GianLuca Patisserie was supposed to be the golden ticket for Palo Alto High School seniors Luca Vostrejs and Jonathan Bakhash. Armed with pipettes of cream and bowls of dough, the pair churned out over 100 croissants during the late summer of 2024. You name it, they’d made it: The duo said chai, earl grey and tiramisu were but a fraction of the croissant flavors they had baked.

However, not a single croissant was sold — Vostrejs said the stress of junior year got to them. Back then, both Vostrejs and Bakhash agreed that actually selling croissants would be too time-consuming, and they parted ways — deciding against an entrepreneurial path — last August.

Despite having no official business, Vostrejs said he and Bakhash still cook and bake regularly, both as a pair and independently. Though Palo Alto High is lauded for its top-tier academics and routinely-strong athletics, Vostrejs and Bakhash said they are two proud members of a small-but-mighty community: Palo Alto High’s chefs.

Luca Vostrejs

Vostrejs said his originality stems from his cooking practices: He doesn’t choose favorites, nor does he repeat a dish, ever.

“The most fascinating part of cooking for me is challenging myself by exploring different cuisines and new dishes,” Vostrejs said. “An interesting part is following new recipes and trying to create completely new things that I’ve never done before. ”

Vostrejs has been cooking for years. From frying up crepes with his dad in kindergarten to joining his aunt in the kitchen around the holidays, Vostrejs said he had ample (amateur) cooking experience before entering eighth grade. Ultimately, that was the year his occasional cooking stints morphed into a real hobby, fueled by the combination of a graded school project and the pandemic.

In Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School’s Connections program, Vostrejs said he participated in the Ropes project — a year-long assignment where students had to commit 50 to 100 hours to any hobby. Vostrejs chose cooking. Though it began as obligatory school assignments, Vostrejs said that soon enough, he was spending his weeknights and weekends cooking a litany of recipes, and it no longer felt like school.

“Cooking was just a really cool way to develop a passion of my own,” Vostrejs said. “A lot of people had a similar experience during the pandemic as well, but that was mine.”

Today, Vostrejs has meals and meals of experience under his belt: Salmon piccata pasta, beef wellington and his most recent dish, personal-sized carrot cakes stuffed with dried fruits and nuts, are just a few of the intricate dishes Vostrejs has whipped up.

Vostrejs said that as his cooking has grown more advanced, so has his preparation. Often, his process to cook one dish can span up to multiple days. To properly plan out cooking a single dish, Vostrejs said he has to allot several days, devoting each day to crafting a different part of the final product.

“Something that I’ve definitely developed is efficiency, learning different techniques, different skills and, more importantly, how to plan everything out,” Vostrejs said.

Despite following schedules and routines, Vostrejs said there exists one exception to his rule on picking favorites: He said he openly prefers dishes he has made with his aunt.

“Holidays were a big reason that I got into cooking,” Vostrejs said. “My aunt always encouraged me to cook with her. Everyone would be playing games, and we’d spend the whole day in the kitchen cooking random stuff.”

For Vostrejs, cooking is a hobby that brings him joy; he said mixing up the hobby with business could one day ruin his love for the activity. To prevent this, Vostrejs’s goal is to open a restaurant or bakery post-retirement — he said that way, cooking will never be a chore.

Jonathan Bakhash

Unlike Vostrejs, Bakhash is more of a baker (though he, too, can cook).

Bakhash began baking at an early age, his journey kickstarted by his elder sister’s fondness for baking things that satisfied their “younger appetites,” he said.

Bakhash said his rise to proficiency began with him cooking pancakes and baking muffins alongside his sister. Soon, he began sharing his baked goods with his family; with their full support, Bakhash said he had the motivation he needed to kick things up a notch.

“I immediately fell in love with the process of producing baked goods and started to take my baking skills more seriously,” Bakhash said.

Soon, he said he found himself tackling recipes involving yeast and fermentation — two processes he considered more advanced and more difficult than anything he’d ever baked before. The next thing he knew, he had made his own sourdough starter: a living community of microbes he then used to make sourdough.

Bakhash’s family once again inspired him when his cousin attended the Culinary Institute of America. He said he decided to follow in his cousin’s footsteps and take a class of his own at the San Francisco Baking Institute, where he was the youngest baker by a 20-year margin. Triggered by the experience gap between him and the other bakers, Bakhash said he elevated his pastry-making to the next level as he continued to pile on experience through the class.

“I learned how to make advanced viennoiseries [a type of French pastry], such as danishes and panettones,” Bakhash said. “I learned a lot about bakery production and techniques on how to bake large quantities of baked goods.”

Equipped with fine-tuned skills and the ability to bake anything, Bakhash said he continued to make complex, time-intensive pastries after taking his summer course.

“When you bite into a pastry, you may not realize the hard work someone had to put into that baked good,” Bakhash said. “Baked goods can take lots of time to produce, and for most yeasted breads, elongating the process typically guarantees a higher quality product.”

Bakhash said croissants, as he and Vostrejs would discover later on, are a multi-day endeavor. He begins by making “détrempe,” a base dough, and his “beurrage,” a butter block, on day one of the process. His second days are a little more hands-off, but Bakhash said he spends ample time laminating the dough on those days. One day three, he cuts, shapes, proofs and bakes the croissants.

“This lengthy process is very labor-intensive but ultimately will produce a very high quality croissant,” Bakhash said. “Making bakery level pastries in a home kitchen is quite a challenge, especially for the more advanced ones.”

To combat the difficulties of baking top chef-quality items in his home kitchen, Bakhash said he has tried to replicate a professional kitchen by using homemade versions of advanced baking equipment. For instance, in lieu of purchasing a proofer for dough to rise in, Bakhash’s dough rises in a powered-off oven, which he said works just the same.

In each baked good Bakhash crafts, improvement is what he strives for, he said. Whether that be in the form of his equipment or his technique, Bakhash’s goals revolve around consistently learning and augmenting his skills each day.

“It is quite exhausting to be attentive to all the small details in baking, but I know they all are very important to produce a very high quality baked good,” Bakhash said. “I usually can find a rhythm to my process, and it eventually becomes second nature.”

Their futures

Rather than embracing what could have been a natural competition between two Palo Alto High bakers, Vostrejs and Bakhash said they made the decision during their early high school years to work together. Though GianLuca Patisserie was a bust, Vostrejs and Bakhash regularly bake together today, each acknowledging the skill and talent of the other.

“[Bakhash] is definitely a better baker than me,” Vostrejs said. “If it came to being a chef, I would win, but if it came to being a baker, he would win.”

Likewise, Bakhash said Vostrejs is a natural, which helps the pair move with fluidity and seamlessly divvy up tasks when working together, he said.

“Having someone to bake with makes the whole experience more enjoyable and productive,” Bakhash said. “I’ve always enjoyed Luca [Vostrejs]’s creativity in baking. He always tries experimenting with new flavors and putting twists on traditional baked goods.”

Neither Vostrejs nor Bakhash can wait to see what their future holds, Bakhash said, but he hopes it might involve one day cooking with Vostrejs.

“We take the flavors that we like and try to improve upon them to make something that’s not only delicious but that you wouldn’t typically find at your local bakery,” Bakhash said. “I’ve enjoyed working with [Vostrejs], and I hope we can cook and bake together more in the future.”