Peter Yuen has barely begun to set up his workstation for practice, but his digital metronome is already nagging. Where others might hear an innocuous if somewhat annoying ticking, Yuen detects something more personal. “‘Are you done yet? Are you done yet? Are you done yet?’ That’s what I hear,” he says. And the answer is no, no, no. But that’s why Yuen bought the metronome at a guitar store—he needs it to help him set a quick pace in the kitchen. It’s 9:33 on a Sunday morning, and Yuen is already running 33 minutes late.
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Yuen finished over the time limit at both the regional and the national competitions, and according to Downer only his baking skills saved him from elimination. “His product is spectacular,” says Downer. “So when it came to picking the team, his product is definitely far better than anyone else’s.”
Downer has some insight into both the cup and Yuen’s baking. When Downer himself made the U.S. team in 2005, Yuen called him up and asked to be his assistant. When Yuen made this year’s team , he turned to Downer again, asking for baking insights and the use of the Bennison’s kitchen. Yuen started practicing with Downer in September, committing to at least one eight-hour training run a week. At the cup, competitors will have one hour to make their dough and then eight hours to prepare their pastries. Yuen and the rest of the Viennoiserie masters must make five products, 15 small and three large of each.
Valentine is a lanky, sleepy-eyed 27-year-old snowboard bum who turned to baking after he hit a tree. He met Yuen at Kendall, where he and the other students labor in kitchens plastered with signs reading “TAAT: Taste Analyze Adjust Taste.” He ambles around the kitchen at half the speed of his master.
Earlier in the week, Yuen had driven his old green minivan to the Container Store in Lincoln Park, his radio tuned to a country station. He arrived close to the 9 PM closing time and wandered the empty aisles before spending 15 minutes examining butter boxes under the watchful eye of a bored cop who’d come in for a browse. Yuen finally selected a few containers and shelled out $31 at the checkout.
They married in January 1994, and the next year Susan came to live in Chicago and work the register at New Hong Kong Bakery. Meanwhile, Yuen tried his hand at marketing, launching a wholesale baking business. That failed within a year, and soon after he returned to the kitchen, working in the bakery before enrolling in 2000 at Chicago’s French Pastry School, which is owned and operated by acclaimed pastry chefs. In 2004, after working at upscale hotels like the Four Seasons, Yuen bought the bakery from his family and changed the name. The store’s purple sign and European name now stand in sharp contrast with the rest of the stores on the street.
“Ohhhh,” Yuen says as he folds the dough and butter like an expert gift wrapper. “Did you ever have a cake like that?” he asks Valentine.
