Billows of smoke rise up as Chika Hanyu eyes a pot of boiling sugar. We’re in the narrow side room of a commissary kitchen in Sunnyside with the struggling AC on full blast. As any confectioner will tell you, making caramel is something of a tightrope act — take it off heat too soon and it’s an anemic syrup; wait a half-second too long and it’s a noxious, blackened mess. For her signature Japanese pudding, Hanyu likes to take it to the brink of ruin.
“I wanted this pudding to have a little bit of a bitter flavor, so I take the caramel darker than you usually would,” she says, seemingly unfazed by the roiling sucrose-napalm. When the faintest acrid tinge fills the air, she hoists the pot off heat and pours a thin layer into individual molds.
Despite its lack of a traditional brick-and-mortar space, Hanyu’s business, C by C Chocolate & Pastry, has built up a cult following entirely by word of mouth. After seven years of working as the executive chef at Marie Belle, Maribel Lieberman’s chocolate company based in Soho, she quit her job in 2020 and went rogue.
Chika Hanyu in her Sunnyside kitchen.
Among her regular customers are some of the city’s top chefs. “Her desserts have depth and richness, but they are never heavy. That sense of balance is something I care about in my own work as a sushi chef, and I think that is what first made me a fan,” says Junichi Matsuzaki, chef at the Michelin-starred omakase restaurant Noz 17. “The sweetness, the flavor combinations, and how she brings everything together are all perfectly judged.”
Matsuzaki serves Hanyu’s cakes for all staff birthdays — including his own. He’s especially fond of her vivid purple sweet potato mont blanc tart with almond frangipane. “She greets you with the warmest smile,” he says. “That kind of energy stays with you and makes the whole experience even more special. I really respect her, not just for her work, but also as a fellow chef.”
Hanyu’s desserts have also been stealing the show at Cafe O’Te, a newly opened Japanese-style hamburg restaurant in Greenpoint. Her Japanese puddings — supernaturally silky custards with a savory edge courtesy of that darkened caramel crown — have been selling out almost daily. The texture is impossibly delicate, with just the slightest wobble on the spoon. Sit there long enough and you’ll notice couples attempting to split one, then immediately ordering a second.
“I wanted the texture of this pudding to be like crème brûlée, but that’s too delicate to flip over so it was very challenging,” she says. “Just adding one gram of egg changes everything. I had to test maybe 10 different recipes.”
Also on the menu are her canelés, which feature an exterior caramelized right to the point of burnt, with a chewy, mochi-like interior. Recently, she added to the lineup a rolled sponge cake filled with tart strawberry jam and whipped cream.
“To me, [Chika’s] sweets represent the gold standard,” says Yuji Tani, chef at the House and Cafe O’Te. Ever since he tried her desserts five years ago, he has ordered her cakes for birthdays and her bûche de Noël around the holidays. When he decided to open the cafe, he knew immediately that he wanted to showcase her creations.
“What stood out to me was how her work feels both distinctly Japanese in its delicate flavors and meticulous craftsmanship, and distinctly French, with a deep respect for traditional pastry foundations and technique,” says Tani.
Outside of Greenpoint’s Little Japan, Hanyu has produced desserts for Kettl and Hōsekii in Saks Fifth Ave. Diners can try her chocolate ganache tart and matcha tiramisu at Ippudo, or Japanese sweet potato mont blanc at select locations of Ootoya.
But to taste the full range of Hanyu’s formidable patisserie skills, customers should order on her website, where they select a pickup time slot and then travel to an industrial stretch of Sunnyside, on 37th Street off Skillman Avenue, just beyond which lies the Amtrak train yard. That’s where they’ll find made-to-order boxes of jewel-like chocolate bonbons, a hallmark from her time at Marie Belle. There’s also a lineup of cakes that would be right at home in the swankiest pastry shop display case — think fluffy Japanese shortcakes adorned with rosettes of mango or Swiss rolls with salted sakura leaves in the sponge and pickled blossoms on top.
Most coveted of all are her cream puffs, a specialty she has perfected over the last 20 years. Filled to bursting with vanilla-flecked diplomat cream, these airy confections are meant to be eaten within a few hours of leaving the oven, making them impossible to send to restaurants. The trek hasn’t deterred devoted regulars, who come from all over the city for a box.
