Grahm Hornigold Is One of the U.K.'s Finest Pastry Chefs — How Much Dough Does He Have?

When Graham Hornigold was 14 years old, he got a job at Usher’s bakery in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England. He started out scraping the floors, filling doughnuts, and packing bread. It was clear from the very start that baking spoke to him. His employers noticed the same thing, which is they stopped paying him, bought the young boy a set of knives, and eventually sent him to a catering college, per Great British Chefs.

While chatting with Cacao Barry, Graham revealed that the hardest thing to master, in terms of pastry, was sugar. "I confess I am not a sugar king," he said. "I am much happier working with chocolate." And work with chocolate, he did, along with numerous other sweet ingredients. Graham is one of the U.K.'s finest pastry chefs and has been in the treat game for more than 30 years. What is his net worth? Here's what we know about his dough.

The life of a pastry chef isn't typically filled with riches beyond one's wildest dreams. Graham has never publicly disclosed what he has earned, but the Izazov Bend website estimates that it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. He has worked in prestigious restaurants and establishments such as The Lygon Arms Hotel, The Park Lane Hotel, and Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park, London.

From 2011 until 2017, Graham worked as a consultant for the Hakkasan Group. While there, he "oversaw the pastry sections of Hakkasan's portfolio around the world including Hakkasan, Yauatcha, Sake No Hana and HKK as well as a development and production kitchen which produced as many as 12,000 macarons and 1,200 intricate cakes every week," per the Great British Chefs website. He also helped Hakkasan expand from four U.K.-based restaurants to 47 all over the world.

A year after leaving Hakkasan, Graham founded Smart Patisserie, a pastry consultation and management company. He also started his gourmet finger doughnut and coffee company, Longboys Doughnuts. "We’re serious about long doughnuts and patisserie with surprising flavor twists," says the website. If you're in the U.K., feel free to order Longboys directly from their website. You can also find them at Market Halls or Coal Drops Yard.

Four years after Graham created Smart Patisserie, he founded Smart Collective in 2022. The Collective focuses on consultation, training, and product development in the culinary arts. When discussing his career with Restaurant Online U.K., Graham said that one thing he wished he had been told at the beginning of his career is to always trim the fat and control only what you can. "This would have saved a lot of stress in my early years as a pastry chef, striving for perfection," he said.