Halifax artisan pizza maker in top 100 best chefs worldwide
Posted Jul 4, 2025 01:00:14 PM.
Last Updated Jul 4, 2025 03:02:53 PM.
When he first heard the news, Cédric Toullec thought he was being scammed, but it turns out he was ranked as one of the best pizza chefs in the world.
The local pizzaizolo at Lou Pécou in Halifax’s North End was ranked number 93 in the world for the Best Chef Awards. His “baby restaurant” opened in the city only three and a half years ago.
Toullec received an email saying he was invited to Milan for the awards, and he thought there had to be a mistake. After reaching out to the admin person, he was “so honoured.”
When he attended the awards in late June, he managed to finish in the top 100, “which was not expected…This was not our goal either,” he told The Todd Veinotte Show.
The restaurant and its chef were recognized after being visited anonymously by the experts who run the Best Chef Awards. So instead of preparing for a big event, the team was unaware of the critics.
“We didn’t know we were noticed, first of all, and we’ve never heard about it,” Toullec said. “But we were really, really surprised to get there.”
When asked why he thought his pizzas were world-renowned, he said the secret sauce is actually the dough of the dish.
“That’s years I’m perfecting my craft with different masters around the world and a different community of bakers,” he said. “We have five to seven different flours in our dough and I allow myself to play with them depending on the season, depending what the (flour) miller is telling me,” he said.
Since Toullec owns the restaurant, it gives him the freedom to be constantly re-inventing or discovering new parts of the pizza-making craft. Something that he loves to share with the people he works with or from whom he sources ingredients. Something that he has seen with artisan pizza making is that the story behind the sauce, cheese, and dough is so much more.
“When I share my knowledge or passion with other colleagues around the world, we are all speaking the same language. It’s non-stop training, it’s non-stop crafting,” he said.
How he came to make pizza is when he was “the most lost in his career.”
Toullec knew he loved the food industry because it made him feel close to his grandmother. When he decided he wanted to be a professional, he went through all the paths to do that. He tried focusing on ice cream, but missed cooking, went back to baking, but then missed crafting dough.
While travelling in the south of France, changing his mind every six months, he stumbled upon a world championship in Rome, where he found the high-end pizza world that involved all his skills.
“For someone like me, pizza became the medium that I was able to express all the parts of me I wanted to be,” he said. “I could be the baker I wanted to be every day, the cook I wanted to be, the pastry chef I wanted to be sometimes.”
