Stir Fried: How Marc Heu brought French patisserie to the Twin Cities

It’s summer, and the Minnesota sun is shining through Marc Heu Patisserie Paris’ expansive windows in St. Paul, making the glossy croissants and delicate hand-piped tarts, nestled in a minimalist white display—with sleek, clean lines inspired by Parisian couture houses—sparkle like jewels.

“I wanna offer people an experience, an escape, to treat themselves,” says namesake Hmong French pastry chef Marc Heu.

Since opening the first Marc Heu Patisserie in 2019, Heu has established himself as one of the finest French pastry makers in the Twin Cities. A graduate of the Lenôtre Culinary Arts School in Paris, his prestigious resume includes internships at Stohrer (the oldest patisserie in France), three-Michelin-starred Le Pré Catalan restaurant in Paris, and Dominique Ansel’s namesake bakery in New York. Heu and his wife and COO Gaosong recently opened their third location in the Twin Cities, and Heu was nominated for a James Beard award in 2025.

From a pistachio ring cake with piped buttercream filling, to their signature passionfruit raspberry tart, each pastry is a unique work of art. While sometimes they do limited runs of trendier items, like a baked croissant version of the state fair corn dog, Heu eschews silicone molds and is adamant about sticking to classic French patisserie; it took years to overcome his very French resistance to serving sandwiches and coffee because “in France, you don’t have that in a patisserie.”

“I don’t want to do fusion. I may not be white French, I’m Hmong. But I was born and raised in France. I grew up with both cultures—Hmong and French. But what I want to do is to represent the French gastronomy. I’m not rejecting my home culture,” says Heu.

Despite initial dubiousness, his favorite item to make is the belle croissant (croissants are technically a boulangerie item). The intricate chemistry involved in a perfect belle croissant—something that he says people often take for granted as simple bread—appeals to his scientific nature. “You can find the belle croissant at the gas station, Aldi, Cub Foods, anywhere you go. It’s something people are familiar with…I think that when you see it everywhere, you think it’s easy to make, but actually it’s really technical,” says Heu. “It’s just so many things that come into place when you make a croissant. The temperature, the hydrometry, the cooking time. It’s actually harder to make than a pastry with piping.”

The breathtaking work of creating something elegant, purely meant to be enjoyed—beauty as defined by writer Annie Dillard as “a grace wholly gratuitous”—is a throughline running through the 38-year-old’s life. It’s a theme made more poignant for the child of Hmong refugees who grew up farming in the tropics of French Guiana and foresook the safety of a medical career to pursue pastry.

French Guiana

The story of Heu’s family is a familiar one in the Twin Cities, home to more than 90,000 of the 100,000 Hmong refugees displaced from Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War in 1975. His parents were Hmong farmers from around Luang Prabang, Laos, who fled to a refugee camp in Thailand. Despite having little formal education, Heu’s father was a self-taught man who produced several children with doctorates. “Even after a long day of farming under the sun, he would come home, and he would always be reading,” Heu says about his father.

Having learned a little French from the missionaries, they immigrated to France, where Heu—the youngest of six—was born. Facing discrimination and a lack of job opportunities, the family moved to the sparsely populated tropics of French Guiana when Heu was 3, where the French government was allotting land for farming.

When Heu talks about his childhood, the vivid recollections of suddenly going from a cool brick house outside of Lyon to the rural tropics are magnified by a toddler’s shock and confusion. Lean and tattooed, Heu looks more like an artist or rock star with his perfectly trimmed beard and white T-shirt as he muses to me about his first memory of an Air France birthday cake on the flight to Guiana. “I still remember that the steward came with a little treat, a little French Air France plane, and yeah, I was standing on the seat, and I even have the sense of the plastic of the bag…I don't know if it's selective memory or just trauma memories,” he chuckles.

Farming can suck

It was a rough transition. For the first few years, they lived in an abandoned cow barn with no electricity or running water. “I'm not trying to portray myself as that poor little jungle boy, but the truth is we didn't have much,” Heu says.

Young Heu slept in a cow trough, then a military cot. They grew and sold vegetables, herbs, and tropical fruit. All the children labored on the farm before and after school, leaving little time for extracurricular pleasures like playing soccer. Heu hated it. “When you looked around you, I mean it was just like trees, animal noises, insects, and nothing else,” Heu says. “I just did not understand how we ended up there.”

Since his older siblings attended middle school in the city an hour away, Heu was left to fend for himself as one of the only Hmong kids in elementary school. The bullying helped him grow a tough skin and learn how to make friends with people from all walks of life. “You know, everybody brings something different, and that helped me be more open to the world, to people, I think, to be surrounded by different cultures. It was tough. But slowly they learn not to be scared of you, to accept you,” Heu says.

After long days on the farm, Heu’s family always had time for dessert. The family converted to Catholicism when they moved to France, and among the church donations were French recipe books, as well as regular supplies of eggs, milks and flour, from which his sisters learned to make a dry sponge cake. The process fascinated Heu, who fought to have the honors of whipping egg whites into snowy peaks with their small electric beater. Baking tied him to a French idyll, which Heu felt he’d lost in the jungle.

“They would let me whip the egg white and I just got so fascinated. You start with a clear translucent liquid, and by whipping it, it transforms into something foamy,” Heu says. “I would call it snow, because I still had memories of snow, you know. But obviously in French Guiana it doesn't snow. So it was my way of bringing or making snow, I guess.”

In their family, dessert was also a way to prove that life was about more than just surviving—that time and effort can be put into a sweet treat, just because it’s fun, and it feels good. Heu’s parents would buy “charlotte,” or ladyfingers, because they were cheap, soak the dry cookies in water (“not even cream,” he says) and make a layer cake with cream and the fruit they grew, which they kept in the fridge. “So right after a long day of farming, you know when you come home, you have a very cold dessert,” Heu says.