'Naked patisserie'

Grolet followed Adam to the exclusive Le Meurice, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. He now works there as pastry chef under celebrity cook Alain Ducasse, who urged him to "work even more on taste".

"Visual beauty attracts the customer, but it is the taste that makes them come back," says Grolet, who as a millennial himself knows that Generation Y eats with its eyes.

The fact that his creations are not overly sweet has also endeared him to the calorie-conscious beautiful people who line up every day outside his mini-boutique, the first of what Grolet hopes will be a handful across the world.

He began perfecting his extraordinarily delicate fruit six years ago, with their highly worked lifelike skins made from chocolate, with a mousse or marmalade interior made from the real fruit.

"The idea was to do away with the biscuit, the eggs, all the things whose taste doesn't really do anything and to concentrate on the taste of the fruit," Grolet says.

It is what he calls "naked patisserie".

His tarts have a similar hyper-natural edge, with fruit as finely cut as flower petals.

With more than a million followers on Instagram alone, Grolet is almost as savvy with his smartphone as his with his blowtorch.

"Making cakes is one thing but you have to know how to communicate. You cannot imagine how many photos I take before posting one," he says.

And not being in the country does not stop him creating. He keeps in constant contact with his laboratory at Le Meurice through WhatsApp.

"I draw and work even when I am on the plane, sending back everything that is in my head, and pictures of everything that I loved eating," says the self-confessed "hyperactive" globetrotter.

Agence France-Presse