- 7/1/2025
Legendary chef Dominique Ansel has been a leading innovator in the world of pastries since opening his namesake bakery in 2011. Best known as the creator of the iconic Cronut®, Ansel constantly strives to evoke emotions and memory in every pastry creation. Some of his most popular inventions include the Cookie Shot, the Frozen S’more, and the Strawberry Jam Jar made using 3D printing. His latest bakery, Papa d’Amour, opened in May 2025 and brings together Asian and French bread cultures. Inspired by his wife and children’s Taiwanese and French heritage, the bakery features creative pastries like pretzel salt egg tart and a taro and mochi lace batter doughnut.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:01When I start thinking of a new pastry,
00:03I think one of the most important things for me
00:05is to connect with a person who's going to eat it.
00:08How to translate an emotion, a memory.
00:13It's not just like, oh, I like chocolate and peanut butter.
00:16I'm going to put them together.
00:18How can I make them feel a little special
00:20with something they might not recognize?
00:22I want to see, you know, people coming to the bakery.
00:25I want to see the smile on their face.
00:27To feel like warm.
00:30There's always something special in every single pastry.
00:36We're here at the Dominican Cell Workshop
00:38where we produce most of the pastries for two locations
00:41and so the third one as well.
00:42So we make all the doughs, all the croissant.
00:45So here we're going to mix the croissant now.
00:47So the croissant is our signature pastry.
00:49It's a hybrid between a croissant and a donut.
00:52At the time with my girlfriend,
00:54she's now their wife and one of my kids,
00:56she challenged me to do a donut.
00:58I look at her laughing.
01:00I was like, honey, I'm French.
01:02I don't know how to make donuts.
01:03And she insisted enough that I had to make something.
01:06So I work on a recipe.
01:08I work on a different type of flour, different type of mixing,
01:10different type of fermentation.
01:12I don't work on it for too long.
01:14I thought I was about to push it aside.
01:16But I like the idea, so I keep on trying it until it worked.
01:21And we decided to launch it for Mother's Day.
01:24Vlogger came, took a photo of it and put it on the blog
01:26and he called me this afternoon freaking out.
01:28He was like, my article went viral.
01:30I'm so excited.
01:31Little did I know by day three, I had over 150 people
01:34lining up outside of the bakery before we even opened.
01:38The most important here, you don't want to overwork this dough.
01:41Once it's mixed, we're going to portion it
01:43and we'll go through the bulk fermentation.
01:46The next day, we'll do the lamination.
01:49So it's a long process.
01:50It takes about three days to make a donut.
01:56It's not like a traditional lamination.
01:58The butter is a little softer.
02:00It has to be softer because I want the butter to break.
02:02But I want the lamination to be too perfect.
02:04If it's too perfect, actually, the layers puff up too much
02:07and it gets too flaky.
02:09And we don't get the perfect texture.
02:11So the perfect texture for me is like just between
02:13a croissant and a donut.
02:15So it should be like slightly Bioshi,
02:16but still have all those layers inside.
02:19So we're giving three folds all together.
02:21Over here, we're going into the blast freezer to chill.
02:25I've seen people scalping our corner.
02:27We're selling it for like 20, 30 times the price.
02:30I've seen people picking our trash
02:32to get the leftover of the corner.
02:34It was just insane.
02:35We had to hire a bouncer for our bakery
02:38just to keep the line calm and quiet in the morning.
02:41You can see the butter is a little bit broken,
02:44which is what we're looking for.
02:46So we make a couple of hundreds of this
02:48up to like 900, 1000 a day.
02:51We sell out of it every day.
02:53No exception, every single day.
02:57So once all the cronets are cut,
02:58we're going to bring them to the bakery
03:00and then we'll fry it tomorrow morning.
03:04I worked in Paris for 10 years.
03:06Daniel Moulu called me out of the blue
03:08and was looking for a pastry chef.
03:10Came to New York for a week and just fell in love.
03:13Fell in love with everything.
03:14I worked for Daniel for close to seven years.
03:16I was the executive pastry chef there.
03:18I've learned a lot definitely for a pastry chef working in a restaurant.
03:21It's always a little harder because your food, your creativity is not on the main stage.
