Elisabeth Prueitt is Pastry Chef and co-owner along with her husband and renown baker Chad Robertson, of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Tartine is the culmination of the pair’s training, expertise and passion for food and cooking that began for Elisabeth at home in upstate New York, growing up in a family that grew most of what they cooked and ate. Her intuitive palette is evident in the unmistakable quality and taste of fresh ingredients that are essential in everything produced at Tartine. Chad is from Houston, Texas, originally where he started a successful career in tennis which eventually took a turn to cooking, leading him to the same school as Elisabeth, The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, where they attended both the culinary arts program as well as the program in baking and pastry.
Elisabeth Prueitt
After her culinary education at The CIA, Elisabeth received early experience at New York’s Montrachet restaurant, then as Pastry Chef at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, Massachusetts where many of the recipes she developed contributed to the Canyon Ranch Spa Cookbook.
Elisabeth has worked as a bakery and dessert consultant for the last ten years, having her work published in cookbooks and magazines as well as an appearance on Martha Stewart television as well as local San Francisco television.
Chad Robertson
Chad attended The CIA and has worked as a cook in such kitchens as Jack’s Firehouse in Philadelphia, PA, and at the Four Seasons. He apprenticed and then worked at The Berkshire Mountain Bakery with renown baker Richard Bourdon for several years. The couple relocated to the west coast where Chad worked and consulted as a baker before their travels took them abroad.
In 1994 Elisabeth and Chad married, traveled, trained, and cooked in France for a year. They worked primarily in two bakeries, one in the south of France and the other in the northern Savoie region, both wood-fire oven bakeries specializing in natural fermentation, organic bread, and various traditional pastries and desserts. Upon their return, they opened their first business, Bay Village Bakery in Point Reyes Station, California where they lived and worked for five years (and then for two years in Mill Valley) creating remarkable bread baked in a wood-fire brick oven and rustically elegant pastry using many of the techniques they learned while in France, selling to farmer’s markets in the Bay Area as well as restaurants. Chad was singled out by Alain Ducasse for his excellence in bread making in his book on American food in Harvesting Excellence.
In summer of 2002 Elisabeth and Chad moved their life and business to San Francisco’s thriving food community centered at the corner of 18th and Guerrero Streets in the Mission district and opened Tartine Bakery where Elisabeth continues to delight her customers who wait patiently out the door for her cookies, tarts, cakes, confections, and jam, and where Chad had a brick oven built and is still the day-to-day baker of his naturally fermented, organic, hearth-baked loaves of bread.
In August, 2003, Elisabeth was chosen by San Francisco Magazine as Pastry Chef of the Year, Critic’s Choice.
Elisabeth and Chad were both nominated for a James Beard Award in 2006 for Best Pastry Chef, National.