Flashback: 2020 Chef of the Year infused immaculate pastries with global flavors
Originally published Feb. 11, 2020. The Free Press will reveal its 2025 Restaurant of the Year and Top 10 New Restaurants and Dining Experiences next week. In the meantime, here's a look at a past Chef of the Year, Warda Bouguettaya of Warda Patisserie. Bouguettaya would go on to win the prestigious James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2022. This year's list will include culinarians who, like Bouguettaya, aren't attached to traditional restaurants.
What makes a great chef?
Is it sheer cooking skill? A penchant for managing a motley kitchen crew while keeping costs in check? The ability to translate a unique and interesting point of view onto a plate?
Those aspects are all part of it, naturally. But, increasingly, greatness demands a chef to be a beacon in a community, to lead with ethical values while nurturing talent and fostering a positive — and safe — environment for employees and customers.
The days of the dish-throwing, mercurial drill sergeant in a tall white toque are, thankfully, coming to an end.
And while the definition of a chef has shifted, the boundaries in which they work have expanded, too.
In 2020, we often find greatness beyond the walls of the traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant. Today, it's just as likely to lurk behind the scenes of a pop-up dinner series, at the helm of a food truck, catering a community event or feeding folks affected by natural disaster. Every year since I began as the Free Press' restaurant critic in 2016, I've aimed to widen the net when casting for people and places to formally recognize in our annual Restaurant of the Year/Best New Restaurants package — to be more inclusive of communities that have historically been overlooked in a food journalism oeuvre long dominated by Eurocentrism and white tablecloths. That's led to us highlighting a more diverse and delicious range of dining options. But the work is not done.
This year, we aim to deepen that approach further by adding a new award as part of our awards package, distinct from the other accolades we give out. Consider it our attempt to get with the times.
Because not all great restaurants are chef-driven and not all great chefs work in restaurants, we'd like to introduce you to the first-ever Detroit Free Press/Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers Chef of the Year: Warda Bouguettaya, owner/operator of Warda Patisserie.
The most salient introduction to Bouguettaya is through her immaculate pastries.
Since 2018, she has served her silky chocolate passion fruit tarts, cherry and port sablé cookies, black sesame and mango financiers and the North African yeasted crepes called baghrir from a pastry stand inside the Trinosophes cafe and arts space on Gratiot near Eastern Market.
It was a long road getting there, but the journey informs all of her output.
'There is definitely not one identity to the patisserie,' she says. 'It's just the inspiration of all these places combined in one space.'
Born and raised in a seaside town in Algeria, Bouguettaya first immigrated to Michigan at 21 in 2004 when her husband, Mohamed, took a job in the automotive industry. A few years later, they were on the move again for work, decamping to Shanghai for three years for another of Mohamed's postings.
It was in China, of all places, that Bouguettaya formalized her love of French pastry by enrolling at the prestigious Paul Bocuse Institute. She started in the cooking curriculum, learning the ways of the cold station and the hot line. But when she got to the pastry department, she didn't want to leave. From there, she rearranged the curriculum so she could focus on her newfound love of baking.
When the Bouguettayas resettled back in the Detroit area in 2016, she began to pursue her dream of opening her own cafe by setting up shop at the Corktown Farmers Market.
'At first, I thought that I was going to do just Algerian pastries,' she says. 'That worked well, but after the experience in China, I just couldn't choose exactly where I fit and where I felt more at home.'
In late 2018, with the support of FoodLab Detroit, Bouguettaya formalized her business another step and opened Warda Patisserie inside Trinosophes. Here, due in part to a gorgeous Instagram feed and expanded hours, her notoriety grew along with her palette.
'For me, this notion of home kind of didn't have any borders anymore,' she says. 'And so I wanted to incorporate all of that into the patisserie, which is Asia, which is Algeria, which is France. … It is a patisserie without borders.'
That translates to desserts like the Koh Lanta tart, named for a popular island district off the coast of Thailand where the Bouguettayas would holiday while living in Shanghai. The circular tart features a buttery almond frangipane base topped with salted pineapple caramel curd holding chunks of fresh pineapple crowned with a dusting of coconut. In the middle of a dreary Michigan winter, one bite is enough to transport you to the tropics.
But while the inspiration is international — and the butter used in the dough is of the high-quality, high-fat French variety — Bouguettaya also embraces and promotes local purveyors and local ingredients.
Offerings frequently rotate at the patisserie, but the savory potato and egg tart remains a staple. It features a flaky pastry crust topped with thin discs of roasted potatoes from Tantre Farm in Chelsea, a soft egg, creamy goat cheese and a smattering of dill or za'atar. Most of the salt comes from the cheese itself — a light-handed calling card of sorts.
Both the Parisian flan served on weekends or the custardy quiche served midweek are about as good as either form gets. Soft and airy, but rich. Never clunky.
Every dish at Warda Patisserie, be it savory or sweet, feels like a signature. A secretive letter shared between pen pals. The experience of eating it is personal. The instinct is to guard it for yourself while the next immediate impulse is to shout it from the rooftops. Each perfect tart holds within it a revelatory kind of beauty. It's almost impossible to describe.
Bouguettaya says she began cooking in America to feel less homesick and you can taste the longing in every bite. It is poetry in edible form.
In food, there's often a tension between precision and soul. Comfort food, sometimes referred to as 'grandma food' has been all the rage, because rustic peasant food hews closer to our collective ideas of authenticity. Precision is the perceived enemy of our grandma's recipes, which call for a handful of this, a pinch of that, seasoning "to taste" and the all-knowing "to the eye."
So when food can walk the line between the two, that tension gives it a kind of rare energy. That is the food Bougettaya makes.
It is heartbreaking in its gorgeousness, like a perfect canvas you don't want to ruin with a misplaced stroke, or in this case a bite. But the soul within, derived from her travels and her memories of cooking in Algeria at her grandmother's knee and that thing that happens when an immigrant falls in love with their new home, transcends food.
You can't help but be moved.
70 W Alexandrine St, Detroit, MI 48201
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 2020 Free Press Chef of the Year Warda Bouguettaya a master of pastry
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