Curate pastry chef is dedicated to making a meal’s finale grand for all

Andrew Buie did not grow up standing on a stool in his mee-maw’s kitchen, helping roll pie dough or breaking eggs into a bowl. In fact, he didn’t have any interest at all in baking or cooking until high school in Winston-Salem, when almost by default he took culinary classes at the school’s career center. “I liked the classes, but it didn’t occur to me to pursue it professionally.”

And yet, ten years after arriving in Asheville to take an entry level pastry position at chef Katie Button’s innovative restaurant Nightbell, he is now pastry chef at Curate, her internationally acclaimed, James Beard restaurant (winner of the 2022 award for Best Hospitality). There, he creates a new, seasonal dessert menu four times a year for the five-time James Beard Foundation award nominated chef, who started her stellar career as a pastry chef.

No pressure.

On August 21, he and Button debuted a prix-fix four course dessert pop-up that he hopes will be an ongoing series. The first, Summer of Sweets (with optional wine pairings by Jessica Salyer), is scheduled for five consecutive nights on the street level floor of La Bodega de Curate, Button and partner Felix Meana’s smaller, sister restaurant. “The open kitchen will let guests see the techniques we use and watch me plate. It’s going to be fun,” promises the young chef.

Fun wouldn’t necessarily be how he’d describe his entry to the field at his first unpaid internship at Ombu in Winston-Salem, but it was where he had his epiphany. “They threw me in with the pastry chef. It was simple things like tortes and ganache, but that’s when I knew I wanted to do pastry.”

He enrolled at Guilford Tech Community College to pursue a culinary degree. “I didn’t know the first thing about cooking, and I didn’t want to go to a restaurant and be a burden. I need to at least learn the fundamentals.”

His time there confirmed the pastry path for him. “Everyone doing culinary was on a completely different level than me,” he explains. “They had a lot of restaurant experience and were doing all these things, and I was trying to grill chicken. But they didn’t know how to do things I was doing. It made sense for me to pursue pastry.”

He learned a hard truth. “The door into pastry is much narrower than savory. The restaurants that had openings, wanted experience I didn’t have. And when restaurants have to cut back, pastry is the first position to go.”

Case in point, he graduated into the recession of 2008 and opportunities were few. He found creatively uninspiring work in a national chain restaurant, from which he gleaned lessons in speed and operations, then took a pastry post in a private club in High Point with a jammed calendar of events and weddings. Blessedly, he was rescued by Instagram.

“Carmen Vaquera, a friend from college, was Katie’s pastry chef at Curate, and sometime before Christmas in 2013 she posted about staging for Jose Andres at Mini Bar in preparation to open Nightbell in Asheville. I reached out to congratulate her and she said they were hiring a pastry cook and I should apply.”

He applied that night and had a promising phone interview with Katie. With no day off through New Year’sEve, Andrew could not audition in person, but Vaquera went to bat for her friend, and in January 2014, he gathered everything together, including his girlfriend (now wife), and moved to Asheville.

“The job at Nightbell was a dream,” he remembers. “There was hustle and bustle and get it done energy, a real team. I got to work with a good friend who was tough on me but constructive. We were doing things I didn’t know were possible.”

Andrew sounds dreamy as he describes a perfectly round black forest cheesecake dipped in a cherry glaze to look like a shiny red orb, placed on top of chocolate soil and pistachio dust; an olive oil, liquid-chocolate-center truffle; a root beer float with house-made root beer syrup and shaved ice put in liquid nitrogen to make a hard shell.

“I was blown away and so proud to be there, so happy to go to work every day.”

When plans were made to double the size of Curate, Andrew was assigned there; not long after, Nightbell was closed to transition to a private event venue. Then Covid closed every restaurant in Asheville. As the hospitality industry crawled back to life, Button and Meana conceived La Bodega first as a take-away café and market on the first floor; the fully realized Spanish wine and pintxo bar on the second opened in 2022. Andrew was recruited to help with the developing bread program there, while overseeing pastry at Curate.

He made a successful case to the operations manager to focus solely on Curate, with the goal of revitalizing the pastry program there. “Right before that, I staged with Antonio Bachour at his place in Miami. It was the first time I saw an operation like that. It just got me really excited to take everything I learned at Bachour to Curate.”

Currently, Andrew is devoted to making the Curate’s dessert menu more inclusive.  “Recently, I noticed our dessert menu had gluten in everything, and it made me sad that some guests were being excluded from the final part of the experience. I knew we could do better.”

Inspired by an episode on Katie’s television show From the Source, for which she made a cherry Sacher Torte, he developed an apricot version, with two layers of Sacher cake, an apricot compote center surrounded by chocolate ganache, and covered in a chocolate mirror glaze. “It’s not only gluten free, but tree nut free and vegan. It’s a beautiful dessert everyone can enjoy.”

More on Curate and La Bodega by Curate. 

— Kay West

Photos courtesy of Button Meana Group:
First photo: Chef Andrew Buie
Second photo:  Chef Buie’s Chocolate Turron
Third photo: Goxua, a sweet and creamy dessert from the Basque Country of northern Spain

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