“This is the No. 1 selling item,” she tells me, as she furiously stirs a panade of flour, milk, water, and butter together on a burner. The choux dough for cream puffs requires precise timing and temperatures in order to rise. Although Hanyu uses an instant read thermometer to be safe, she can tell by feel when the mixture has hit the magic 80 degrees Celsius and it’s time to remove the panade from heat.
As she beats eggs little by little, she points out how the dough becomes shiny and satiny, how it forms a V shape as it hangs from the mixer paddle when it’s ready. With a pastry bag, she freehands perfectly symmetrical choux dollops with ease. Before baking, she tops each with a circle of cookie dough like a small hat.
“My sister loves cream puffs, so when she asked me to learn to make them for her, I had no choice,” she explains with a laugh. “I’m the youngest.”
Hanyu’s close relationship with her two older sisters is what brought her from Tokyo to the United States. Her oldest sister suffers from severe asthma, particularly in Japan’s humid summers. When she moved to Las Vegas, her symptoms all but disappeared. At just 18 years old, Hanyu decided to follow her. She planned on going to business school, but before long she switched to taking culinary classes at the University of Nevada.
“I studied business at the beginning, but after September 11 we saw a lot of people losing their jobs,” she says. “But even people who lost their jobs still went to restaurants and I thought, ‘I could do that. I could make people happy.’”
Hanyu’s first-ever job was at the Luxor Hotel & Casino, the obsidian pyramid that looms over the Strip. Her boss quickly noticed that she had a gift for chocolate, thanks to her cool fingertips and innate sense of precision, and before long she was fashioning chocolate boxes full of intricate bonbons. Her work would later take her to Délices Des Sens in Lyon; the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo, which she likens to a military bootcamp with butter and sugar; and Norwegian Cruise Line, where she oversaw desserts for some 6,000 guests.
A chance meeting at a World Pastry competition back in Las Vegas led her to a representative from Marie Belle, who scheduled an interview with her the following day. Hanyu had been searching for a way back to the United States from Japan for months and jumped at the chance. She helped open the brand’s chocolate shop in Kyoto, before relocating to New York for good.
“After seven years, I was ready to start my own business,” she says. “Then the pandemic came and everything stopped. Then one of my friends told me about a Japanese restaurant on the Upper West Side looking for dessert. So I said I need a commissary kitchen. I just prepared everything and started with one restaurant.”
Although she hopes to one day have a physical bakery to call her own, she’s intentional about taking her time to find the right fit. “I don’t want to have investors much, so I saved my own money to buy a chocolate machine,” she says. “A storefront is very risky and I haven’t found a place where I feel like, ‘This is it’ yet.”
Even without a storefront, Hanyu is a firm believer in the kind of artful presentations she excelled at during her time at Marie Belle. Everything, including her Florentine cookies with iyokan (a kind of Japanese citrus), or her dark chocolate mousse cake finished with a mirror glaze, is packaged in custom boxes fit for a high-end confectioner. Around the holiday season, her bonbon-filled advent calendars are especially popular.
In her kitchen, Hanyu puts the finishing flourish on a batch of cream puffs: nickel-sized disks of tempered dark chocolate stamped with the C by C logo. She packages most into boxes and gift bags, but I can’t resist trying one immediately. It’s like biting into a vanilla-flecked cloud with a crackly, crunchy topping, much like the sugary finish on a bolo bao (pineapple bun).
As we speak, other chefs keep popping by her private room in the commissary kitchen to say hello. Part of this has to do with Hanyu’s reputation for being exceptionally generous with extra baked goods. One who stops by — Sean Patrick Gallagher, chef-owner of Home Grown Meals — says, “Chika is the best.”
Given the sometimes competitive nature of the industry, I ask Chika if she feels a need to be protective of her trade secrets. “At some point at a younger age, I was like, ‘Oh, I cannot share my recipes or blah blah blah,’” she says with a winking smile. “It’s funny, people can try to steal my ideas, but I know they cannot make it exactly the way that I do.”
