Sarah Villamere runs the busiest department in the kitchen at The Royal. The boutique hotel in Picton is known for its locally inspired farm-to-table cuisine, but essential to every course is Chef Villamere’s bakery—working tirelessly to make everything from sourdough loaves to pizza dough to a delectable selection of pastries.
“We don’t stop. We’re running about 20 hours a day,” Villamere says. “We have cookies in your room when you arrive. We are facilitating bread to the tables. We are the last thing that you eat in the dining room if you order dessert.”
As an executive pastry chef, Villamere handles ordering, hiring, and scheduling, as well as communicating with wholesale clients, including several local restaurants and cafés in Picton. From May until the end of October, her team provides baked goods for The Royal’s stand at the weekly Picton Farmers Market. And of course, she coordinates all things bread, pastries, and desserts at the hotel—from the grab-and-go counter to supporting the grill, garde manger and other departments in the kitchen with their baking needs. Villamere works closely with The Royal’s executive chef, Albert Ponzo, on bringing the Italian-inspired farm-to-table menu to life. The hotel’s offerings, including the bakery, evolve with the seasons, based on what’s currently growing in Prince Edward County.
“We’re very lucky because we’ve got the farm, Edwin County Farms, which is a 700-acre farm owned by the Sorbara family. They’re directly involved with the hotel…we get deliveries twice a week from the farm, and they always let us know what they’ve got coming up first before anybody else,” Villamere says.
As we sat down to chat in mid-August, there was still an abundance of fresh fruit in season for Villamere to draw inspiration from. One of the many mouth-watering pastries she showed us was her seasonal fruit galette, made with Ontario peaches and cherries.
“It’s easy right now…because there’s fruit at our fingertips,” Villamere says. “It’s going to start to slow down and change a little bit.” In the coming months, as peak produce season winds down, she’ll have to get creative—integrating Ontario frozen fruits and items grown in the farm’s greenhouses.
Despite the colder weather, Villamere has plenty in store for the bakery this fall and winter, including the return of one of their biggest sellers. From mid-November until after Christmas, The Royal goes all in on panettone.
“We’ve perfected a true panettone,” Villamere says. “We got our recipe from friends of Albert from Italy. It was written in Italian, so we had to translate it.” This year, The Royal will introduce their panettone for the season at Picton’s annual Holly Jolly Market at the historic Crystal Palace. But there is demand for The Royal’s take on this sweet Italian Christmas bread even outside of Prince Edward County. Last year, Villamere ran a panettone pop-up here in the city, taking pre-orders from Toronto-based friends of The Royal and selling extras to intrigued passersby. She plans to run the pop-up again this holiday season and is hoping for an even bigger turnout for the beloved panettone.
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Villamere has been immersed in the pastry world for years now, but baking wasn’t her first love. She’d always had her heart set on cooking, but in 2005, at her first job interview after culinary school, the chef offered her a spot in the pastry department.
“I thought, ‘I have no interest in that whatsoever.’ And he convinced me that this is the place you want to be,” Villamere says. “I realized I got in at a great time because a few years later, everybody was trying to learn desserts or baking.”
The job was at Cambridge’s Langdon Hall, where she learned to make bread, butter, ice cream, and chocolates—and discovered she didn’t want to leave the pastry department. She went on to work as a pastry chef at establishments across Canada, including Raymond’s and The Fogo Island Inn. She travelled around the world, receiving pastry and baking training, and worked with some of the country’s top chefs before joining The Royal Hotel in 2021.
Now, as the executive pastry chef, she relies on a team, so her days don’t need to start as early as they used to. “For many years, I worked dinner service, and sometimes if I was the baker and the dessert person, I was the first person there and last person leaving. Now I’m very fortunate; I have a great team, and I can step back a little bit.”
When planning a menu or creating a new recipe, there are many factors for a pastry chef to consider—balancing textures and flavours, using seasonal ingredients, crafting an artful presentation. But for Villamere, the heart of her job is simply making something that people love to eat.
“Dessert is a treat, and people may or may not eat it very often, but when they do, they just want to enjoy it,” she says.
This means that she is mindful of keeping certain crowd-pleasers as staples on the bakery’s roster—even a simple slice of chocolate cake. During the pandemic, she was short of some ingredients that a different chocolate cake recipe called for, so she used what she had to make her own version. “It’s not Italian. It’s not from the farm…it’s simple. We don’t mess with it. We don’t put anything on the side or add anything to it. It’s not fancy at all, but I think that’s the goal.” Three and a half years later, the same chocolate cake is still a staple on the hotel’s menu.
Villamere tells us that her make-what-you-love approach can apply to home bakers as well. But if you’re still stumped, these are her go-to, crowd-pleasing dessert ideas: “Chocolate tart because everyone loves that. It’s not very difficult…It’s a showstopper. Galette is a good one as well because it’s an easy way to make a pie without making a pie. You can fill it with whatever fruit you’ve got around.”
Before heading back to Picton, Villamere left us with a selection of just some of the goodies available to enjoy at The Royal Hotel’s grab-and-go counter or for bakery pre-order: a cinnamon roll finished with a rum glaze (one of their most popular items), a pain au chocolat, loaves of sourdough bread (made with organic flour and a starter named Francesca), rosemary focaccia, and Villamere’s personal favourite, the almond croissant—more than enough to enjoy until panettone season.
Try Chef Villamere’s creations at The Counter Bar at The Royal Hotel in Picton, or pre-order your favourite loaves, pastries, and sweets for pickup.
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