Meet The Asia's Best Pastry Chef - Maira Yeo

With her innovative use of unorthodox ingredients and heritage flavours, Cloudstreet's Maira Yeo has discovered sweet success. Shamilee Vellu chats with Asia's Best Pastry Chef.

- Shamilee Vellu

If you think coriander and capers shouldn't be anywhere near a dessert, think again. Maira Yeo, Asia's Best Pastry Chef 2022 (part of the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants awards programme), is known for her innovative desserts that incorporate such non-traditional ingredients, along with others.

Take the 30-year-old's signature Celtuce, Yuzu, Green Chilli, And Yoghurt at Sri Lankan-Australian restaurant Cloudstreet, where she's worked for 1.5 years. She turns the humble celtuce (known locally as wosun) - a thick, knobby stem lettuce topped with a frowsy head of crisp leaves into a refreshing sorbet studded with confit celtuce cubes that she garnishes with green chilli and coriander cress cream before dressing it tableside with lettuce juice and drops of vanilla oil she made herself. The result is a disc of jade green painted with dark green slashes of pure edible art.

Nothing's wrong with things that are ugly-delicious, says Yeo. Our goal at Cloudstreet is to create things that look good, as well as taste good.

Chef Yeo adds the final touches to her celtuce sorbet

Culinary Beginnings

Yeo was born to chase flavour. At age 6, she began helping her Cantonese-Teochew family run a mixed-rice hawker stall and soon became her mother's sous chef, preparing dough and meat for elaborate Chinese New Year feasts. Then came more professional stints. Yeo spent four years at Meta in New York City and then Aska in Brooklyn, and Patrice Pâtissier in Montreal before her current role at Cloudstreet under Rishi Naleendra. Each of these stops taught her valuable culinary lessons.