Laurent Merdy - Pastry chef of The Blue Duck Tavern

A chef with very particular tastes

Laurent Merdy limps into the bar of the Blue Duck Tavern and eases himself slowly into one of the sublimely comfortable armchairs that line the soaring floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking 24th Street. He has a bad back, which periodically gives out. This is not a pleasant affliction for anyone. But Merdy is the pastry chef of the restaurant in the Park Hyatt Hotel and works all day on his feet.

Still, he’s philosophical about the problem and refuses to let it get in his way. If he must sit down, he uses the time to write down his latest inspiration for a new dessert. With the rapidly cooling fall season upon us, he’s thinking of pumpkin pie ice cream and sorbets that reflect the desire for comfort that colder weather inspires, in flavors like hazelnut, cranberry and caramel.

His macaroons, plump little pillows in decorator pastels like rose, spearmint and pale sunshine, are arranged temptingly alongside his elegant pastries in the minimalist tea tasting room at the restaurant’s entrance from the hotel.

Merdy has always made pâtisserie — “to amuse myself,” he says. Born in the Val-de-Marne in northern France into a large restaurant family, he’s one of three brothers who have gone into the business. He has five sisters as well.

For as long as he can remember, Merdy has relished sweet things. “Always since I was small I just loved chocolate. I used to steal my brothers’ and sisters’.” He pauses and grimaces. “Now I’m not that crazy about chocolate anymore.”

But his passion for it led him, he says, “direct to pastry.”

In 1987, Merdy earned from a school near Paris the official certificate in pastry, obligatory for anyone in France aiming to become a pâtissier. For the next three years, he honed his skills at several high-end restaurants that read like a travel guide of top French food destinations, including Le Bacchus Gourmand in Provence and Fouquet’s in Paris.

But he had set his sights on the United States. “When I was young in France, we dreamed about America. Today,” he hesitates and shrugs, “I don’t know. But at that time ... .”

Merdy headed straight for New York, read the classified ads and found spots at Le Périgord and Le Chantilly. He also spent three years at the St. Regis Hotel. But the problem was always his visa. “I was looking everywhere for a green card. They want to hire you but not to sponsor you.”

Eventually, he settled at Waters’ Edge, a fine-dining restaurant on Long Island. It took him seven years there to get his green card. But he also met his wife, to whom he has now been married eight or nine years. (He shoots his eyebrows up. She won’t be too impressed by his imprecision, he says.) She is Japanese, “and she was working with one of my best friends and also doing pastry.”

The French are not renowned for an enthusiastic interest in cuisines not directly linked to the old French empire. So does he like the food of Japan — never a French acquisition? “Not much,” says Merdy. “I’m not too crazy about it. I’m very picky on food.” Which explains, he says, why he is not what he calls a “kitchen” chef, someone who cooks the appetizers and entrees. “There are too many things I [don’t like]. But pastry is not a problem.”

Pastry brought him to Washington, where the Willard Hotel hired him as a pastry chef. “It’s an amazing place. You can do two, three thousand desserts a day, sometimes working non-stop. You keep doing a lot of new things.” But he found it a disorganized enterprise and moved to the Park Hyatt after a recent renovation there.

One day Merdy would like to open a business of his own, and it wouldn’t offer only pastry. He would rely on his wife to broaden the menu to other courses — “She’s good for that,” he says.

But he is not sure how he would focus his side of the enterprise. “To do a business now, the way in America it works, you need a concept. If you have a concept, you can go pretty far. It’s not like in Europe. There, you open a pastry shop. If it’s good, people come. The tradition in France is: They go home, and the first thing they do is buy a baguette, buy a dessert. We grow up like this. Here, it doesn’t work like that. Here it’s, OK, I’m going over there [to that new spot] — just to meet people ... or because a place is popular ... .”

Merdy still has the passion for America that brought him here. He spends his holidays not in France but in Florida and Hawaii and California. But he says he wants to go to Japan — “next year, I hope. They are so different people.” With his curiosity, the cultural differences could send this pastry chef home with a whole new interpretation of the American sheet cake.

The Blue Duck Tavern (202-419-6755; http://www.blueducktavern.com) is located in the Park Hyatt Hotel at 24th and M streets NW. Desserts cost $7 to $8.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers. Photo Bill Petros/The Current.