A Sweet Ride From South Riding to an Ooh La La Life

A Sweet Ride From South Riding to an Ooh La La Life

Raamin Samiyi followed his dreams to make perfect pastry in Paris.

By Kelly Querin

On a recent trip to France, I met Raamin Samiyi while dining with

friends at a tucked-away Michelin-starred Paris restaurant. We struck up a conversation with the young man in the kitchen and discovered this pastry chef ’s background was as exceptional as the cuisine.

And a Virginian, as well, who grew up in South Riding in Loudoun County but said he had always been obsessed with all things French.

“By the time I was 14, I was begging my parents to let me study abroad and to take French as my language in school,” he recalled. His loving, but practical parents from Iran and Azerbaijan told Samiyi that learning Spanish would be more useful. And studying abroad was not an option.

This dutiful son majored in neuroscience and minored in classical piano at George Mason University. But the siren call of France still beckoned, and he applied to a program to teach English in French-speaking countries. He was accepted and soon assigned to a small village in the Jura region of eastern France.

With all its history, romance and sheer beauty, Samiyi found France to be all he had ever imagined.

Still, in order to stay, continuing his education was the only route. He was accepted to study science at The Sorbonne in Paris, graduating with a master’s degree in pharmacology. The end of school also meant goodbye Paris and hello New York to a real-world job.

For Samiyi, life in New York paled in comparison to France.

“I had a job in a field I was prepared for, but my soul was dying,” he recalled. After checking the box of “a real job,” he started going door to door with applications for creative industry jobs and soon received a call back for a second interview from a bakery.

These artistic donuts were hardly made for dunkin’.

Photos by Kelly Querin

Embellishing his high school summer job in the cake department of Harris Teeter, he secured an interview and soon was being tested making cookies and brownies. He failed at both.

“Between using salt instead of sugar in the brownies and burning the cookies, I think it was pretty obvious to all I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said.

Yet something caught the attention of the owners, and they took a chance and hired him. They saw his determination, work ethic, and raw talent. Soon he was taken under the wing of Todd Kennedy, New York’s high-end specialty wedding cake designer. From there, it was warp speed into perfecting skills, splitting time between New York and Northern Virginia, where he started Citron Rose Bakery, his own wedding cake company.

But Paris is Paris, and beckoned once again.

He returned to formally study pastry at the famous Ecole Grégoire-Ferrandi. He had an internship in Avignon in the south of France and was being mentored in what he described as the “perfectionism of pastry.”

He was living his dream, and soon was moving up in the French culinary world, from the renowned chef Thierry Marx to the Paris 5-star Hotel Lutetia, to becoming head pastry chef (“le chef pâtissier”) himself at yet another Michelin restaurant.

And now there’s still more to come. This month, he’ll open MOMZI, a donut café shop near the Opera in Paris, where an American sugary staple will marry with French elegance to create the most beautiful donuts imaginable.

Exquisite styling, single-source quality ingredients, and the ingenuity of matched flavors combine to create picture-perfect, delicious donuts, a rarity in Paris.

Still, for Raamin Sayimi, it’s not about donuts or French pastries. It’s a testament to following a passionate path, sticking with it, and having the courage to believe in a dream.