Lucie Franc de Ferriere is someone who knows cakes. In fact, having made them for the likes of Lorde, actor AnnaSophia Robb, and most recently Harry Styles when he came to NYC to play Madison Square Garden, she more than just knows cakes—she has an intimate relationship with them in all their glorious forms, flavors, and shapes. “Cake is religious to me,” says Franc de Ferriere. “In France, the kids have goûter, where you have milk and a baguette with chocolate at around 4 p.m. It’s such a ritual, and I feel like a kid in a sense still wanting cake and Yorkshire tea every day at that time. But now, I’m an adult who gets to have a whole bakery for that—and to give it to other people for their own cake rituals.”
Welcome to the world of From Lucie, Franc de Ferriere’s new bakery, which opened this past weekend in the East Village behind a bijou, mustard yellow storefront—and has already attracted lines around the block.
It turns out that Franc de Ferriere’s first bakery is a lifetime in the making, even if it took a few diversions to get here. Originally hailing from a small town an hour or so from Bordeaux, her bucolic upbringing on a farm involved many years of watching carefully as her mother would cook for the guests staying at their B&B, the majority of her ingredients coming straight from their property. “There was always cake at our home,” says Franc de Ferriere, laughing. “Way too much of it actually. I nourished myself from that background.”
After studying art history in the U.K. and embarking on a career as a curator in the New York art world, Franc de Ferriere was laid off from her job when the pandemic hit in 2020—and as with so many others, found herself at a loss over what to do next. Her fiancé had just opened his own coffee shop, Sunday To Sunday, on the Lower East Side, and after pivoting to operating a takeout window—and with most of his local bakeries shutting down at the time—he needed a helping hand. So for the next year, Lucie worked away in the basement of the store, providing banana bread, cookies, cakes, and various other pastries to keep their counters fully stocked. Unable to travel back home to France to see her family, she was able to bring a sense of her home country to New York through the ritual of baking.
After she began posting her exquisite creations—think layers of pastel-hued sponge decorated with organic flowers and dried or crystallized fruits that looked as much like table centerpieces as they do cakes—to Instagram, and word of mouth began to spread about the top-tier baking on offer at her fiancé’s coffee shop, Franc de Ferriere quickly established a fiercely loyal following. What to do next, then, but open a bakery all of her own? After launching a Kickstarter campaign in July 2022, she reached her goal of over $40,000 in just two months. “People in New York have been so welcoming and receptive to what I make,” she says. “They love trying new things and I feel really lucky to have found a place where my cakes are so well received.”
When I ask why she didn’t consider relocating back to France to open a bakery, Lucie hesitates, noting that most of the cakes she has found in U.S. supermarkets are too sweet for her liking. Heavily-iced cakes aren’t her thing, and some of the typical flavors to be found Stateside don’t appeal to her palette. “Plus, if I’m being honest, I don’t have formal French patisserie training,” Franc de Ferriere adds. “That’s not really my style, and I’m not sure if people in France would care much for what I’m offering.”
The French influence continues to run deep, however, with her childhood hanging out in the garden with her family at home serving as an enduring influence. The heavy inclusion of flowers, for example, can be traced back to the roses her mom planted in their garden, and whose petals she would often include in salads. Franc de Ferriere’s herb-infused icings also include classic Gallic ingredients such as thyme and lavender—all of the ingredients and vegetables used are sourced from a local farmer’s market, while the pesticide-free flowers largely come from another neighborhood spot, Union Square Market—and she leans towards Swiss meringue instead of buttercream to cut down on the sugar. (Her favorite cake, she tells me, is a good Victoria sponge with a big dollop of whipped cream and some seasonal jam.)
As for the inspiration behind the striking aesthetic of her cakes, Franc de Ferriere cites everything from botanical books to her background in art history to, once again, the flora of her childhood growing up in the French countryside. “Even seeing a flower at the market inspires me, and I get excited thinking about how I can work with that particular flower,” she explains. “I’m always evolving and changing depending on what inspires me.” And much to the anxiety of friends curious to watch her creation process, she’ll be making final adjustments to the cake right before it’s ready for pickup. “It’s all in my head,” Franc de Ferriere adds. “I never put anything on paper beforehand, so it’s always impulsive and I don’t overthink it. My buttercream will never be applied in a neat way—because I’m actually terrible at applying it in a neat way—but I also like it to be messy. The common pattern in my cakes is a sense of wildness.”
At From Lucie, Franc de Ferriere will offer her typical array of cakes in all sizes and homemade jam (the latter will likely be on the menu forever, she notes), as well as continuing her booming trade in custom orders. She plans to keep the bakery as small and personal as she can, with no plans to mass produce or sell her baked goods in bigger stores. “I like the idea of someone being able to just walk in and have a slice of cake, and getting the chance to meet my customers,” she says. “I want to make smaller batches of things and not know what’s in store and see what direction that takes me versus where I try to take it. I was born on Friday the 13th, have lived at a 666 address, and am left-handed… so I really believe in good luck and fortune despite the odds.”
It may be a gamble, but with the dramatic 180-degree turn her life and career have taken since the beginning of the pandemic, Franc de Ferriere is ready to evolve once again, more confident in her vision than ever. “I’ve learned that you don’t have to please everyone, and if you do, you manage to lose some of that authenticity,” she says. “You really have to believe in something if you’re giving it to everyone to enjoy. It’s a good risk to take, and growing up with two parents who took a lot of risks… I’m excited to do the same.”