DINING OUT
HOW THESE BEAUTIFUL DESSERTS MADE A PUERTO RICAN CHEF AN INSTAGRAM STAR IN MIAMI
December 10, 2020
Antonio Bachour hunches behind the camera at his Coral Gables restaurant, adding to the 35,114 photos on his iPhone 11, always looking for the best angles.
His nearly 1 million Instagram followers await his next post.
“Remember,” he said, “we eat with our eyes.”
His models? A tiny carrot cake in the shape of a glistening tangerine bon bon. A fruit tart encrusted in ruby raspberry jewels. A chocolate petite gateau jingling with satin gold and silver pearls.
Each piece appears sprouted from the fingertips of a Disney ice princess.
The shimmering beauty of Bachour’s desserts — coated in a colorful, jewel-like mirror glaze to shame a Faberge egg — have made the Puerto Rican-born son of immigrants an international social media star. And his peers have called him one of the best pastry chefs in the world.
Bachour (pronounced like a sneeze) travels the world teaching the world’s best bakers this technique he popularized when he first started posting photos of his desserts on Facebook more than a decade ago. And they, in turn, have posted, shared, commented and liked his creations such that he has become a star among chefs. These days, with diners in town for the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, he’s taking as many selfies with diners as they are of his pastries.
“I bought all your books, and I love them all,” baker Maria Elena Badillo tells him, while a friend takes their photo. They have traveled from Mexico for vacation and made Bachour’s bakery a destination, hoping for a chance meeting. “French chefs are more traditional. He is rebellious.”
In that, Bachour takes after his late father. Efrain Bachour left a 500-person Orthodox Catholic village in Lebanon to work in textiles with an uncle in Brazil. Within five years, Efrain and his best friend, a Palestinian Muslim man, moved together to Puerto Rico, where the elder Bachour later married a Lebanese woman from home, had three sons, and opened a bakery in Río Grande, La Rio Grandeña.
Antonio, the middle brother, preferred to work at the bakery rather than play beach volleyball like his brothers. He’d watch the head baker decorate cakes with delicate meringue flowers with one hand while swigging a beer with the other.
“I was fascinated,” he said. “I wanted to be inside helping them. I fell in love with it.”
Bachour learned to make all the traditional desserts and pastries — tocino del cielo, coconut flans, brazos gitanos, guava cheesecakes. (And at home, his Lebanese mother might serve pork and arroz con gandules, but “there was always hummus on the table.”)
He also started innovating: Why couldn’t there be guava and cheese inside a croissant he wondered?
“He always seemed to be ahead of others,” said his younger brother, José. “He’s always looking for what’s new, what’s different…. He was bored of making the same things over and over again.”
Small town Puerto Ricans weren’t ready for him to mess with their pasteles.
So Bachour left the island to study at the French Culinary Institute in New York and later spent a year traveling through Spain, working for free at nameless bakeries from Barcelona and Alicante “until my savings ran out.”
“All I cared about was learning,” he said, “and the pastry world was much more advanced than in the U.S.”
He landed in Miami, where his younger brother lived, ready to innovate — and not just with pastelitos.
Bachour took the traditional black-and-white French chocolate desserts and added what he thought was missing: color.
He spent the next year experimenting with the classic French formula for chocolate ganache, adding color, sugar, and (in the most Puerto Rican twist) condensed milk. (He made a lot of ugly cakes at first. “Too many,” he joked.)
“I had a vision for what I wanted,” he said.
The result looked less like a year-long science experiment and more like a fairy tale. He created a glass-like finish that added a colorful, crystalline pop to his delicate desserts. Each piece feels like it belongs in a glass case.
His internet videos, with the mirror glaze creeping in sparkling waves over his cakes, are as satisfying to watch as the last seconds of a sunset.
He took photos with his phone, posted it to Facebook (in 2007, pre-Instagram), and the likes started popping.
Bakers around the world started sending him messages and soon he found himself traveling the world over, teaching his advanced techniques. He holds nothing back, giving away all his secrets in the classes, in his five cookbooks and even in his short Instagram videos. His students around the world share his videos, and Bachour’s name spreads.
Once, while on vacation with his wife in Fiji, a resort chef recognized him, asked for a photo — and then for help with a recipe. Bachour spent three hours the next day in the kitchen helping him perfect his mirror glaze. Whenever he travels around the world teaching (he visits 20 different cities a year), he calls home to pray with his wife in the mornings and at night.
“That’s the type of man he is. Always helping,” said his wife of three years, Alejanda Sanchez. “He’s all heart.”
When one of the world’s best chefs, Massimo Bottura, opened a soup kitchen in Milan, where he invited 60 of the world’s best chefs to cook for the homeless, he asked Bachour, now 46, to take a turn. Bachour made an olive oil cake with a goat cheese cremeux and a citrus compote with leftover ingredients from the Milan expo. The recipe was later shared in the book “Bread is Gold,” and part of the proceeds went to charity.
Meanwhile, his work as a corporate pastry chef earned Solea at the W South Beach recognition as one of the best new restaurants in the country. And in 2016 he was named a James Beard award outstanding pastry chef semifinalist at St. Regis Bal Harbour.
Bachour partnered with Javier Ramirez, a longtime fan and restaurateur who was a founding partner of the highly regarded Alter in Wynwood, to open Bachour’s first restaurant, first in Brickell, now in Coral Gables.
He only ended up in the new spot because the real estate mogul Armando Codina, who owns the building, pleaded with Bachour to open on the ground floor of this residential block.
“I chased him more than I chased my wife,” Codina joked.
Even there, Bachour thinks with his eyes first.
He thought the entrance to a restaurant where the desserts are known for their flash, deserved more bling. So he designed a river of roses to cascade down the front door.
“People love taking photos next to it,” he said. “It might be more Instagrammed than the food.”
It’s as pretty as a picture.
BACHOUR BAKERY AND RESTAURANT
2020 Salzedo St., Coral Gables, FL
