Growing up, Nicolas Guercio wanted to be an architect. That didn't pan out, but his career as a high-end pastry chef in Paris isn't far off from that original dream. "My sugar work and sugar showpieces are based on architecture," Guercio, now the executive pastry chef at Hotel Lutetia, tells Observer, sitting upstairs in the property's Brasserie Lutetia.
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Guercio, who at one point also wanted to be a motorcycle cop, took a circuitous route to find his dream job. Despite his ambitions, however, Guercio didn't excel in school, and at the time (about 25 years ago), there were "only a few options," he recalls, admitting that he used to get in trouble a lot as a teenager. "Cook and pastry chef were two of them. It wasn't fashionable like it is today, with Top Chef and Master Chef."
Instead, Guercio saw the kitchen as a way to gain some discipline -- almost like joining the army. He enrolled in cooking school, spending nearly five years studying the culinary arts. It was in his final years there that he fell in love with desserts and pastries, both because of the precision baking required and because it meant he wouldn't smell like fish and grease after work.
"I never went back to the kitchen," he says of shifting from cooking to pastries, which are typically done in separate areas of a restaurant. He found he preferred the exactitude and rules that come with pastry. "[Baking] is very strict. One hundred grams is one hundred grams in pastry. In the kitchen, one carrot might be big and one carrot might be tiny. One day you add too much salt, and then the next day, you put in the exact same amount, and it's not enough. But in pastry, it's always the same. It's very practical."
Guercio also found himself drawn to more creative aspects of pastry. "The second part was all of the artistic elements. You can have beef, but you'll never do a beef showpiece," he points out.
Guercio worked as an apprentice at the Ritz Paris with pastry chef Eddie Benghanem before taking his skills around the world. He spent time in London, working for the Hakkasan group, before accepting a job at a private resort in the Seychelles, eventually landing in Tokyo. But it was a move to St. Petersburg in Russia that changed Guercio's life. It wasn't meant to be a permanent relocation, but after Guercio met his now-wife, he ended up staying put.
"I came for three months, and then I realized I enjoyed my life there," he says. "It's all about women, more or less. You follow the people you love, then you go to another country, then break up, then you move somewhere else. I found a girl for a night, and then she became my girlfriend and then my fiancée and then my wife and then the mother of my kids."
After spending seven years in St. Petersburg, primarily working for a luxury grocery store, Guercio decided to return to France. He admits that coming back to his home country was "very tough" until he found a job as a pastry instructor at the cooking school Ferrandi Paris. Then, a dream job appeared. Guercio was offered the opportunity to relocate again, this time to Shanghai, to be in charge of three shops. It was a massive salary, which would make a big difference for his family since his wife was pregnant with their second child at the time.
"I quit [Ferrandi] right there," he recalls. "We sold the car. We gave our furniture to charity shops. We said goodbye to the school. Two days before we moved, they withdrew the offer. We had nothing. We stayed in my parents' house. I was very upset, so I went to Shanghai. I found a lawyer. I went to the French Embassy and the French Consulate to find a way to get my money back. But, really, I had to get a job. And I came [to Hôtel Lutetia] and they were looking for a Christmas chef. I thought I could never work in a palace [hotel] because the level is too high and I wasn't ready for that."
It turned out that fate was on Guercio's side. He ended up staying at Hôtel Lutetia after his trial run ended in 2019, and has been the pastry chef there ever since. It worked out for the best -- all of his friends who worked in Shanghai before the pandemic ended up being fired during COVID-19, and had to leave the country as fast as possible amid the pandemic.
"I have a lucky star looking down on me," Guercio says, grinning. "We lost a lot of money, but I made it here. I was a wanker in the street doing nothing, and now I'm a pastry chef at a palace in Paris, and I speak three languages. People have said, 'They could do a movie about your life.' No, but it's pretty fun the way it is."
Guercio brings that sense of adventure to his creations at Hôtel Lutetia. He is part of a team of 18, who are responsible for the sweet elements in the hotel's two restaurants, Brasserie Lutetia and Le Saint-Germain, in addition to its two bars, the spa and the room service. There are also special events and in-room amenities, like the whimsical chocolate ship placed on the guest's table upon arrival. Each morning, the team bakes around 200 croissants, brioche and a daily special pastry. On the weekends, Le Saint-Germain serves 150 guests afternoon tea. It adds up to over 1,000 pastries every day, but Guercio keeps things interesting by pairing innovative inventions with these traditional offerings.
"This is a traditional Parisian brasserie, so we have to make it look like a brasserie but more high-end," he explains. "You might have the same thing you'd have in a brasserie, but here it's more fancy, with better design. Our profiteroles are very fancy and pretty. A classic one is delicious, but ugly -- it's always cracking."
The pastry chef also gets to experiment. He loves playing with chocolate and sugar and building large sculptural pieces. Last year, he decided to make a small chocolate dog for Valentine's Day based on the hotel's mascot Lulu, but the team didn't end up using it. A few months later, around Easter, he posted it on Instagram, and the response was immense. Everyone forgot about the traditional chocolate eggs and requested their own Lulu. She became so famous that Guercio made a five-meter high tower of chocolate Lulus for an exhibition, and she's reemerged several times, including for Christmas, Pride and breast cancer awareness month.
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"We made 250 [dogs] just for the exhibition tower, and all together, [around] 2,000," Guercio says. "It's been so much fun... That's the power of a social network. [A pastry idea] that is born in Shanghai, in two weeks you can find it everywhere -- in Sydney and Paris and California. It gives people a lot of ideas."
Along with working in Hôtel Lutetia, Guercio has his own consulting company, Guercio Advice. He recently collaborated with Kellogg on an exhibition in London, for which he built a chocolate Sacré-Cœur. He constructed a fake perfume bottle for Dior for a Christmas commercial. Next, he wants to learn how to blow sugar, and eventually, Guercio hopes to open his own pastry shop, maybe in Paris or perhaps in the U.S. He admires Parisian shops and chefs like Patrick Roger, Pierre Hermé, Christophe Michalak, Jacques Genin and Hugo & Victor, as well as the pastries in La Grande Épicerie de Paris, located nearby. However, he says it's hard to choose his favorites because he loves all pastries, which is exactly what keeps him motivated every day.
"I'm not that kind of guy, you know?" Guercio quips. "Some guys just want the blonde woman with blue eyes. No, I like all kinds of women. So if you ask you ask me which kind of dessert is my favorite, I'm not the chef who's going to say, 'Oh, I love the lemon tart.' Because the chocolate tart is good too. And why not have a Paris Brest? I'm not discounting anyone or anything."