How Love Lured Hmong French Pastry Chef Marc Heu to Minnesota

Marc Heu Pâtisserie Paris is a love story—and likely America’s first French bakery aiming for international expansion?

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In 1992, when he was 3 years old, Marc Heu’s family moved him from France to a semi-abandoned fruit farm in French Guiana, an hour from the Brazilian border. “I was like, ‘Why are we stuck in the jungle?’” remembers Marc. “We had a TV. I could see that everyone else in the world had a phone, nice clothes—everything. What did we have? Pineapples!”

At “Pineapples!” Marc, who is all lean muscle and scraggly goatee and looks more like a rock star than a baker, pulls a theatrically comic face, making his pretty wife, Gaosong V. Heu, laugh. The three of us are behind a wall at Marc Heu Pâtisserie Paris, the Frogtown bakery that the couple opened in 2019 as a preorder-only operation with the occasional pop-up. It quickly became the talk of St. Paul and soon blossomed into the full-service bakery of the year. 

Marc is trying to find a picture on his phone of the French Guiana farm, but his phone keeps ringing, and ringing, making the task difficult. He holds out his phone and considers it, as if he pulled up a fishing line and got a live cat, and stretches out his anecdote to try to deliver us to a point when the phone isn’t ringing. “Oh, I’m so unlucky,” he playfully quotes his younger self lamenting. “Why me? What do I have to do in this world to get a phone?” Gaosong laughs again. She has one of those faces that lights up in rosy circles when she smiles, and I get the sense the two young marrieds have spoken often of the curse and blessing of the ever-ringing phone. It finally stops ringing, and Marc shows me an image of the “cow barn” without walls he and his parents moved into, with the wall of tropical jungle just outside. In a second photo he is just 7 years old or so, with a plastic laundry basket rigged with ropes to make a backpack for the fruit of the farm: dragon fruit, mandarins, clementines, passion fruit, and, of course, sword-leafed and prickly pineapples.

The Heu family had moved to French Guiana for the usual reasons anyone from the Hmong diaspora moved anywhere—first they fled the wrath and retribution of the communist  governments of Laos and Vietnam for helping America during the Vietnam War, and then they sought new lives and community. Initially, Marc’s family settled in France, where his five older siblings went through school, but his father hated the cold. His parents saved up their money in hopes of living somewhere tropical, like their mountain homeland, and joined 200 other Hmong families in French Guiana. When their fruit was ripe, they’d take it into town to market, and his father, who had developed a taste for French pastry in France, would stock up on croissants and baguettes to carefully portion, consign to the family chest freezer, and warm up over time. When Marc’s sisters would come to work at the farm over their summer breaks, they’d use the electricity, which was only available during the day, to make cakes. “They would give me the job of whipping the egg whites,” he recalls. “We had no scale; you just had to eyeball it. It was such a treat. You live in the jungle—out of nowhere you have a cake.” The seeds of a pastry connoisseur were planted. 

At 14, he returned to France, to the porcelain capital Limoges, for Catholic boarding school. “I was a little boy straight out of the jungle—it was not easy,” Marc says. For comfort, now and then, he would head into Limoges to buy himself a pastry treat, walking past what he considered all the inadequate bakeries. “Just looking at pastry, I could tell if it was going to be good, if it was not fresh. In the jungle, we microwaved frozen croissants—I really can recognize microwaved pastries!” 

During these school years, Marc set about becoming a doctor, his parents’ fondest wish. He also journeyed to St. Paul to visit family, as many Hmong do, St. Paul being one of the world’s greatest capitals of the Hmong diaspora, with some 100,000 Hmong now living in and around it. On one life-changing trip, he stayed with an uncle, and one of his cousins thought he ought to liven up his stay by meeting a Hmong girl who lived in a dorm at the University of Minnesota. 

As Marc reaches this part of his story, Gaosong looks over at us from her laptop and hops off her counter-height chair to pick up the tale. “‘Hey, do you want to meet this French guy?’” Gaosong remembers her sister asking her. “I was hungover and heartbroken. I had just broken up with a guy that morning.” She decided she did not want to meet a French guy and intentionally showed up five hours late. When she eventually arrived, they were introduced, and she recalls, “I was like: This guy is fresh off the boat. Yuck.” Gaosong avoided him by immersing herself in a pod of “the grandmas.” Marc did not give up. As we stand in the bakery, she mimics Marc walking by her, again and again, head swiveling, eyes wide. “Four times!” she laughs. Gaosong decided to give Marc another chance and took him to late-night Denny’s, where he redeemed himself. She remembers returning to her dorm and telling her roommates: “This is weird, you guys. I think this is the one.” And so it was. Two weeks later Marc used a bit of string on her nightstand to ask her to marry him. 

