From Failing Choux Pastry To Fine French Cakes: The Malaysian Chef Who Found His Calling In Melbourne

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Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Eigan Ting had his future mapped out.

Pure science stream, strong grades, and a father who was an engineer.

The plan was accounting; it was sensible, stable, and — as he eventually admitted to himself — completely wrong for him.

“I realised I couldn’t do a sedentary lifestyle,” he said. “I’m not sitting there.”

So he enrolled in culinary school instead, and promptly became one of the worst students in his class.

The subject that broke him was pastry.

Something as foundational as choux pastry — the dough behind éclairs and cream puffs — eluded him entirely.

His chef pulled him aside; why couldn’t he do what everyone else was doing?

The answer, it turned out, was that he didn’t yet understand why it worked.

The Moment Everything Changed

The shift came when Ting stopped trying to follow recipes and started treating the kitchen like a laboratory.

Pastry, he realised, was chemistry; ingredients reacted, and temperatures mattered.

There were reasons behind every step — and those reasons were exactly the kind of problem his science-trained brain was built to enjoy.

From that point, his trajectory became unusually deliberate; after graduating, he moved to Singapore — as many young Malaysian chefs did at the time, drawn by better pay and more international exposure.

He completed an internship at a five-star hotel, then secured a position at a Michelin-starred restaurant.

After that, Ting moved into large-scale production at TWG Tea, one of Singapore’s most recognised luxury brands, where he helped train the Malaysia team and got his first real look at how a commercial kitchen actually runs at scale.

Each stop was chosen with a specific gap in mind; hotel for foundations, fine dining for precision and production for volume – he was collecting contexts.

Melbourne, A Visa, And A Lot Of Freedom

The move to Australia came through a sponsorship from a restaurant owner, whom Ting describes only as a well-known public figure.

Given unusual creative freedom to design his own dessert menu, he encountered something unexpected: seasons.

In Malaysia and Singapore, the same fruits are available year-round — in Melbourne, the menu had to change with what was actually growing.

It was disorienting at first, then liberating.

He runs Sucre du Jour with his wife, Josephin Tan — also Malaysian, and someone he met during their years working in Singapore.

There is something quietly poetic about that: two Malaysians who found each other in someone else’s city, then built something entirely their own in another.

The first year, we were struggling a lot. In our second year, we started to be a little bit more on our feet.

He began travelling — to Japan, France, across Asia — taking masterclasses with pastry champions and building a technical vocabulary no single kitchen could have given him.

Slowly, a personal style emerged: French technique as the foundation, but lighter, more delicate, less bound by European tradition.

Flavours that were familiar but not predictable.

In 2020, during the pandemic, he and his wife opened their first shop.

The Bakery That COVID Accidentally Helped

The timing looked terrible on paper.

Melbourne was entering what would become one of the world’s longest cumulative lockdown periods.

But Sucre du Jour — the name means “sugar of the day” in French — opened in Toorak, one of Victoria’s most affluent suburbs, with a simple setup and almost no branding.

It worked, partly because the timing was right and partly because the product was genuinely different.

People had discretionary income and nowhere to go; orders came in, and the business grew.

Five years later, Sucre du Jour has a second location in Melbourne’s CBD, at Shop 24, 250 Spencer Street, open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm.

The team is small — four full-time staff and a handful of part-timers — but the production is precise.

Everything is made in-house; celebration cakes are designed to be last-minute friendly, sent out with instructions so customers know exactly how to serve them.

The Bakery He Killed, And The Cake He’ll Never Change

Not everything survived; for a time, Sucre du Jour ran both a bakery and a celebration cake business.

The bakery side — bread and everyday items — was doing well commercially, but Ting found himself unhappy.

He shut the bakery side down and doubled down on fine French pastry and celebration cakes.

It was a deliberate narrowing, and by his own account, the right call; two items have stayed on the menu since the beginning and will not be leaving.

The first is a lemon tart — built from whole lemons, using every part of the fruit across multiple preparations.

The second is a cereal-based dessert inspired by a trip to New York, where he encountered a version with cereal ice cream that struck him as genuinely playful.

He rebuilt it from scratch, incorporating a chocolate component the way a French pastry chef might, and the result became one of the bakery’s signatures.

Then there is the Mont Blanc — a French classic, traditionally made with chestnut cream.

Sucre du Jour has made a different version every year for six years, and this year’s is Japanese-influenced; previous versions have included black sesame and blueberry.

The chestnut version, done once, was inspired by a version he encountered from a celebrated chef whose interpretation he found extraordinary.

A Loyalty That Outlasted the Address

Labour remains his biggest challenge — a problem he says is common across Melbourne’s hospitality industry, and one he believes will force food businesses to operate smarter in the years ahead.

He is already working on the systems and processes that would allow Sucre du Jour to scale, with a third location as a stated goal.

Someday, he hopes, that expansion might reach Malaysia — a homecoming of sorts, bringing back everything the years abroad have built.

But the part of the business he describes with the most warmth is simpler than that.

“They started as customers,” he said, of the regulars who have followed the bakery across locations and years.

He paused.

This article was produced following the Cool Escapes to Melbourne and Beyond familiarisation trip, organised by Visit Victoria, 24–29 June. All photographs were taken by the writer.

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