Eating with our eyes

The son of a hairdresser and truck driver from a small town near Saint-Etienne in central France, his moment of revelation came when he was only 13.

"A farmer gave me a basket of strawberries for helping him pick his crop and I made a strawberry tart with them for my grandfather", who ran a small hotel nearby, he says.

It went down so well that Grolet left school early to apprentice himself to the village baker.

"I would make bread all night so that I would be allowed to make the desserts at 11 in the morning. My reward was to be able to slice the apples and cover the tarts in strawberries."

He later studied fine patisserie and began winning prizes before leaving to make his name in Paris aged 20. There he worked for the French gourmet food and delicatessen chain Fauchon, which eventually sent him to Beijing to help train its staff there.

It was also at Fauchon that he worked alongside Christophe Adam in its research laboratory, developing new recipes.

"It was every patissier's dream," he says, "trying new things every day".

Like Adam, who has since founded L'Eclair de Genie, a chain in France and Japan, Grolet has been crowned French patissier of the year and hailed by macaroon guru Pierre Herme as "one of the most talented patissiers of his generation".