10/08/2026
I did the work.
Every day I woke up and I knew: this is it. When you're truly passionate, you don't look at the clock or notice the blisters. You stop counting the weekends, the holidays, the days you should have taken off. For years, I ate, slept, lived and breathed pastry. No vacations. Hardly any days off. I fought like hell for my career.
I dug deep inside myself, into the places where creativity and art live, and I created from there. I experimented. I failed. I started again.
I did the work.
And somewhere through all of that, my work became recognisable as mine. My signature. My identity. My trademark. We are all inspired by something. I have drawn inspiration from pastry, art, nature, emotion, architecture, people, places - from everywhere. But inspiration is supposed to ignite something inside you. It is supposed to pass through your own imagination and become something new. It is not permission to become somebody else.
There is a difference between being inspired by someone's work and watching what they create, seeing that it succeeds, and following closely behind.
One requires you to search within yourself.
The other requires you only to look sideways.
Do your own work.
Take the risks. Make the mistakes. Develop your own eye. Find your own language. Suffer through the failures until eventually you create something that could only have come from you. Because copying may give you the product. It will never give you the identity behind it... And eventually, people recognise the difference.
Originality will define you. So will the absence of it.
My brand and my menu were built on the work I did, the sacrifices I made and the things I had to overcome to get here. They were not built by standing behind somebody else and following their footsteps.
And I want to say this for myself, and not for anyone else:
I have earned this.
My work is not “hype.”
It is not “viral.”
It is not “overrated.”
I have suffered to produce this menu in every sense of the word.
I did not take the easy route. I created my own.
And in doing so, my work became my trademark.
That is why, when you see my work, you see me.
SÉSAME DORÉ
Salted caramel & toasted sesame cheesecake
