Restaurant Awards 2024: Pastry Chef of the Year, Kenta Takahashi of Boulevard

Would you like to see the dessert menu? If you’re dining at Boulevard, the answer should always, always be yes—and that’s thanks to the thoughtful, delicious work of Kenta Takahashi, our 2024 Pastry Chef of the Year.

Looking at Takahashi’s intricate, beautiful dishes—a delicate jasmine panna cotta nestled next to fresh peach tea ice cream; a crunchy sesame praline bar with fluffy chocolate mousse; a translucent, sugary cylinder layered with pistachio cream and cassis compote—it’s clear that his attention to detail is supreme. “I calculate the ratios, colour combinations, composition, height, width, balance… there is reason behind everything,” he says. It’s not surprising that the pastry chef also dabbles in painting and photography.

Despite the near-obsessive effort that goes into his work, Takahashi has an admirably humble attitude toward it. “It’s all classic and basic things that people learn in pastry school,” says the chef, who was born in Shizuoka, Japan, and attended pastry school and began his career in Tokyo before moving to Vancouver, where he got his Canadian start at the then-brand-new Thierry. He’s been at Boulevard for seven years, now, and while some of his desserts are considered classics (that perfect praline bar, for example), no one could mistake his elegant, meditative creations as basic.

As much as we love a scoop (especially if it’s Takahashi’s house-made sorbet), we’re not the first to honour the Boulevard chef’s sweet skills: he was named Best Pastry Chef by Canada’s 100 Best in both 2020 and 2023. And while he admits that the 2020 award turned up the pressure, leading him to be mostly heads-down in the kitchen—particularly because of the, ahem, other global goings-on that year—the pastry chef says he’s feeling a lot more comfortable about the 2023 acknowledgement. “I can see how much the award helps me, now,” he says. “I see more potential, I’m looking for more collaborations, I’m looking forward to the future.” Well, here’s another accolade to add to the mix—the proverbial cherry on top.

Boulevard
845 Burrard St., Vancouver
boulevardvancouver.ca