The Heus have now been married eight years and have been through a lot as a team. They were together when Marc confessed to his parents that he didn’t want to be a doctor; he wanted to make pastry. They were together when Marc made a batch of croissants with ingredients from Trader Joe’s and Gaosong told him they were better than any she’d ever had. They were together when Marc finally left his path to be a doctor and started training to be a pastry chef in France. They were together as Gaosong got her MA in arts administration from Columbia. They were together when Gaosong created the Marc Heu branding, secured the Marc Heu domain name, worked her connections at the Asian Economic Development Association to find a Marc Heu bakery space, invented and ran the remarkably polished Marc Heu social media presence, devised the Marc Heu rollout strategy, and turned herself into the Marc Heu chief operating officer. Everyone says you should try to marry your best friend, but not enough advise you to marry someone who can dominate finance and marketing. The happy couple advises me that they have a new addition to the family on the way—a second Minnesota Marc Heu location in 2021—though the location is still top-secret. They also have plans for national, and eventually international, expansion. 

“Did you know the number one customer for luxury baked goods in Paris is Chinese?” Marc Heu asks me, explaining that Asian flavors like yuzu, lychee, and passion fruit dominate modern French pastry for that reason. 

With the luxury pastry market currently underserved, globally, the Heus see a bright future. “Hopefully, we’ll be a worldwide brand one day,” Gaosong says. 

So how are these pastries that are aspiring to worldwide recognition? They are absolutely beautiful! Croissants of two colors, ordinary croissant dun and a red or green as glossy as a Prada patent leather purse, masking a center both buoyant and tender. (Anyone who drives across town for croissants absolutely has to try the ones from Marc Heu. For myself, I found the outer slick of crisping sugar distracting, but if I see a croissant with powdered sugar on it I tend to avoid it—different strokes for different folks.) 

The cakes, though, are pure and gorgeous sugar art. For instance, a cake called the Ispahan is made of a baby-blanket-pink meringue spiral, as precise as if it were drawn with a protractor, laid like a jewel box lid on a rose-and-lychee-scented pastry cream. This, in turn, is surrounded by a sentry wall of raspberries, and then the whole thing is scattered with bloodred rose petals and dotted with sugar gel to look like raindrops. It’s as pretty and fanciful as a Vogue cover photo of a hat in 1952, but stick in a fork and you find something fragrant as a fruit farm and light and tasty as it is fun. (This cake is a tribute to a version devised by French pastry god Pierre Hermé.) 

Marc Heu’s passion fruit tart is also not to be missed. It’s as yellow-orange as the fresh egg yolks he prides himself on using, tart and vibrant-tasting as fresh lemon curd, and decorated so prettily with a crescent moon of edible flowers and berries that it looks as precious and polished as a Dior perfume ad. Slices of his technically virtuosic Opera cake become more than glossy chocolate-glazed cake when their tops wobble in the breeze with petals of edible gold foil, like Japanese katsuobushi flakes dancing in the air from the heat of a dish. 

His version of the chocolate Saint Honoré looks like it was made as a presentation piece to win an award in a French pastry competition, with piped pastry cream in petals as numerous as a chrysanthemum’s resting on spheres of choux pastry dipped in dark chocolate. Is this abstract puff of beauty more like a Fabergé egg or more like a Calder mobile, created for nothing but art, fashion, and delight? No wonder the phones are ringing off the hook. 

Honestly, it’s difficult to believe that Marc Heu is really just at the beginning of his professional baking career, merely two years along in a calling that tends to only truly blossom after decades. I couldn’t be more excited to see what he does when he turns to work that’s more personal. For instance, after hearing about his fruit farming, I say something along the lines of: I bet you really understand pineapple. Marc leans forward excitedly and explains a fraction of the great many things he knows about pineapples, things that a French chef never could, like methods for assessing them, peeling them, treating them. He speaks so fast I can’t keep up. 

Might he use them in a future dessert? I ask. “I’m a little kid from the jungle; I can do anything,” Marc laughs. And Gaosong, who has already returned to her laptop to run the company, looks over and shoots him a smile as pretty and radiant and encouraging as all the pastry-cream flowers in the world.

383 University Ave. W., St. Paul, 651-666-1464, marcheuparis.com 

This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue.

Mpls.St.Paul Daily Edit

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