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.