Our Story
how it began
It started with a television screen and a plane ticket. Somewhere around 2019, Oren Cohen caught an episode of the Israeli edition of Chef's Table featuring a French baker named Stephan Laurent. A few months later, a business trip brought Oren to Shanghai, where Stephan happened to be running a restaurant. Oren walked in, they talked for hours, and by the end of the night they had exchanged numbers with the vague promise of staying in touch.
Three years went by. Oren, an entrepreneur and obsessive home cook, had spent most of them in his Miami kitchen perfecting the kind of food he actually wanted to eat: bright, Mediterranean, built around real ingredients. One evening his wife Alexis looked at him and said something to the effect of, "You should open a restaurant. And call that friend from Shanghai." So he did. Within a year, Stephan and his wife had packed up their life and moved to Miami.
What followed was five years of recipe testing, technique refining, and the kind of arguments only two people who genuinely care about bread and olive oil can have. The result is Madame Olivia, named after Oren and Alexis's daughter. A French bakery and Mediterranean bistro that feels like the best version of what both men have always cooked: Stephan's classical French training meeting Oren's instinct for clean, generous, healthy food.
