CHEF PROFILES | FORT LAUDERDALE

Pastry Chef Julie Franceschini Is Making the Case for Slowing Down

By Eric Barton | April 10, 2026

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.

Thinking back now to her childhood on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, Julie Franceschini remembers a full table, something baking, conversation that kept going, and a family that didn’t treat a meal like one more obligation to race through before whatever came next. “Life moved at a slower pace, and people really took the time to enjoy it,” she said.

It’s an idea that’s defined Franceschini, a pastry chef who builds desserts to create a pause in our day. At a moment when pastry programs are finally getting treated like a serious part of the dining experience, she’s become one of the people proving why. Franceschini, now executive pastry chef at Pier Sixty-Six in Fort Lauderdale, oversees pastry across a resort with 12 dining concepts, including the polished Riviera-minded Calusso, the brighter, more social Sotogrande, and the daily rhythm of Elate Market Café. Every day, the job starts with croissants and ends with the question every good pastry chef has to answer: what will get people to come back tomorrow?

Franceschini

For Franceschini, that answer started at home. “Growing up in Corsica, food was really at the center of everything,” she said. She spent time in the kitchen with her grandmother, watching her cook in that old family way where nobody gives a lecture and somehow you still learn everything. Meals were made from scratch, guided by season and instinct. “There was a lot of care in even the simplest dishes,” she said. “Meals were never rushed.”

It was an easy time. “Honestly, there wasn’t anything that felt particularly difficult at the time,” she said. “It was a very simple and grounded childhood.” That might not sound like the usual origin story for a chef who’s worked at the highest levels of French pastry, but maybe that’s the point. Her work now still seems to come from someone who doesn’t believe everything has to be overworked to matter.

Her mother saw where this was headed before anyone else did. “My mother definitely encouraged me, as she saw that I was naturally drawn to the kitchen,” Franceschini said. What drew her especially was pastry, that strange corner of the kitchen where obsession gets rewarded. “There’s something very satisfying about pastry with the balance between precision and creativity.”

Dark chocolate cremaux

She studied in Nice, then moved through internships along the Côte d’Azur and in Paris, absorbing the discipline that French pastry still demands from anyone foolish enough to think it’s just about making beautiful things. A key step, she said, was apprenticing with the first Michelin-starred chef from Corsica, then refining her craft at L’Ambroisie in Paris, the city’s oldest three-Michelin-starred restaurant. She later led pastry at L’Oggi in Corsica before making the move that changed her trajectory. “Moving abroad was definitely a turning point,” she said. “Leaving Corsica and everything familiar behind is not easy, but it’s something that changes you very quickly.”

Trois petites fleurs

Rhubarb pavlova

By 2019, she was executive pastry chef at Café Boulud in West Palm Beach and competing on Food Network’s Best Baker in America, a public test of the precision she’d spent years building. Now at Pier Sixty-Six, which reopened in January 2025 after a billion-dollar remodel, she’s shaping pastry for a resort that’s trying to matter as much for dining as for the marina outside.

At Elate, she’s focused on “perfecting the croissants, viennoiserie, and pastries that people come back for daily.” At Calusso and Sotogrande, the work gets more layered, but not fussier. “Even when the presentation is more elevated, I try not to overcomplicate things,” she said. “It always comes back to balance and clarity.”

Chocolate café crunch

That sounds a lot like Corsica, just translated into South Florida. She says there’s “always a thread of Corsica” in what she makes, especially in her pull toward citrus, honey, and combinations that let each part speak clearly. Maybe that becomes a honey semifreddo with honeycomb and Comté. Maybe it’s a butter croissant at breakfast or a pear dessert carrying rosemary and memory. However it lands on the plate, the idea is the same one she grew up with: slow down, taste this, stay at the table a little longer.