The Discipline of Margarita Kallas-Lee

The crust is shatteringly thin, a delicate crackle giving way to a high, spongy interior that somehow tastes warm even when cool. It’s sourdough, technically—but really, it’s memory disguised as bread. Developed over eight years with a century-old Italian starter gifted by a guest, Margarita Kallas-Lee’s signature loaf at Pasta|Bar isn’t just a calling card. It’s a thesis statement. This is baking with soul and science. This is what obsession tastes like.

Precision isn’t just a skill for Kallas-Lee—it’s a form of stability. In an ever-expanding restaurant group and a life filled with creative chaos, baking is where she finds control. There’s no improvising when it comes to wild fermentation or featherlight lamination. Her pastries aren’t dainty, they’re disciplined. Even her most romantic desserts are engineered to behave a certain way. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being intentional.

While many chefs chase adrenaline or ego, Margarita creates as a way to center herself, to focus, to reclaim something. Her childhood was chaotic, fractured between Latvia and Ukraine, then uprooted to LA. Her teen years? “Awful,” in her own words. But cooking—and specifically, pastry—became the place where she could channel her energy into something exacting and beautiful. Her drug isn't applause, it's the moment when a dessert rewires someone’s expectations. She’s not in this for the spotlight. She's in it for mastery.

It’s not about perfectionism in the cliché sense. It’s about process, repetition, and deeply personal evolution. Eight years spent on one bread recipe. R&D in silence. Creating memories that taste familiar but behave differently. That’s her superpower: she conjures emotion through control. Not control over others—but over her tools, her ingredients, her imagination.

Precision Over Perfection: How Margarita Kallas-Lee Found Power in Pastry

Margarita’s love of food was born on a farm—literally. In Latvia and Ukraine, she spent summers with her grandfather, a chef who raised chickens, grew potatoes, and taught her to pluck bugs off plants under the sweltering sun. It was rural, analog, tactile. “There was a community telephone in the middle of the village,” she recalls, laughing. She watched neighbors skin rabbits, picked berries in the forest, ate sunflowers bigger than her head. Food wasn’t aesthetic or performative—it was survival and connection. That primal bond never left her.

But Los Angeles was a different story. She moved to Pasadena at age seven and food became an escape. By 13, she was cooking for friends while her parents worked. By 17, she’d gone raw vegan and was obsessively teaching herself technique through cookbooks and experimentation. “There were maybe two places in L.A. doing that kind of food,” she says. “And I couldn’t afford them. So I made everything at home.” She didn’t go to culinary school. Instead, she messaged a childhood friend—now her husband, chef Phillip Frankland Lee—on Facebook, asking about the CIA. His response? “Don’t do it. Just work for free.”

So she did. First in L.A., then in Chicago. Free labor, long hours, no mentors—just hustle, instinct, and repetition. She didn’t follow a traditional path—but what she lacked in formal training, she made up for in relentless practice.

Kallas-Lee didn’t set out to become a pastry chef. But when she started reading cookbooks, she gravitated toward the ones that demanded rigor: bread science, classic pastry techniques, controlled fermentations. While savory food gave her comfort, pastry gave her discipline.

She describes her creative process as solitary and immersive. When she’s developing recipes—whether for Pasta|Bar’s tasting menu or a seasonal dessert at Sushi by Scratch Restaurants—she prefers to be alone, fully absorbed in the work. “I don’t think about anything else,” she says. That kind of deep focus is rare, especially for a chef running a growing hospitality group and raising a toddler. But it’s central to how she thinks, cooks, and leads. Even now, she insists on writing recipes by hand on parchment paper, adjusting ratios by feel, and testing everything until it meets her internal standard—not a nostalgic one, but an intuitive one.

A Pastry Chef Who Builds Systems, Not Just Sweets

Kallas-Lee isn’t precious about the myth of the lone genius. She knows excellence at scale doesn’t happen by accident—it takes systems. Each new outpost of Pasta|Bar or Sushi by Scratch Restaurants might have a different team, a different climate, a different audience. But the quality? Non-negotiable.

She develops every dessert herself, then creates what she calls “packets”: instructional videos, precise plating guides, and written recipes for her pastry teams. There are weekly check-ins, tastings, and feedback loops. The process isn’t glamorous, but it works. “Once you have the systems,” she says, “you can create consistency—and magic.”

Even the sourdough bread that anchors Pasta|Bar’s menu, the one that took her eight years to perfect, is subject to this approach. The starter came from an Italian family’s heirloom batch, gifted during the couple’s early pop-up days. Kallas-Lee coaxed it back to life and spent nearly a decade adjusting hydration, fermentation, and timing across kitchens in wildly different climates. The result? A bread with an airy crumb, delicate tang, and whisper-thin crust that still makes her guests do a double take.

Crafting Emotional Desserts with Technical Precision

For Kallas-Lee, dessert isn’t a sweet afterthought—it’s an emotional crescendo. Her plates are engineered to disarm: visually striking, texturally complex, and always anchored by flavor. She starts with a taste or texture that fascinates her, then reverse-engineers the experience. A spoonful isn’t just delicious—it’s calculated to surprise, to trigger memory.

What inspires her isn’t nostalgia, but the possibility of new nostalgia. “It has to feel familiar,” she says, “but also completely different than what you expected.” Think airy pâte à choux filled with koji ice cream, or a glistening orb of frozen citrus set atop a warm, nutty financier. She wants guests to recognize something—but not quite place it. She’s not chasing perfection. She’s chasing that flicker in your brain when food becomes feeling.

And even with a growing family and a fleet of restaurants, she insists on doing R&D solo. “That’s my time,” she says. She works while her daughter is in school, obsessing over texture, temperature, balance. It’s in those quiet hours—alone, focused—that her best work happens.

For Kallas-Lee, growth doesn’t mean doing more—it means doing better. With each new dish, she’s refining her technique, sharpening her voice, and holding fast to the creative control that’s defined her from the start.

The work isn’t finished. That’s the point.