At L'Abattoir, pastry chef Oliver Bernardino is serious about the business of desserts
From mille feuille to rice pudding, the culinary artist and Sauder School grad crafts foods to make people happy
Oliver Bernardino. Photo by Eric Milic
SOME FOOD EXPERIENCES are so out of this world, they stay with you forever. For Oliver Bernardino, one such memory goes back over a decade, to a dinner at L’Abattoir. He was studying at UBC Sauder School of Business at the time, nearing the end of his bachelor’s of commerce degree, baking as a hobby on the side and poring over food blogs when he wasn’t cramming for exams.
“I remember eating dinner at the restaurant for the very first time in 2012 and the dessert I had that night: coffee custard with chocolate crumb and whipped milk,” Bernardino tells Stir. “I was blown away from the first bite. There were so many different textures and temperatures on the plate—perfectly set coffee-forward custard, two different types of chocolate ice cream, crispy chocolate crumbles, an ethereal mound of whipped milk… It was like taking a bite out of a cloud.
“I had never experienced eating anything like that before, and it totally opened my mind to what a dessert could be,” he says. “I still reference that dessert [by former L’Abattoir pastry chef Hilary Prince] as the best dessert I’d ever had. Since then, my family and I would come back to L’Abattoir to celebrate everything over the years: birthdays, anniversaries, graduation. It was the primary special-occasion restaurant, majorly driven by my admiration with the dessert program.”
That initial visit planted the seed for what would become Bernardino’s professional calling. He still went on to graduate from Sauder—with honours, on the Dean’s list, specializing in marketing—and gained experience in viennoiserie at Beaucoup Bakery. Then in 2016 he got the gumption to make his next move.
“I wanted to learn how to make exceptional desserts,” he says. “Looking at Vancouver, there was really only one option in my mind for me, and that was L’Abattoir, and to work for Hilary. In the fall, I knocked on the door of the restaurant and applied for a position. I was so nervous. Even though I had a few years of work experience, none of it was in a restaurant setting, so I truly felt like I had nothing to offer, just my time, immense desire to learn, and pretty solid work ethic. Thankfully Hilary was hiring, and I started two weeks later.”
Prince has gone on to move to the Sunshine Coast, where she’s pastry chef at a restaurant called Brassica. Bernardino was promoted to the role of L’Abattoir’s pastry chef. The Gastown restaurant helmed by executive chef Lee Cooper earned a Michelin Recommendation in its inaugural Vancouver guide and has racked up numerous other prestigious nods, including spots on Canada’s Best 100 Restaurants list. There, Bernardino is making a name for himself as a leading talent in the city’s culinary scene, whether he’s crafting a 10-layer flourless chocolate cake with a table-side pour of Armagnac crème anglaise; blackberry-frangipane tart with fig-leaf ice cream; courgette-and-cassis cake studded with rehydrated currants; or 15-layer honey cake with Meyer-lemon curd, toasted honey brioche, and Earl Grey ice cream. Or maybe it’s gingerbread houses so detailed that Thomas Keller once invited him to dine at the French Laundry after seeing Bernardino’s re-creation of his California restaurant.
Oliver Bernardino. Photo by Eric Milic
The Richmond-born and -raised culinary artist credits his parents for instilling in him an appreciation for food from an early age. The family made a point of cooking and eating together, and instead of ski weekends or camping trips, they would go to food shows at B.C. Place and visit Granville Island regularly.
“My dad was an exceptional home cook and drew from so many different cultures when preparing our meals,” Bernardino says. “In terms of desserts, my mom would often bring home the best pastries available at the time: apple crostatas from Leslie Stowe; blueberry-white-chocolate focaccia from Terra Breads. Thomas Haas’s crispy raspberry cake was, and continues to be, a mainstay celebratory dessert for our family. We would also go to really nice restaurants to celebrate special occasions, whether it be Feenie’s for my 16th birthday or Provence brunch to celebrate an anniversary. It sounds like an extravagant lifestyle growing up, but I can assure it really wasn’t. My parents just prioritized those types of food experiences for our family.”
Although Bernardino has always been enthralled by the idea of being a chef, he also wanted to have a college experience. Getting a university degree seemed like a sound idea; he figured he could always fall back on his education if a career in baking didn’t pan out. Halfway through university, however, he came to an important realization: “I wasn’t into it at all,” Bernardino says.
“Academically, I barely got through that first year,” he explains. “I just didn’t care about financial accounting or microeconomics. Instead of taking notes in class, I would be reading food blogs about new restaurants and underground supper clubs that were popping up around Vancouver. I would bake apple tarts and coffee cake at home and show up to study sessions with my friends with the best snacks but be scrambling the night before every midterm.
“At the end of my second year, as I was registering for summer school to make up for my failed courses, I genuinely thought it was time to just go to culinary school so I could do the thing that I actually liked doing,” he says. “This was a major wake up call.”
You’d think this would be the part of the story where he abandoned his studies. Nope. He was determined to see through what he started and “basically lived in the library for the next two years”. His experience at Sauder imparted invaluable lessons. “It taught me that when you go after something you want and take ownership of the factors you can directly control, truly anything is possible,” he says.
Besides being a dessert lover himself, Bernardino appreciates the creativity involved in pastry. However, he’s quick to point out the art form involves many far less dramatic aspects.
“I love that I’m able to make desserts that I’ve been thinking about since I was a kid,” Bernardino says. “But in order to do this type of work for a living, you have to enjoy mundane repetition… While cleaning. So much of cooking and baking professionally is doing the same task every single day, over and over again. You have to find inspiration in that repetition—or at least have the drive to constantly improve the way you carry out those tasks, day after day.
