Order
From the Ritz Paris
to Greenwich Village
A pastry dream, two continents, and a whole lot of butter.
It started with a wedding cake. In 2001, after a year of intensive training at the Ritz Cooking School in Paris, Olivier's first major project was preparing all the desserts for his own wedding celebration — over 150 guests in Saint-Malo, Brittany.
That was the moment he knew. But life had other plans first: Olivier spent the next years working as an IT Architect in a Parisian consulting firm. The pastry dream never faded.
In 2009, Olivier and his wife Nathalie visited New York City and fell in love with it. They envisioned something that didn't quite exist yet: a French-style bakery with the welcoming atmosphere of a Village café, serving both French and American pastries made with all-natural products.
He trained with some of the best — Camille Lesecq, named best pastry chef in 2010, at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, and the legendary Pierre Hermé, celebrated for his macaron expertise.
In February 2010, Olivier left the corporate world for good. Eight private investors believed in the concept. A team of Parisian architects and designers helped bring the vision to life.
The name? Mille-Feuille — "a thousand layers" — references the famous Napoleon cake, and is a subtle nod to NYU's nearby Bobst library, with its many floors of knowledge. The windmill logo symbolizes flour, the essential ingredient for everything they bake.
Born near Nantes in northwestern France, Dimitri brings 18 years of baking and pastry experience across two continents. He joined Mille-Feuille in 2014 at age 24, working as Chef Pâtissier alongside Olivier.
Between 2018 and 2020, he sharpened his skills further as Sous-Chef Pâtissier under Nicolas Chevrieux at Maison Kayser USA. Then he came back home — to Mille-Feuille.
Today, Dimitri leads a team of 20 people, overseeing all daily pastry and bakery production. His specialties are mousse, layered cakes, and chocolate confections — truffles, figurines, the works. But ask him what he loves, and he'll also talk about the craft of a great bread and viennoiseries.
From a village in the Tizi Ouzou region of Kabylia, Algeria, Amer's American story began with a lucky envelope: he and his wife won the Green Card lottery. They landed in New York with everything to prove and nothing to lose, and Amer threw himself at it, stitching together small jobs across the city, sometimes 70 hours a week — the kind of schedule you only survive when you really, really want a future.
In 2013, Mille-Feuille posted a barista opening. Amer didn't apply — his wife did, on his behalf. She called us herself to vouch for him: “This man is good, he is serious, you have to hire him.” Hard to say no to that. So we hired him, and on day one Amer knew exactly zero about coffee. Not a cappuccino, not a grind setting, nothing. But standing next to Nathalie behind the bar, he learned. Quietly, stubbornly, beautifully.
Six months later he was managing our LaGuardia Place shop. When Broadway opened in 2014, he took the keys and ran the place as if it were his own. By the time Brooklyn opened, Amer was supervising all three boutiques and the entire front-of-house team across the company.
In 2016, Amer became a U.S. citizen, the official stamp on a journey that had really started years earlier, somewhere between a 5 a.m. shift and a perfectly pulled espresso.
Then COVID hit. Our doors closed for weeks, our teams scattered. When we reopened, Amer and Olivier rebuilt the sales crews from scratch — one hire, one shift, one morning rush at a time.
Today, regulars who have been coming in for over ten years walk in asking for him by name. He is, without much debate, one of the finest baristas in New York City. And the next chapter is already steaming: his two kids are starting to learn the rudiments of the espresso machine in our shops, perfecting the small art of an impeccable “bonjour, what can I get you?”
Some people are hired. Amer was vouched for by his wife — and he has been proving her right every single day since.