Trailer: History meets patisserie in ‘Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles’

“How do we give people a way to understand Versailles?”

From IFC Films and acclaimed filmmaker Laura Gabbert (the acclaimed Jonathan Gold portrait City of Gold) comes a new documentary detailing the now-unfathomable trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, featuring world-famous chef and seven-time New York Times best-selling cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi and the team of renowned pastry chefs he assembled for the Met’s “Feasts of Versailles” exhibition last year. Gabbert’s film captures the heights of human achievement and the frailty of decadence, themes with more resonance than ever. 

Via London, Versailles, and Instagram, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles follows famous chef Yotam Ottolenghi on his quest to bring the sumptuous art and decadence of Versailles to life in cake form at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He assembles a team-a veritable who’s who of the dessert world, including Dominique Ansel and Dinara Kasko-to help bring his vision to life. The pastry chefs create a true feast of Versailles complete with a cocktail whirlpool and posh jello shots, architectural mousse cakes, chocolate sculptures, swan pastries, and an edible garden. Ottolenghi acts as our guide throughout, disassembling pastries to give us the history of ingredients that we now take for granted, like sugar and chocolate. 

Featured in the doc are an extraordinary team including Dominique Ansel, a James Beard Award-winning French baker recently named World’s Best Pastry Chef; Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, London’s “sensory magicians (CNN),” and masters of food, design and theatrics; Dinara Kasko, a Ukraine-based chef takes inspiration from her architectural schooling, and approaches cakes and treats as if they were scale-models of buildings, using 3D-modeling technologies; Ghaya F. Oliveira, a Tunisian-born executive Pastry Chef at Restaurant Daniel who was awarded the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2017 and Janice Wong, two-time winner named Asia’s Best Pastry Chef, whose mastery focuses on pastry as “interactive, edible art.”

Director Laura Gabbert’s critically acclaimed films deploy full measures of humor and drama to unflinchingly put a human face on a range of social and cultural issues. NO Impact Man (Sundance 2009), which the LA Times called “terrifically entertaining, compelling and extremely funny,” played theatrically in over 30 cities. Her previous film Sunset Story (PBS) won prizes at Tribeca and LAFF. About it, the New York Times wrote, “Sunset Story may break your heart, but it will also make your day.” Gabbert directed the feature film City of Gold (Sundance 2015) about Pulitzer Prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold.

IFC Films will debut Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles in select theaters and On Demand / Digital September 25.