Camille DÉFAYE

Pastry Chef : 1 restaurant

Presentation

Camille Défaye naturally turned to catering when he left secondary school. But I wasn't necessarily convinced I wanted to become a pastry chef," he says. It was when I spent a season in pastry at Les Célestins, in Vichy, that I knew this would be my path. You have to be precise, attentive and artistic, all of which are just what I was looking for.

Driven by a genuine thirst for learning, Camille Défaye even completed an internship with a butcher before leaving his native Auvergne to join Pierre Hermé's teams in Paris. I'm barely 20," she says, "and I know I have a lot of technical gaps to fill. I'm going to spend two years with the great pastry chef before returning to Auvergne for a few seasons, at Château de Maulmont, as head pastry chef."

The experience was mixed, and Camille Défaye returned to Paris to work for Hélène Darroze, where he went from commis to sous-chef in just six months. He stayed on rue d'Assas for almost six years before discovering the world of palaces in Switzerland, at the Beau Rivage Palace. "I spent four wonderful years there before losing the flame. I didn't like the new directions that were coming," he says, and decided to move to Clermont-Ferrand to work with Thierry Constant, the famous baker at La Ruche Trianon. "It allowed me to acquire new skills."

After a few months at Le Diapason, in Le Broc (Alpes-Maritimes), Camille Défaye, one of whose models is Sébastien Vauxion, joins Dorian Van Bronckhorst at Atelier Yssoirien. After a few years of running in, the duo has found the right carburation. In 2024, Gault&Millau will reward the pastry chef with the regional trophy.

F. T.