As a teenager, she thought she was a loser and wanted to escape France. Today, 36-year-old pastry chef Nina Métayer has earned countless accolades and represents France around the world. In 2023, she became the first woman to be chosen by the International Union of Bakers and Pastry Chefs to be the profession's ambassador and, in 2024, she was voted the World's Best Pastry Chef by The World's Best Restaurants. She made the desserts for Xi Jinping's state dinner at the Elysée Palace in May.
If I hadn't gone to live on my own in Mexico for a year when I was a teenager. That little moment of madness started it all. I'd met a girl who'd spent some time in the United States after high school. When she came back, she could speak English, she'd learned so much and was so impressive when she talked about everything she had experienced. I thought I was very uninteresting and not very intelligent, and I dreamed of being that girl, of being interesting to other people. So one evening, in 10th grade, I went home to La Rochelle and told my parents I wanted to go abroad the following year. I was 15, and in reality, I didn't really believe it would happen. But I craved adventure and wanted to be proud of myself.
I felt like a loser. At school, people made fun of me because I stuttered. I was very shy, dyslexic and couldn't keep time in music. As a result, I did 15 years of theater, always stuck in small roles that I struggled to remember, and 12 years of piano, but always in the beginners' group. I was hyperactive, so sitting still took a lot of effort. I wasn't cut out for school. I worried about the future. I wasn't very good at French, history, geography or science. What was I going to do? I had no idea.
My father was reluctant, but my mother, who had traveled to California at a young age, didn't shut the idea down. I had one thing in my favor: For the previous two or three years, I had been working at the market every weekend and during the holidays. It all started because I had fallen in love with a boy. After calling him so often, my phone bill became enormous, and my mother asked how I planned to pay for it...
The very next day, I found a job at the market. I loved it, and in doing so, I gained a form of financial independence very early on, which gave me freedom. I could buy the clothes I wanted, pay for my turn if I felt like it, and so on. It gave me a sense of legitimacy to plan a faraway trip. In the end, my parents trusted me.
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