Yannick Oppermann puts the finishing touches on desserts for guests at the Peninsula Beijing's afternoon tea. Provided to China Daily

So is being a French chef a good way to meet ladies?

"That is a funny question," he says, laughing. Opperman says he met his girlfriend at a travel agency while they were booking flights. "So I can't say that happened because of my work.

"On the other hand, it's for sure a good way to meet women, the only problem is, you don't know if they like you for what you make or for what you are."

Oppermann got the cooking bug at the age of 14, he says, inspired not by fast talking and slicing celebrity chefs on TV but by his uncle, who is a restaurant chef to this day, now working in Jakarta.

"He gave me the passion for food," Oppermann says. "I was a cook at first, but I decided I had more feeling for the pastry, for the sweets."

While his eyes gleam brightly as he sprinkles his favorite French chocolate powder into a mixing bowl of molten caramel, he says that working in China for five years has changed his thinking about sweets.

When he arrived in Hong Kong, he says, he quickly discovered that Asian people don't like sweet desserts. That flash of illumination could have sent a lesser wizard of sugar scampering back to Paris.

Today, he says, "I thank Asians a lot for that! I have reduced the amount of sugar in my recipes 25, 40, even 50 percent, and I really appreciate the desserts now much better.

"When I go back to France now and I try the desserts - oh! They are really, really sweet. Too sweet for me. But now even French people are starting to understand that making desserts with less sugar is better. It's healthy, and you can work with different sugars, honey, fructose, all the sugar contained in the fruits"

"I've also learned from Chinese culture how to better manage your team, without screaming, with more calm and serenity," he says. "You definitely get a better result from people you work with by being a good listener, and trying to understand that we have a different vision, a different mind."