“I’m a pastry cook, and at the end of the day, I’m part of a team that makes food with the intention to make people happy,” he says. “That being said, particularly with pastry, and working in a restaurant setting where plated desserts are a huge part of what we do, there is some level of artistry that’s required to make food look attractive. We eat with our eyes, and I try to find that sweet spot with plating desserts so that they are visually appealing through clean, sharp lines and perfect proportions, where it’s almost too pretty to eat, while conceptualizing desserts that look so undeniably mouthwatering, where, as a diner, you’re literally drooling and can’t wait to take the first bite.”
Desserts at L’Abattoir change up frequently, whether for Cooper’s ever-changing multicourse tasting menu or the a la carte dinner menu. With the chefs focused on culinary creativity, consistency, and refined techniques (along with industry vet Chad Clark having joined the team as director of operations and), the team is all about creating a dining experience that lingers in diners’ minds long after it’s over—the kind that inspired Bernardino to pursue his passion.
L’Abattoir is participating in Vancouver Cocktail Week 2023, with several events on the calendar. One is the Esquimalt Vermouth & Apéritifs dinner on March 9. Cooper will be collaborating with Vancouver Island mead-maker Quinn Palmer for a cocktail-paired multicourse meal. Bernardino is on dessert: he’ll offer a new take on a lemon tart, paired with Esquimalt Vino Miele Limoncello.
Here, Bernardino shares his creative process behind a few L’Abattoir desserts.
Mille-feuille with salted honey, buckwheat, bourbon. Photo by Oliver Bernardino
Mille-feuille with salted honey, buckwheat, bourbon
“Mille-feuille is such a special dessert,” Bernardino says. “I have fond memories of trying the best versions in Paris with my former boss and colleagues from Beaucoup Bakery, so anytime I have one now, it brings me right back to those incredible memories with the people who shaped the way I taste and experience desserts.
“Though we often change up the flavour profile of the mille-feuille to reflect the season, this iteration is one of my favorites. It’s an incredibly labour-intensive dessert to prepare—the puff pastry alone takes three days to execute, laminated by hand—but worth it for the difference in textures, depth of honey flavour, and overall balance.
“Plating starts off with buckwheat chiffon cake soaked in bourbon honey syrup, layered with salted honey buttercream—the cake component is incredibly moist and adds a texture not typically associated with mille-feuille, yet harkens to the comparable contrast found in old-school diplomat cake. Caramelized honey crèmeux is then layered with ribbons of whipped-mascarpone mousse and crunchy toasted-buckwheat brittle. Alternating shards of caramelized puff pastry dusted with icing sugar and buckwheat-cookie tuile are shingled on top. To finish, there is a scoop of vanilla-bean ice cream drizzled with bourbon caramel sauce and studded with big flakes of Maldon sea salt.”
Rice pudding with lime, mango, passion fruit. Photo by Oliver Bernardino
Rice pudding with lime, mango, passion fruit
“I feel like rice pudding gets a bad rap,” Bernardino says. “I’m going to assume most diners who don’t have a nostalgic affection towards rice pudding must associate it with an unappealing preparation from their childhood. And maybe my assumptions are out of touch, since rice pudding is now consistently featured on some of the best menus in Vancouver—like St. Lawrence. Anyhow, every pastry chef that I admire and know loves rice pudding, so I enjoy having it on the menu. This particular iteration—there have been others prior, notably paired with salted caramel and horchata—initially started out as a lemon mousse. It was September, we were on the tail end of summer’s abundance of fruit, and guests were looking for something a bit more bright and citrusy for dessert going into the fall and winter months. Lemon mousse, while delicious, didn’t seem satisfying enough, so we added rice pudding to give the dessert more body, switched the citrus to feature lime, and went full tilt with complementary tropical flavour profiles.
“The dessert starts with a thin, cylindrical buckwheat cookie tuile wrapped around a layer of chiffon cake. The cake serves two purposes: it adds texture to the dish and acts as the base that prevents subsequent layers from seeping through the bottom. This is followed by a layer of rice pudding, lightened with pandan infused crème anglaise—the pandan is super mild, especially when not accompanied with the usual coconut, and meant to fortify the natural flavour of the rice. Fresh chopped mango is mixed with mango pureé—the glazy sheen totally reminds me of mango-topped shaved-ice desserts—and lime juice to bring out the tropical flavour of the fruit. A small quenelle of passion-fruit ice cream is hidden beneath a velvety mound of lime mousse, a divet of mango passion fruit coulis, and freshly grated lime zest, a nod to the tarte au citron from Jacques Genin.
“It’s a lot of different textures and temperatures all hidden inside, and you have to crack the tuile open to reveal all the components. The initial drag of the spoon into the pool of golden tropical coulis through the off-white lime mousse is so satisfying and meant to evoke the same joy—and striking colour combo—of breaking into a perfectly poached egg. How the dessert is presented, including the glass bowl in which it is served, is a nod to chef Lee’s chickpea-and-crab toast appetizer that was featured on the menu during the early stages of the restaurant.”
Millionaires shortbread
“I really can’t take credit for that, as it was all Lee’s idea,” Bernardino says. “He was conceptualizing the progression of the chef’s tasting menu and thinking of ways we could end the meal with mignardise. Our take consists of three components: a base of salted shortbread cookie crumbs and feuilletine, bound butter, a layer of salted caramel, and a custom-made dark chocolate plaque printed with the restaurant’s iconic tile design. It’s fun—guests get a kick out of it when they see it for the first time.”
Oliver Bernardino, “Christmas at The French Laundry” for Hyatt Vancouver’s annual Gingerbread Lane. Photo by Oliver Bernardino.
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