03:27It's hard to express yourself.
03:28It's hard to like show people what you can do.
03:30So launching on my own for me was a natural next step.
03:34This is my very first bakery.
03:45Opened in 2011 with only four employees.
03:48So I slept in this bakery in many, many different places.
03:51Here on the floor, downstairs in the office.
03:53I was like spending my, all my days here.
03:56I was working 20 plus hours.
03:58Every single day I was just literally exhausted.
04:02So here we're proofing the cornut.
04:05This is one of the last steps of making the cornut.
04:07And we're going to fry them.
04:10That's the only place we fry the cornut here.
04:12So we do small batches at a time.
04:14The temperature of the oil is 175 Celsius.
04:17And we fry them quickly.
04:18We use grapeseed oil.
04:20So this fries for just a few minutes.
04:22We'll be quick.
04:24I think it's important to keep small batches
04:26because we really control every single product.
04:29So you can watch and focus on all of them individually
04:32and make sure the quality and the consistency is there.
04:35At a time when people were telling me to cash out
04:37and mass produce it, I refused to do this.
04:40I decided to myself that the quality and the integrity
04:43of the idea was the most important.
04:46I didn't want my creation to kill my creativity.
04:52The sugar is just here for adding a little bit of texture.
04:54Remind you a little bit of the classic darnut.
04:57So this is our filling for this month.
04:59The flavor is orange blossom and pistachio.
05:02So the flavor we offer here changes every single month.
05:05We actually have never, ever repeated the same flavor.
05:07So every time you come to a different month,
05:09you have a different flavor of the cornut.
05:11That's something that people will come back for
05:13because it's special.
05:14It's unique.
05:20The cornut is turning 12 on May 10th.
05:23A special date for me as well.
05:24It's the birthday of my son.
05:26And here you have it.
05:27You can see the two fillings.
05:28This nice golden crust and all those layers inside
05:32that we carefully built.
05:34The cornut, I think, opened doors to creativity
05:37and more inspiration for me to show the world what I could do.
05:43I think it's fascinating to me.
05:45That's why I love food.
05:46That's why I love traveling.
05:47Different cultures will have different childhood memories,
05:50different connections with food.
05:52It's not because you're from a place
05:54that you cannot adapt to another one.
05:56With my skills, with my knowledge,
05:58I can translate to, like, such a deep,
06:00a core memory of American culture
06:03and bring both worlds together.
06:05Traveling, adapting, learning,
06:07being curious about food is what I love.
06:09That's who I am.
06:11So the DK, it's Dominique Squignamane.
06:14I call it DK because Squignamane is hard to pronounce,
06:16even for French people.
06:17It is our best seller on every single location we open.
06:22So this is just a perfect lamination.
06:23A nice, stretchy dough with a perfect elasticity.
06:26You see there's nothing breaking.
06:28That makes me very happy.
06:30I've had people from Brittany coming to the shop.
06:33They asked me what to try
06:35because they heard of the bakery.
06:36I told them to try the DK and they refused.
06:38They told me, like, in Brittany,
06:40they never eat quignamane for breakfast.
06:43So I give them one.
06:44I told them to try and come back to see me.
06:47And they came back five minutes later
06:49with a big smile on their face
06:51and they told me they've never had such a great quignamane.
06:53It's not just for sure.
06:54It's, like, really something that you can test.
06:56You can test the difference, the quality of it.
06:58We're making between probably 600 to 1,000 a day.
07:03This is really the most popular pastry.
07:10This is, like, the omelette of pastry
07:12because, like, it's such a simple pastry.
07:14It is just a dough with some butter and sugar.
07:17But it's so easy to mess up.
07:19So I see, like, it's, like, hot.
07:21It's, like, really gooey in the center.
07:22It's caramelized on the outside.
07:24And then you can see all these, like, flaky light layers.
07:27That's a beautiful decay to me.
07:32When I think creatively of food,
07:34I look in a lot of different industries.
07:36It's easier to get trapped into the same feed
07:39and to have, like, the same ideas and the same inspiration.
07:42I've looked at nail art many times before.
07:45Just through the painting, the details,
07:47the mixing of the colors, the tools they use.
