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A Sweet Taste Of Home
Pastry chef
BernardChu
isworking to showcase the taste ofMalaysia in
his newhome.
SarahRees
finds out how
Chu
and fellowemigrant
YenYee
have become the dessert king and queen ofMelbourne.
A tough road
However, the journey was not an easy
one. Chu and Yee both studied at the
prestigious cookery school Le Cordon
Bleu before working their way up in some
of Sydney’s top restaurants, learning from
the greats and honing their own skills.
“It takes at least four years to be able to
create and pair flavours,” explains Chu.
“Desserts may look simple, but they
require a lot of technique.”
By 2010, the pair felt ready to go solo
and established a dessert café – LuxBite
– in a quiet corner of Melbourne to
embark on a journey of education for
their would-be customers.
“In setting up LuxBite, we wanted
to educate Australia on where we had
come from. We use ingredients that we
have grown up with in Malaysia but that
are quite unusual here,” explains Chu.
An example is the bamboo charcoal
used to colour their
Bamboo Oolong
Tea
macarons – “It is nothing back in
T
he
story is as
sweet as the
d e s s e r t s h e
makes – young,
inexperienced
Bernard Chu left
Malaysia with
dreams of becoming a pastry
chef. He studied, he worked
hard, and now he and fellow
emigrant Yen Yee operate one
of the most successful dessert-
focused cafes in Melbourne.
Chu and Yee’s creations have
been featured on MasterChef
Australia, are some of the most
instagrammed in the country and
have resulted in the duo being
invited by Tourism Victoria (an
Australian state tourism board)
to hold a dessert degustation on
home soil as part of their efforts
to woo tourists from Malaysia
to Australia.
A selection of the
goodies Chu creates
LuxBite is known for its
many-flavoured macarons