Rising Star Pastry Chef Renae Connolly of Café ArtScience - Biography

Cambridge, MA

March 2015

Pastry Chef Renae Connolly lives the sweet life. At Café ArtScience, the culinary-art-science-design hybrid space, she and her sweet tooth have found their creative home. It’s not surprising Connolly would end up playing at the forefront of sophisticated, imaginative pastry. Her career has been an exercise in technical grounding and creative expansion. A graduate of the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, Connolly did the requisite stints around her hometown of Fresno, California, before moving east to work at her first big name, big deal kitchen, Clio, under Rick Billings. She rose up the ranks, taking over as pastry chef, leaving to travel and continue to expand her technical and creative horizons.

Connolly spent two and a half years working and staging at different restaurants, ultimately finding a home at polished, progressive Marea in New York City. Connolly was advancing, but home beckoned, and she returned, rounding out her education behind the bar at Clio and later as bar manager at Commonwealth in Cambridge. Rooted in the sweet life, and stacked with skills and vision, Connolly was the superlative choice for pastry chef when Café ArtScience opened its doors. There, Connolly opens up her mind full of progressive, complex, and sweet possibilities to Boston.