Why it belongs in ORBIS
Dominique Ansel trained eight years at Fauchon before becoming pastry chef at Daniel Boulud's Daniel in New York in 2006. On May 10, 2013, at his own Soho bakery he introduced the Cronut, a laminated dough proofed then fried in grapeseed oil; TIME named it one of that year's 25 best inventions.
Dominique Ansel was born in 1978 in Beauvais, north of Paris, and started working in a restaurant kitchen at 16 to help support his family. He spent eight years at the Paris pâtisserie Fauchon before moving to New York in 2006 to become pastry chef at Daniel, Daniel Boulud's flagship restaurant.
On May 10, 2013 — Mother's Day — Ansel introduced the Cronut at his own bakery in SoHo: a croissant-doughnut hybrid built from a proprietary laminated dough that's proofed, then fried in grapeseed oil. It took him two months of development to land on the recipe, and the pastry went viral almost immediately, drawing lines around the block. TIME named it one of the year's 25 best inventions of 2013.
Ansel has since built a small network of NYC concepts around the original SoHo bakery, including the Dominique Ansel Workshop croissant café in Flatiron and Papa d'Amour, a newer shop built around Asian bread culture; he has also been named World's Best Pastry Chef by the World's 50 Best Restaurants organization.