New Pastry Chef!

We’ve had an amazing summer hosting weekly pop-ups with our favorite local pastry chefs. It’s been so much fun seeing all the different styles, flavors, and textures that can be made with our chocolate. Now that the summer is winding down, we have some exciting news to announce: we’ve found our new pastry chef!

So meet Lisa Vega, the newest member of our team, most recently the pastry chef at Gary Danko. Here’s a little she wrote about herself:

I was born and raised in Los Angeles and grew up cooking with both my grandmothers. Everyday after school I’d sit at the kitchen pull out cutting board and help anyway I could. I mostly made jello but the romance of a group of people coming together to share a meal and their stories started to define my love for food.  After graduating from Loyola Marymount (with a BA in English Literature) I decided that culinary school would be my next step, I did my externship in Napa and decided to enroll in the CIA’s Greystone Campus and completed the baking and pastry program.  After graduation I worked at Bouchon Bakery in Yountville as a bread baker and still practice the discipline of excellence I learned there as a young cook.

After Bouchon I moved back to Southern California and began working in restaurants as I wanted to learn all aspects of the baking and pastry world. I worked at Craft LA, Providence and Thyme Cafe and Market. I carefully chose these places because of who I’d get to work for, and value the kitchen lessons I learned and apply them in my work everyday.

However,  I was drawn to the thriving food scene in San Francisco and moved back North to work for the Mina Group and most currently I was the pastry chef at Restaurant Gary Danko. I like to see myself as responsible for someone’s experience with desserts like being someone’s fairy godmother, it’s special to create that seamless moment where someone falls in love with a dessert. It makes all the details worth the while.

Lisa is hard at work on a new menu, so you will still get to try a few more awesome pop-ups for the next two weeks: Sweet Pistachio this week and Bicyclette next week.