This week we're chatting with pastry chef Rebecca Masson. Besides consulting with multiple restaurants, managing her online pastry shop, and planning out her future retail store, somehow she finds the time to audition for reality television shows. Read along as we check out life on the sweet side with Houston's Sugar Hooker.
EOW: You have quite a few chef friends and pastry chef friends, does competition ever get in the way of your friendships?
RM: I'd like to say no, but sometimes people in the community create this beef, and you buy into it. Maybe because I wasn't a pastry chef for very long in New York, so I didn't see it as much there, but I see it here. I'd like to think that we're all one big family, I love and respect everyone that I know, and even the people that I don't know, I respect what they do 'cause it's a hard job. You don't have time for family and friends, and the holidays suck, but you should be able to respect each other, and I think sometimes that gets a little lost.
EOW: Have you ever thought about trying out for a reality show?
RM: I did try out for Just Desserts. I went up to Dallas, went through the interview, sent my video interview in, but I didn't make it. I'm actually very happy I didn't make it. I would have been like that one girl who said, "It's time for me to go home." It's just entirely too much drama. I know everyone thinks that pastry chefs are too full of drama, and for the most part we are, we're stubborn, we're anal, we want things done a certain way because that's the way it has to be done. But, I think the shows exaggerate how drama-filled the pastry kitchen is, we're not that bad. But we're a different breed, and we'll always be a different breed.
EOW: You said you're a perfectionist about pastries, does that carry on to the rest of your life?
RM: No, my house is always a wreck, but my kitchen will always be exactly how I want it to be. I should always know exactly where things are all the time. My house is never like that. I always lose my keys, I'm always losing something, I can never find my phone, that kind of thing. But I am stubborn across the board, whether it's in the kitchen or in real life, I am pretty stubborn.
EOW: Finally, how did you get the nickname "Sugar Hooker"?
RM: When I was at Catalan, chef Chris Shepard gave me that nickname and it stuck. His wife Rocio doesn't like that, so she calls me the Sugar Fairy and that's my Twitter name.
