The first restaurant Eve Yeung ever worked at was Noma – yes, the Copenhagen establishment named the World’s Best Restaurant four times. So how did she end up in René Redzepi‘s renowned kitchen at the age of 18?

The young pastry chef actually considered becoming a competitive hockey player (a path she pursued while working at Noma) and before she was preparing desserts in the high-profile restaurant, she worked at Long Island’s best bakery – making extravagant cakes to celebrate people’s milestones: one staggering creation, to commemorate someone’s law degree, featured a legal book of torts and judge’s gavel; she’s also produced cakes featuring a shark jumping out of the water as well as an ’80s tribute that showed a Rubik’s cube on top of a 3D Pacman game.

And yes, she’s even fielded weird requests for wedding cakes (luckily, her family-friendly bakery had a policy about not making “crazy nudity cakes”), so she didn’t have to bake anything that was too out there.

It was a contrast to her time at Noma, where she would go foraging for ants in the Danish landscape or end up painstakingly cleaning reindeer moss for the restaurant’s menu. She also got to push her desserts in imaginative directions (listen to the description of the dazzling ice cream sandwich she presented to Noma staff) and got to travel to Sydney for the Noma Australia pop-up. She also end up with many standout experiences while working at Noma Mexico, too, (from learning to cook regional specialties with locals to the time she was stuck in a walk-in freezer with a torchlight on her head to finish a granita dish for the menu).

Eve has some pretty exciting news she’ll announce later this year – keep updated via her Instagram account. In the meantime, enjoy hearing about her experiences working in memorable kitchens across the world.

You can listen to this episode on iTunes or download it via RSS or directly. You can even find it on Stitcher nowadays. And thanks to everyone who has dropped a kind review in the iTunes Store (aka Apple Podcasts) or been a cheerleader for this podcast – it means a hell of a lot.