Valrhona opens a new school for professionals in Dubai
Dubai is home to a vibrant culinary scene, which now includes the latest L’École Valrhona. The school is scheduled to open in September 2024 and aims to bring together a community of chefs from all over the world to promote values such as excellence, ethics, sharing, and tolerance through sweet cuisine.
In this place of learning, each trainee is immersed in a world of creativity. Now more than ever, L’École Valrhona is helping to forge a strong link between French know-how and local cultures to dream up surprising and imaginative creations.
A school with an international outlook
Dubai is a global city that straddles Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. A commercial and cultural hub with a wide range of influences, it has many facets and a thriving creative landscape.
The new L’École Valrhona school is located in the heart of the city, close to all the hotels and restaurants. It is set to become a center of excellence for all the sweet cuisine professionals in the region.
Sweet cuisine heating up the scene
The decision to open a L’École Valrhona school in Dubai came in response to a growing demand for high-quality vocational training in the region. Brice Konan-Ferrand was entrusted with this project.
The United Arab Emirates has become one of the world’s top food destinations. Thanks to its history and unique geographical location, Dubai is a city of multicultural richness, which stimulates creativity. We are delighted and excited to bring our expertise in chocolate and patisserie to this vibrant community.
Brice Konan-Ferrand, EXECUTIVE PASTRY CHEF AT L'ÉCOLE VALRHONA DUBAÏ
Brice Konan-Ferrand is a chef specializing in pastries and chocolates. With over 12 years’ experience, he began his career as a chef in Europe and Africa in prestigious restaurants before joining L’École Valrhona Tokyo in Asia, where he worked for over 8 years. His international experience and personal background (he grew up in Ivory Coast) make Brice the ideal person to lead L’École Valrhona Dubai, where he can pass on his knowledge and expertise in ethical pastry-making and sharing.
His travels around the world were a source of inspiration for him, and make him the right person to take on a school at the service of a growing community. His desire to explore above and beyond the limits of pastry-making is a real asset: how he combines flavors using spices and how he uses his ingredients in novel ways to appeal to the 29 markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
At L’École Valrhona Dubai, the Chef will work alongside Fatima K Rahman, Assistant Pastry Chef, trained by award-winning chefs, who has worked with numerous MOF-awarded chefs. This creative duo draws on the diversity of their past experiences and cultures.
Committed and ethical
CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is one of Valrhona’s core values and an integral part of how L’École Valrhona Dubai operates. Particular attention has been paid to using responsible, state-of-the-art machinery that will help to save resources.
Choosing high-quality, seasonal raw ingredients and reducing waste are some examples of the practices passed on to both teams and students. L’École Valrhona Dubai has removed plastic entirely and replaced it with eco-responsible materials.
A rich and varied program
L’École Valrhona’s pastry chef instructors, guest pastry chefs and talented artisans offer a range of training courses for all levels to enable each student to progress throughout their career. Each two- to three-day course covers a basic theme, such as chocolate-making, pastry-making, gourmet cooking, ice cream, and French pastries.
There are also emblematic courses such as an introduction to chocolate-making, alternative desserts, and plant-based patisserie, including a Reasoned Gourmandise course taught by Frédéric Bau, Experimental Pastry Chef at Valrhona.
For me, L’École Valrhona Dubai is what a school should be. Passing on and sharing our knowledge, learning from each other, working towards the evolution of pastry-making with new techniques and new products also means committing to the new challenges of our profession: eco-responsibility, traceability, and the origin of products.
It’s an honor for me to be the patron of the Dubai L’École Valrhona school, which will raise the profile of French patisserie and chocolate-making in this beautiful part of the world.
Philippe Rigollot, Head Pastry Chef and Chocolatier, MOF and World Pastry Champion, and judge of the World Pastry Cup.
L’École Valrhona’s offer
In addition to training courses, L’École Valrhona offers:
- Technical consultancy for businesses: over two or three days, a pastry chef instructor from L’École Valrhona visits a customer’s kitchen and provides a tailor-made service that aims to help develop recipes, balancing ganache recipes, or solving equipment-related problems.
- Lectures: technological insight into significant advances in pastry- and chocolate-making practices, lasting around three hours.
- Workshops: eight to ten customers are brought together for a day in a kitchen around a topic defined beforehand, starting with a buffet to add to the theoretical information. At the end of the day, participants are given the tools and tricks of the trade to make the creations presented in the introduction themselves.
- Demonstrations: presentation of products from the Valrhona range by demonstrating their use to an audience.
