The Ritz-Carlton, Naples’ executive pastry chef, Lerome Campbell, draws inspiration for his delicately flourished pastries, towering chocolate sculptures and annual life-size gingerbread house at The Ritz from a variety of muses. His Jamaican upbringing, farm-to-table inclinations, French pastry apprenticeships, eclectic professional background, and affinity for Southwest Florida flavors all play a role. His motivation, on the other hand, is quite simple; Lerome’s creative fervor is driven by boredom.
It’s been a lifelong affliction, the undeniable itch for something new, but a fortuitous one when paired with another attribute emblematic of the artistically leaning chef: He’s a quick learner.
Growing up on the windswept coast of the island nation’s Westmoreland parish, Lerome’s voracious appetite for information, discovery and creativity often left his mother’s house littered with disassembled TVs and furniture the budding pâtissier would pour hours into reconstructing, desperate to understand how everything worked. Time in his mother’s kitchen was no different.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
The Ritz-Carlton, Naples’ executive pastry chef Lerome Campbell is the multi-hyphenate mastermind behind the hotel’s confectionery wonders and life-sized holiday gingerbread house. Growing up helping in his mother’s bakery in Jamaica, Lerome developed an affinity for tropical flavors, which he spins with classic French techniques.
A pastry chef herself, Lerome’s mother sparked his love of the culinary arts and fed his incessant curiosity with recipes that kept his hands and mind busy. A Jamaican fruit cake—made with raisins, cherries and other fruits left to soak in Wray & Nephew Red Label Wine for weeks, if not years (Lerome says “the longer, the better”)—was a staple at her bakery. “I still can’t make it like her,” Lerome says happily. “She’s old-fashioned, you know? She’s one of those people who doesn’t scale anything. They just add a little bit of this and a little bit of that.”
Though it may not precisely match Mama’s, his version of the boozy confection (his comes with measurements) delights on The Ritz-Carlton, Naples’ banquet menu. “I give her all the credit for my creativity,” he says. “I liked how she thought [about baking] and her love for tropical fruits. Growing up with her taste in all these things, baking with her, I think it never really goes away.”
Today, Lerome feels his mother’s influence when infusing his tweezer-refined French desserts with mango and coconut. He’s transported home when pouring rich vats of molasses—a major Jamaican export—into the dough for his playful gingerbread house—an annual attraction that drives viewers in droves to The Ritz’s beach location over the holidays.
Often inspired by Swiss chalet houses and his drives through the Naples Park and Bayshore Arts District neighborhoods, the yearly gingerbread giant isn’t just an aesthetic marvel; it’s a feast for all the senses. Of the innumerable candies and iced edges adorning the structure (construction tips the scales at a ton), Lerome makes his selections with obsessive care: cinnamon-flavored licorice for a festive scent, strawberry chocolate for a candy shop air of sweetness.
Bringing Lerome’s ever-expanding ambitions for the lofty house of sweets to life each year takes a village of bakers and a host of carpenters, who set to work building out the confectionery construction’s supporting structure to the chef’s exacting specifications months in advance. “On my days off, I go to Home Depot or crafting stores and just walk around,” Lerome says. “You’d be surprised at the number of ideas you will come across if you are a creative pastry chef.” He was, after all, a carpenter once—and an electrician, and a mechanic and a computer technician. “When I finished high school and told my mom I wanted to go to culinary school, she said no,” Lerome says. “She said, ‘You’re going to change your mind when you finish your culinary school. You’re going to want to do this or this or this. How about you try all these things and see if that’s what you want to do?’”
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Each career experiment, including earning a degree in art, plays a role in his craft today. When sculpting with chocolate—his favorite medium for the task—Lerome pulls on his carpentry background to achieve mind-bending tall structures ranging from steampunk timepiece-themed sculptures to coiling red dragons to delicately frilled derby hats and behemoth squids with tendrils that curl in and around each other with organic ease. “People will look and say, ‘It’s going to fall, it’s going to fall,’” he says with a laugh. “It’s not going to fall. I know where to put the weight. I know how to balance everything out.” Those skills again came into play when Lerome recently constructed a giant, fully functional Rubik’s Cube out of various desserts, with handmade hardware supporting the array of sweets organized according to color theory for perfect aesthetic balance.
