into the living room one evening and shows me the bill: 1,500 francs! She tells me that I’m going to have to find a little job to pay it back. » The following weekend, little Nina immediately found a job selling apples and pears in a market. “I loved earning a living and being independent. And I discovered a passion for work. Not only did I continue every Sunday, but I also started selling pancakes on Saturdays. »
At 15, the girl who felt like she was useless in class (she repeated her second year) decided to go abroad to learn a foreign language. “My parents told me “banco”, convinced that I would not make it to the end. I had also met a Mexican, so I had a base, and here I was off to Puebla, a small town near Mexico City, for the best year of my life. » At the end of which she returned to France and re-entered the school system. In high school, “I skipped a lot, and I absolutely wanted to pass my CAP bakery degree. But my parents wanted me to also get my baccalaureate. It wasn’t a win, I was seventy points behind! So I took all the possible options: theater, visual arts, sport, written and spoken Spanish. As a result, I finally got a small mention.”
Passion and pleasure
© Dorian Prost
This says a lot about the young girl’s willpower and her passion for challenges. With her CAP in hand, she is convinced that she will easily find a place in a bakery in the city center: “I only had offers for a sales position. I don’t blame anyone, at the time, there were only three girls to have obtained this diploma and, when they saw me arriving with my 45 kilos all wet, it was difficult to imagine me facing a 50 kilo bag of flour. » However, a man, Denis Baron, offers him a chance. The Paillat bakery is thirty minutes from her home by bike, and she has to be there every day at 2 a.m., but she hangs on. She then discovered the pleasure of doing something with her hands, of bringing home a crispy, warm baguette every evening to her family and friends. “I understood how simple things make people happy. And I loved the idea of making others happy: that was what I wanted to do with my life. » The following year, the young baker left for Australia to improve her English, and began making pizzas. Back in France, she hesitated between opening a pizzeria in Italy or a bakery in the Caribbean.
And there, destiny intervenes. She meets a Parisian, Mathieu, at the head of an audiovisual company, during the La Rochelle Fiction Festival and falls in love with him. Goodbye desires for elsewhere, hello Paris! And the tour of odd jobs ends at Délices de Manon, where she brings out 8,000 pieces of pastries per day. She is 21 years old and still wants to learn. She then enrolled at the Ferrandi Paris school, graduated at the top of her class and discovered a passion for baking. “I approached the rigor, the precision, the beauty of the gestures. But it wasn’t easy to tell people what I was doing in society. At the time, it was a bit of a siding. Fortunately, my family supported me, as did Mathieu, despite schedules that were not compatible with a life as a couple. » Nina applies to Meurice and joins the team of Camille Lesecq, her first mentor. “I thought I was going to peel apples for two years, but I immediately found myself making desserts. I learned a lot, especially how to make meringues, which I systematically failed! »
I see my husband very little. I find it very courageous of him to never blame me
When Cédric Grolet arrived, the young woman changed creameries and became pastry chef at the Hôtel Raphaël, under the leadership of Amandine Chaignot. His exotic floating island with lime, mango and citrus becomes his signature dessert. The ascent has only just begun. The following year, she married Mathieu, and Jean-François Piège took her on board for the opening of his Grand at 7 a.m. to finish Restaurant. “I started at 2 a.m., and I worked on weekends. I saw my husband very little, which is still the case. I find it very courageous of him to never blame me. » In 2016, she was elected pastry chef of the year by the magazine “Le Chef”, then it was Gault & Millau which honored her in 2017. In the process, in homage to her babouchka, her maternal grandmother Of Russian origin, she accepts a mission for Café Pouchkine, which wishes to expand abroad. This office life does not satisfy her. When Anastasia, her first daughter, was born, she left to open a restaurant in London with her two sisters. “A very joyful experience, which made me want to stand on my own two feet. »
The box quickly took off. My parents and my sister Paloma are part of the team
In 2019, the young woman returned to France. Covid is sweeping across the world. Pregnant with her second daughter, she leaves to confine herself with her husband and her mother-in-law to the countryside, in Eure. Mathieu on camera, she in the kitchen, they concoct pastry videos and create a buzz. She then opened La Délicatisserie, an online pastry shop that awakens the taste buds. We love its Fleur Vanille, a sort of crumble, pecan and praline with a vanilla mousse, its Pistachio Pistachio, a crunchy and soft biscuit with Persian almonds, its Pavlova Exotique with white chocolate and Passion fruit, or this Black Forest Revisited. “The company quickly took off. The extras became permanent contracts, and there are now almost forty of us. My parents and my sister Paloma are part of the team. » Between her company Nina Métayer Group (a consulting agency) and her pastry shop (delicatisserie.com), the best pastry chef in the world works eighteen hours a day, dreams of a project in Shanghai, but very rarely takes her daughters at school. She makes up for it on weekends, in her Normandy house, where Anastasia and Adèle love nothing more than learning to make cookies and apple crumbles. “We spend all our time in the kitchen. They love having their hands in the dough and their fingers full of chocolate. A delicious and joyful vision of transmission!