07:49I think when you look at different industries,
07:51you put yourself out there with your creativity
07:53and with your ideas.
07:55The entirety of my life, people always tell me,
07:57this cannot be done, that it's too hard.
07:59Don't move to New York.
08:01It's too hard to work in a fine dining.
08:03Don't open your own shop.
08:05Don't try something new.
08:06Just do the classics.
08:08That's bad advice after bad advice.
08:11I always pushed away all these ideas
08:13and this way of thinking, which is not me.
08:19We got here early.
08:21Waited in the rain.
08:22No one does what he does,
08:23and just the creation and innovation
08:25behind everything he does is great.
08:28There's definitely a degree of, like, polish and, like, finish
08:31that I think is different than a lot of other bakeries.
08:34There's not really many places where they make something
08:38that innovative and make it that well.
08:41So, yeah, I'm just excited to check it out.
08:46The idea behind Papa Lamour was to bring Asian bread culture
08:50and the French culture as well within one bakery.
08:53My wife is from Taiwan.
08:56Our kids are half Taiwanese, half French.
08:59And, of course, they're born here, so they're also American.
09:02I've spent so many years giving people, like, new experiences
09:09within every location I open.
09:12Having to have a chance to, like, show my kids how I connect with the food
09:15is very important to me.
09:24The final days before opening this was stressful.
09:27You get a little sleep because you worry about everything.
09:30You want everything to go well.
09:32No matter what happens, how, like, cancer can be, I see the kids,
09:37it's like a sunshine in my heart.
09:38Like, hey, I love them so much.
09:41On the menu at Papa Lamour, we have a tart.
09:44We're going to use a bit of pretzel salt within the vanilla sabre
09:49and this nice, light custardy cream.
09:52And then we're going to finish it, we're going to brush it
09:54with a little bit of brown butter on top.
09:56Crunchy, it's creamy.
09:57It's beautiful textures that you haven't seen before.
10:01I was inspired by traveling to Taiwan.
10:04This bread that they do for breakfast is Scandian bread,
10:07and they fluff before they serve it.
10:09So I've created this pastry where you have to, like, kind of crush
10:12and break this two-textured pastry and eat it with the Scandians.
10:18Well, our signature is also our Tao puff donut.
10:21So it's inspired by the dim sum.
10:24So first, we make a Tao mix.
10:26There's some starch inside, a little bit of salt, sugar.
10:29You can wrap it around the mochi that was previously steamed.
10:32So everything is made by hand, one by one.
10:34So it's a long, intensive process.
10:37Traditionally, people use pork lard because it's a savory dim sum.
10:41But we don't do that.
10:43We use butter, a nice butter, actually.
10:45And it fries up, essentially, the butter and the heat of the oil.
10:50Everything kind of, like, fuses through.
10:52They take about a million and a half to fry.
10:54It's pretty quick.
10:55They fry to order.
10:56I actually fried them all myself yesterday and today.
10:59We're making 200 today.
11:00So they all fry, like, two by two in a small fryers.
11:04Important for me to make small batches throughout the day
11:07so we don't overdo it
11:09and keep the quality of everything we serve one by one.
11:12And we finish this with a little bit of powdered sugar here.
11:15So this is, like, not sweet at all.
11:18The dough is, like, super crispy on the outside.
11:21It's, like, chewy and tender in the center.
11:24It works very well.
11:25I love this one.
11:26So I've had a little bit of luck with the donut thing,
11:29and hopefully, you know, we can come up with something good with this one.
11:32I don't know.
11:33It's the next donut.
11:34I don't know.
11:35You tell me.
11:36It's the next donut.
11:37I don't decide this.
11:41When people come to Papadamu,
11:43I want them to see different cultures through my eyes and my hands.
11:48For me, creating is fun.
11:51It's life.
11:52I don't want to do something forever for, like, 30 years.
11:55No one wants to.
11:56We all want to grow.
11:57We all want to change.
11:58And seeing your business changing
12:01and your customers appreciating and coming back
12:05for the new person you are every single time, it's amazing.
12:08You can be part of their life
12:10and you can be sharing those experiences with them.
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