Profile | From box cake mixes to fine-dining pastry chef in Hong Kong, how Joanna Yuen quit advertising for the job she’d always wanted, and how it landed her in hospital
- Joanna Yuen is a fine-dining pastry chef at Ando in Hong Kong, having been hired in 2017 by the Landmark Mandarin Oriental without any professional experience
- She dreamed of being a chef but worked in advertising, and while in Singapore started baking – ‘a Betty Crocker kind of thing’ at first, she tells Bernice Chan
You started your career in advertising. What was that like? “I studied political science at the University of Melbourne and thought speech writing was an art. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a politician I wanted to write speeches for, but thought there must be some parallel between selling politicians and selling a product, so I applied that skill set in advertising.
“I had mentors who told me: ‘If you can’t write what you want to say in two lines, then you basically don’t know the product well enough to know what to say.’”
How did you get into baking? “When I was 26 years old and working in advertising [in Hong Kong], I was transferred to Singapore for two years. It was less stressful than working in Hong Kong so I started making cakes in my spare time. I wasn’t very good at it, it was a Betty Crocker kind of baking; out of a box and you add an egg.
“I focused on decorating, and making sugar flowers. I put pictures online and people actually asked how much the cakes were, and started buying them. I needed to find a way to scale it: bake, decorate and deliver. I decided I really wanted to give this a try and moved back to Hong Kong.”
How did you get your first job in pastry? “I came back in 2017, but who would hire someone with no pastry background? So I made a portfolio of all the cakes that I had made and sent it to chefs on LinkedIn. I got really lucky because around that time the Landmark Mandarin Oriental [in Central on Hong Kong Island] had a pop-up store and they needed some casual staff so I started working there.