At Brix in Dubai, Carmen Rueda Hernandez takes diners on a trip around the world through a series of dessert dishes that stimulate all the senses. Recently crowned as MENA’s Best Pastry Chef, sponsored by Valrhona, the Spaniard is regarded as one of the most creative culinary talents of her generation.
Carmen Rueda Hernandez has lived and worked in eight different countries over her 20-year career – and those life experiences have been distilled into six perfect dishes, presented over 60 minutes in her dessert-only tasting menu at Brix in Dubai.
Located alongside the acclaimed 3 Fils restaurant in Jumeirah Fishing Harbour, Brix is an intimate 10-seat space where Rueda Hernandez expresses the creativity that has earned her the title of Middle East & North Africa’s Best Pastry Chef 2025, sponsored by Valrhona. But the chef’s origins are far away from the modern metropolis of Dubai: she hails from a rural town in Salamanca in the west of Spain.
To fulfil her dream of becoming a chef, she moved to Madrid in 2004 to study at the Spanish capital’s Culinary and Tourism Institute. After graduating, Rueda Hernandez’s curiosity for pastry took her to Barcelona for a three-months internship. In the first week, she started working with chocolate and it was love at first sight.
Over her 20-year career, Rueda Hernandez has lived in eight different countries
“I never wanted to go back working with savoury dishes after that,” she says, laughing. A trimester was not enough for this new passion, so the time extended to three years of pure chocolate.
Before and after
The first adventure outside of her home country took her to France, where Rueda Hernandez worked with award-winning pastry chef Olivier Bajard. After a year, she returned to Catalonia for an experience that marked a ‘before and after’ moment of her career. “I think what influenced me the most was the time I spent at El Bulli. I learned about creativity from a totally liberal point of view,” she says.
“At El Bulli, all the ideas were something that could be executed in one way or another, even if no one had done them before. So, the extremely free way of creating at El Bulli is something that totally influenced me, and not only me: I think it left a very important mark on all of us who have been there. You realise that nothing is impossible.”
Rueda Hernandez loves to work with unusual flavour combinations
Carmen Hernandez then traded one world-leading restaurant for another, heading to the UK to work at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck (part of the Best of the Best group of former No.1 restaurants, alongside El Bulli). Over two periods as a key part of the pastry team in Bray, she learned more about storytelling, how to satisfy guests in a more intentional way and even developed her understanding of the human brain. From perfumier and neurologist to magicians and font specialists, Blumenthal’s team worked with a vast array of specialists in order to comprehend diners better.
Silky skills
Stints in Singapore (with former Asia’s Best Pastry Chef Award winner Janice Wong) South Africa and Saudi Arabia followed, each an important stage of the chef’s journey. The multi-national experience added new textures and flavours to Rueda Hernandez’s dishes and prepared her for the solo venture that is Brix.
There, guests are offered a choice of two multi-sensorial tasting menus: The Silk Road and The Seasons. Each comes with a selection of non-alcoholic cocktails created by the chef, which can include kombuchas, infusions and more. Every bite and sip has a clear purpose. “I need the guests to feel what I have felt before through food,” says the chef.
The dessert tasting menus at Brix come with non-alcoholic drinks pairings
The Silk Road acts as the signature offering from Brix, where Rueda Hernandez explores six key destinations within the historic namesake trade route – China, India, Persia, Türkiye, Greece and Italy – and transforms them into picture-perfect bites served over a short but sweet 60 minutes.
Dishes are bold and experimental: a trip through Persia takes the form of a delicate meringue topped with saffron ganache and a thin line of caviar, and a dip into China leans on caramelised seaweed. The menu is presented to the guests in the form of a boarding pass and passport.
The dessert bar’s alternative menu, The Seasons, offers a compact, four-course experience inspired by the chef's memories associated with the changing seasons of the year. Autumn, for example, may arrive in the form of cherry and ginger ice cream, paired with dark chocolate and shavings of truffle.
The Seasons menu at Brix is a four-course experience inspired by the chef's memories
It is evident that Rueda Hernandez is comfortable using surprising ingredients such as black garlic, celery or seaweed in her dessert recipes. This is a consequence of her knowledge of savoury dishes, which she believes is essential for the evolution of pastry. “Even without knowing that it was possible to make what I make today, I have always thought that if patisserie and [savoury] cooking were closer there would be many more interesting techniques,” she says.
Endless curiosity
The immersive Brix concept is not only the manifestation of all the knowledge and experience that Rueda Hernandez has gathered during the two decades of her career to date, but it is also one of the biggest challenges she has encountered.
“At the beginning I hadn't seen any restaurant that did something so intimate – and to shape it, to make it work, to have a team that understands it, to ensure the customers that come in also understand it, that's the most complicated thing.”
When Rueda Hernandez started working with chocolate, it was love at first sight
In 2023, the chef and her team expanded further with the opening of Brix Café in the same waterside location as 3 Fils and Brix. The casual all-day eatery aims to satisfy palates of every kind with comforting dishes ranging from classic scrambled eggs with smoked salmon to wagyu beef lasagne, plus a honed selection of classic and contemporary viennoiseries available, including a Cubano-style croissant, and a selection of hearty breads baked on-site daily.
The decades of hard work have clearly paid off, culminating in Rueda Hernandez receiving recognition as the region’s premier pastry chef on stage in Abu Dhabi in February. “It's great to be able to feel that all the people that come [to Brix] and everything that you do, it has a meaning, and that people appreciate it. People ask me, ‘What do you have to do to earn that?’ And I always say, ‘You have to work for 20 years!’ It's not something you get overnight, right?”
This free-spirited chef believes in constant work but also in cultivating an endless curiosity. To the young chefs out there, her advice is clear: “Analyse everything that happens, because only when you analyse can you grow.” There’s no doubt plenty more growth to come from this rare talent, too.
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