From Art School to Pastry: Riccardo Menicucci’s Zen-Inspired Approach to Matcha
As part of our Pastry Journal series, our team travels across the country to meet the chefs, bakers, and chocolatiers who bring Valrhona to life through their own creative vision. During a recent visit to Los Angeles, we stopped by Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills to meet Cercle V member and Executive Pastry Chef Riccardo Menicucci. With the launch of Valrhona Inspiration Matcha approaching, we invited Chef Menicucci to be among the first to discover the new product and create with it. The result is a plated dessert inspired by Japanese Zen gardens, and a perfect expression of a chef whose approach to pastry has always existed at the intersection of art, craftsmanship, and flavor.
At the intersection of Art and Pastry
For Riccardo Menicucci, Executive Pastry Chef at Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, pastry has always lived somewhere between art and science.
Born in Florence, Italy, Menicucci originally imagined a career in design. He studied art and graphics and dreamed of becoming a car or interior designer. But while attending school, he began working in a boutique pastry shop in Florence, and quickly recognized that the two worlds were far more connected than he had imagined.
“I noticed that design and pastry are very connected, and it’s all about craftsmanship.”
What began as a job alongside his studies became his craft, and eventually, as he puts it, something of an obsession.
That path would take him from Italy to the United States, through the two-Michelin-starred Acquerello in San Francisco, then to Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and finally Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills, where he now leads the pastry program.
Pastry as a Form of Design
Menicucci’s artistic background still shapes the way he approaches every dessert. For him, pastry offers the same opportunities for composition, form, proportion, and texture that first attracted him to design, with an added dimension: flavor.
He gravitates toward desserts built around a limited number of clearly identifiable flavors, explored through different textures and techniques rather than complicated by unnecessary elements.
“I don’t like to have too many flavors,” he explained during our visit. “I like to keep it simple. I like to have a lot of texture and bold flavors that you can try and taste and that linger in your mouth.”
That philosophy became especially apparent when our team invited him to discover Valrhona Inspiration Matcha ahead of its launch. The ingredient immediately took his imagination somewhere deeply personal.
Inspired by the Harmony of a Zen Garden
For his Inspiration Matcha Plated Dessert, Menicucci drew upon a longstanding connection to Japanese culture. Growing up, his father traveled frequently to Japan and developed a deep appreciation for its culture. Menicucci even remembers having a sand garden at home as a child.
So when he first began thinking about Matcha Inspiration, the visual direction came almost instinctively.
“When we talked about Matcha, I thought about bonsai. I thought about Zen gardens.”
The finished dessert translates that memory into a landscape. At its center is a Matcha Inspiration semifreddo, paired with peach and lemon. An almond cookie crumble, accented with matcha and lemon, brings texture to the plate, while a delicate chocolate tuile evokes the carefully composed lines of a Zen garden.
Menicucci also created an almond milk and Matcha Inspiration sorbet, deliberately limiting the amount of fat in the recipe to preserve a particularly bright, clear expression of matcha.
“I just wanted the matcha to stay the star,” he explains.
The natural theme continues through delicate leaf-shaped elements made with Opalys white chocolate and Matcha Inspiration, while a custom-designed stencil helps create the garden-like landscape across the plate.
The result is unmistakably Menicucci: graphic yet organic, technically precise yet deeply personal.
A Relationship with Valrhona Spanning More Than a Decade
Menicucci’s relationship with Valrhona began long before this particular creation. He first encountered Valrhona professionally while working in Italy and later at Acquerello. Since then, the brand has followed him throughout his career, across restaurants, hotels, states, and different stages of his development as a chef.
Today, after well over a decade of working with Valrhona products, he points to three qualities in particular: flavor, consistency, and innovation.
“It’s high quality, it’s consistent, it’s innovative. I love what I use, and I’m happy and proud to use it.”
For a chef who approaches ingredients as creative tools, that innovation matters. He speaks enthusiastically about the intensity and brightness of Yuzu Inspiration, for example, and describes the new Matcha Inspiration with the same excitement, not simply because of its flavor, but because of the creative possibilities it opens.
That response is exactly what drives innovation at Valrhona: creating ingredients that give professionals new ways to translate an idea, a memory, or an inspiration into pastry.
Craftsmanship Above All
Even outside the pastry kitchen, Menicucci is drawn to disciplines centered around making things by hand. If he had not become a pastry chef, he imagines himself working as a designer or artist, perhaps painting or customizing motorcycles, another of his passions.
The common thread is craftsmanship.
And nearly fifteen years into his relationship with Valrhona, that same curiosity continues to define his work. Whether exploring a new ingredient, developing a plated dessert, or mentoring the next generation of pastry professionals, Menicucci remains focused on learning, creating, and refining his craft.
His Matcha Inspiration dessert is a fitting example: a new ingredient interpreted through memories of Japan, an education in art and design, years of pastry technique, and one chef’s distinct creative language.
For us at Valrhona, seeing professionals transform our products in such personal ways is precisely what makes these encounters so meaningful.
Discover More
Explore Chef Riccardo Menicucci’s Inspiration Matcha Plated Dessert and discover how he brings together matcha, peach, lemon, almond, and Opalys in his interpretation of a Zen garden.
