FLORIDA
The Many Layers of Feliz Green, Palm Beach County’s Rising Pastry Star
By Eric Barton | Aug. 26, 2025
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
The croissant you order at Lingonberry Lingonberry Cafe in Palm Beach Gardens looks familiar, until you pull it apart and discover a tang of sourdough winding through the buttery layers. It’s a brilliant mashup—unexpected, balanced, and proof of the skill behind it. That’s Feliz Green’s way: building on tradition, then bending it toward something distinctly her own.
Before she ran two sourdough-obsessed cafés in Palm Beach Gardens, Green was baking wedding cakes in a rented apartment in the Philippines. She cooked her way across 35 countries aboard luxury ships, learning how to make risotto for Italians and bread for guests obsessed with crumb and structure. Now at Lingonberry, she’s the chef behind a menu where everything is made from scratch—and the croissants, like Green herself, have more layers than they let on.
Feliz Green
Green’s story begins in Makati, where those flower-topped wedding cakes made her a viral sensation. Couples whispered about them as she finished designs at receptions, and the photos later felt surreal. “Seeing professional photos of the couple slicing the cake almost feels unreal,” she says. That was the moment she realized baking wasn’t just a gig; it was a career.
Her path since then has been relentless: months at sea baking bread that had to satisfy purists, nights sweating through risotto orders in kitchens abroad. From each stop, she carried home the same lesson—that kitchens only work when you make them feel like home.
Wild mushroom black garlic Parmesan sourdough
Home also meant flavor. For Green, it’s ube: the purple yam her father loved so much he requested it every year in chiffon cakes and ice cream speckled with macapuno. “As a Filipino and the child of an ube lover, there’s no doubt that I will represent this ingredient in the best way I can,” she says. Today, she folds it into cookies, pies, croissants, even sourdough. She experiments, too, with soy sauce in savory pastries like Roast Pork Buns and Chicken Adobo Pandesal, a nod to the flavors of her childhood.
Spinach quiche
Green’s breads all begin with the same starter
In America, where only about one in 10 chefs have Asian heritage—and fewer still Asian women leading pastry programs—Green feels that responsibility each time she steps into a kitchen. “Leaving a mark as an Asian woman and a chef isn’t easy, it’s a responsibility,” she says. She carries it if it means more space for others like her.
Green at her Palm Beach Gardens bakery
Lingonberry has given her the platform to lead and to experiment. She mentors younger bakers while still finding time for her own quiet projects—often a stew or pasta at home after her shift, because even on her longest days, cooking still feels like comfort.
Those sourdough croissants, layered with tradition and invention, say what words can’t: Feliz Green has built a life—and a career—entirely from scratch.
