Restaurant Awards 2025: Pastry Chef of the Year, Kate Siegel

Thirty or so years ago, there weren’t many people in the Niagara region growing veggies like Jerusalem artichokes or kohlrabi—but Kate Siegel’s grandparents were. “My grandfather was really, really creative in the kitchen,” she recalls. Siegel credits her teenage dream of becoming a chef to her family’s inventive home cooking, and from her first gig at a Greek steakhouse at age 15, she was certain: “I got a job in a restaurant and decided to never leave the kitchen again,” she says with a laugh.

At Toronto’s George Brown College, she realized that the savoury path wasn’t for her (ironically, because the fast-paced line life didn’t leave time to savour—or exhaustively critique—a dish). “I wanted to be able to take my time to make it, you know, perfect,” she says. Our 2025 Restaurant Awards judges have agreed that, in her current role as executive pastry chef at the Fairmont Pacific Rim, Siegel has unequivocally achieved that perfection.

The chef herself humbly points out the influences of her team of 10, and of past culinary mentors, on every plate (and there are many plates: at Pac Rim, she covers everything from desserts at Botanist and the Lobby Lounge to room service to banquet dinners to the Fazioli piano-shaped chocolates offered to hotel guests). The roasted pear mille-feuille at Botanist, with crunchy puff pastry, pears slow-roasted in brown sugar and earthy Ecuadorian vanilla ice cream, was prompted by executive chef Hector Laguna’s love of texture. Her past work at Pemberton’s North Arm farm inspires her use of hyper-local and hyper-seasonal ingredients (like in a rhubarb and elderflower dessert, created for a collab tasting menu with New York chef Eunji Lee—the rhubarb was supplied by Hannah Brook Farms, the elderflower was sourced from Chilliwack). Seigel’s current favourite on the Botanist menu, the miso milk chocolate mousse, is informed by her tenure at Toronto’s Soma Chocolatemaker—from learning about ethical sourcing to the roasting process, she calls her time there “life-changing.”

In every dab of ginger gel, crumble of tonka bean and spoonful of oolong tea semifreddo, Seigel combines her decades of experience, resourcefulness with ingredients and steadfast passion for getting things just right. It’s all part of the sweet skills baked into our 2025 Pastry Chef of the Year.

Fairmont Pacific Rim
1038 Canada Pl.
fairmontpacificrim.com

Find more of the best Vancouver restaurants on our list of 2025 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Award winners.