Before Lucie Franc de Ferriere opened a bakery in New York, she grew up watching her mother bake for strangers. At her family's vineyard bed and breakfast in southern France, every cake was an invitation, every table a place where people who had never met could feel at home together. That spirit of generosity still shapes everything she makes, from the cakes themselves to the community they've created around them.
In this week's SIDIA Stories, she reflects on the world she's built, one shaped as much by instinct as intention. We talk about redefining French pâtisserie on her own terms, creating beauty that feels generous rather than precious, and the people, places, and memories that continue to find their way into her work.
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Your mother baked for guests at your family’s vineyard B&B, and now you bake for thousands of people in New York. What do you think she was really teaching you in that kitchen, and do you feel her in the work you do today?
" I think my experience was a little different from the classic image of a mother baking the same recipes over and over just for her family. My mother was baking for strangers too, guests at our B&B, and she wanted every single one of them to feel welcome in our home through her food. That was her gift: taking people who had nothing in common and bringing them together at one table through what she made. That’s what she taught me without ever saying it directly. At the bakery and through my custom orders, I carry that with me every day, the idea that a cake isn’t just a recipe you repeat, it’s something you adapt to the person in front of you. Getting to know a customer, understanding what they need, and making them feel at home through what I bake for them."
There is something so poetic about you using the flowers whose stems are too short for a traditional florist to use. It feels like a metaphor for your own journey - finding beauty in what others might overlook. Do you see your cakes as a way of giving a second life to things that don’t fit the standard mold?
"In a way, yes, but it starts from a very practical, ethical place. If something is going to be wasted, I would rather find a use for it. The flowers with stems too short for a florist, the overripe fruits from the garden that would otherwise be thrown out turned into jams and fillings. I never saw the point in waiting for the perfect ingredient when the imperfect one has just as much to offer, if not more. Though I think it goes deeper than that. I grew up in France, where baking, patisserie, is synonymous with precision and perfection."
"Every layer tucked in neatly, not a drop of cream out of place. But that was never the baking I grew up with at home. My mother’s cakes had cream overflowing, jam oozing out of the sides, and to me that was perfection. It felt more approachable, more inviting, more delicious. That is the philosophy I carried into my own baking, don’t strive for perfection, strive for something more whimsical, more alive. Not everything needs to fit a mold."
In France, the goûter is a sacred afternoon ritual. In the chaos of the East Village, how do you protect that sense of ‘sacred time’ for yourself? Is the bakery your way of inviting New York to finally slow down?
"I love the East Village for that. The community there feels like a true village. I’m not sure if it’s because the subway barely reaches it, or because so many of the people living there have been there for forty years or more, but I get to see the same faces every single day. They come in for their cookie or their slice of cake, but mostly for a good chat. And because we focus on cakes, we naturally attract that 4pm crowd, the people who need a little sweet pick-me-up in the middle of the afternoon, a proper goûter break. I love that we get to be that for them, that little pause in the middle of the day. Though occasionally you get the person who needs their goûter moment at 10am on a random Tuesday, and I love that too. I like to think it made their day a little more special."
"I never saw the point in waiting for the perfect ingredient when the imperfect one has just as much to offer, if not more."
You’ve admitted that you are terrible at applying buttercream neatly and that you prefer the messiness, the sense of wildness. In a world of highly-filtered, ‘perfect’ social media desserts, why do you think people are so hungry for something that looks impulsive and untamed?
" Because it feels more personal. There is a sense of “homemade” and accessibility to my cakes. A feeling of “I can make it too”, and I hope people getto do their own cake now with my book."
You lost your job, couldn’t get home to France, and built something extraordinary out of that rupture. Looking back, do you think you had to lose that life in order to find this one?
"Home is something you get to create, to make entirely your own. It’s built from fragments, childhood memories, all the lives you’ve lived along the way, the person you once were and the person you’re still becoming. Every detail in the bakery is a piece of that. The yellow on the storefront is inspired by the houses in Menton where my grandparents lived. The gingham curtains came from the kitchen of my best friend’s mother growing up. And the shelves at the front of the shop, those were always there with a specific intention: that one day they would carry my cookbook. They always felt like a bridge between the past and the Future."
Your whole life is built around the way scent carries memory - butter, lavender, fresh flowers, a kitchen in Bordeaux. Which SIDIA fragrance speaks to that same part of you?
"It’s hard to pick just one, but I keep coming back to Saucy. I close my eyes and I’m immediately back in my mother’s vegetable garden, too many tomatoes, warm from the sun, almost overripe. That specific moment, that specific smell. It’s one of the best scents in the world to me."
Lucie's Ritual:
