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CHRISTIAN THOLONIAT
French patissier
Standing in a tiny shop in Paris' 10th arrondissement, one of the city's seedier neighborhoods, Christian Tholoniat is describing the naked woman he made in his laboratory. Tholoniat is a patissier, and "laboratory" is what patissiers call the place where they work. Tholoniat's lab is out back, across a cobbled courtyard. The naked woman was life-size and made of chocolate. She reclined on a bed of 600 sugared roses as the centerpiece for a party thrown by the Baroness de Rothschild. Tholoniat's father, who made the roses, agreed on a price with the Baroness over drinks at the café on the corner. "My father was an artist," says Tholoniat, "a man who was passionate about his work. He never let a day go by without sculpting a bit of sugar."
Tholoniat was born in St. Etienne, where his father was hiding out after escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp. His grandfather was a charcutier, his wife Marise is a patissier's daughter and both their children are in the food business. "It's a family tradition," he says with a smile. He's a smallish man with close-cropped white hair, twinkling eyes and a thick Parisian accent. Things have changed since he first came to work in his father's shop in the mid-1960s. "Back then we used to coat our chocolates one by one with a fork," he remembers. "We used to spend whole nights doing it in the Christmas season." Tholoniat's personal contribution to food artistry was made possible by the deep freeze. Once a week, he shuts himself away in his lab to knock out a batch of the dessert that has made him famous among Parisian gourmets. His semifreddo is a delicately chilled concoction of whipped cream and nougat sandwiched between layers of light sponge cake, its surface caramelized Spanish-style with a red-hot iron. Tholoniat can supply this delicacy for an intimate dinner for two people or a 25-person banquet. If you ask nicely, he might even come up with a naked woman.
—NICHOLAS LE QUESNE