Despite his professional explorations, culinary school inevitably won out. “As a carpenter, I felt like I was going to cut off my finger. As a mechanic, I smelled like grease. Electrician? I’ve been shocked, and being a computer technician was just boring,” Lerome says. Culinary school, with its artistry, attention to detail, and endless opportunities to learn and experiment, was the perfect fit. Lerome attended Jamaica’s Petersfield Vocational Training Center, then worked for a series of resorts around Jamaica, learning whatever he could as quickly as he could before moving on to the next.
Before long, he felt he had nothing left to learn, so his mom encouraged him to find work in the United States, where he’d often visit his Rhode Island-native father. The young chef landed in Southwest Florida, where he soon found work in the kitchen at The Gasparilla Inn under Peter Timmins, one of the country’s rare master chefs, certified by the American Culinary Federation. Peter would often invite other pedigreed chefs to cook, dine and chat, exposing Lerome to a vast array of influences and techniques. Among the masters who walked through the door was Sebastien Thieffine, the then-executive pastry chef at The Ritz-Carlton, Naples, who took Lerome under his wing. In the years that followed, Lerome bounced between jobs under the two culinary icons and jetted around the country to various French culinary training programs whenever he could, learning and advancing at an exponential rate. “I was the head pastry chef [at Gasparilla] in two years,” Lerome says.
This French training opened up new avenues of flavor and design for the artistically inclined pâtissier, reinforcing the technical foundation on which Lerome would build and iterate to form his present-day, intuitive approach to plating. Balanced flavors are paramount, forming the first guiding principle for his visual representation—the composition of each plate is cohesive and avant-garde.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
In October, while polishing the menu for The Ritz-Carlton, Naples’ Italian culinary gem Nolita—home to the chef’s Food Network award-winning tiramisu—Lerome agonized over a new creation blending chocolate, caramel, hazelnut and almond. Bite after bite, the flavors sang, and as their melody translated onto the plate, a crucial element eluded him—how to pipe the crème finish. He leaned back, took in the room, with the sous chefs running to and fro, piping and tweezing and scattering edible rose petals onto a cake, and thought, ‘Wait, why not just do a rose?’ “Sometimes it’s as easy as that. You see something and think, ‘Okay, I can do this. It’s going to be complicated for them to create a whole bunch of these, but it’s going to look great.” Once mastered, each of Lerome’s creations becomes a blueprint for his sous chefs to follow, allowing for myriad variations depending on what’s in season.
Seasonal and local ingredients with a sense of place are foundational to Lerome, who, after two years as Gasparilla’s head pastry chef, ventured north to Vermont to work with Woodstock Inn & Resort, where nearly every ingredient is sourced onsite. When the longing for Southwest Florida’s silken warmth and tropical pastry palette became too much to bear, he returned to the region. He joined mentor-turned-friend Sebastian at The Ritz, who passed the reins of executive chef to Lerome in 2018. Even with his swift rise to success, landing an executive role at The Ritz—where an amateur could easily stand with the pros anywhere else—was a major leap. “You have to understand that The Ritz-Carlton, Naples is a flagship hotel,” he says. “At that time, we had one of the founding fathers of The Ritz-Carlton (the venerable Edward Staros) as the general manager, so the standard was very high.”
Now, with seven years in the job under his belt, the subtropical flavors of our region continue to ignite Lerome’s imagination, yielding creations like a passion fruit-infused meringue, white chocolate and coconut ganache, and innumerable concoctions that lean on Key lime, strawberry and orange. His deconstructed pineapple cake with honey crémeux and mango passion foam cascades across the plate, golden and warm. Lerome harnesses the full power of Southwest Florida’s bounty by collaborating with local farmers, like Farmer Mike’s in Bonita Springs. “When it’s homegrown by farmers that love and care for their product, you can tell the difference, and you will also taste the difference in your food,” Lerome says.
Photography by Anna Nguyen