The Ilford Pastry Chef With a Michelin Kitchen Behind Her

Most of London's serious pastry lives in one of two places. Behind the kitchen doors of a hotel restaurant, or in a West End shop window with a queue outside.

Fatima Saleh is doing it from Ilford.

Her Instagram bio lists her as a pastry chef at Marcus, Marcus Wareing's Michelin-starred restaurant in Belgravia. Her own business, The White Tiger Patisserie, takes that training home to East London: French pastry, cakes and event catering, all of it halal, available for collection or delivery.

That last part matters more than it sounds. For a lot of Muslim families, proper French pâtisserie has quietly been off the menu. Gelatine in the mousse, alcohol in the soaking syrup, a glaze nobody can vouch for. You either asked a lot of awkward questions at the counter or you just didn't bother. Fatima has built a business that removes the question entirely.

Two accounts, two sides of one cook

Fatima runs two Instagram accounts, and it helps to know which is which.

@thewhitetigerpatisserie is the business. It's where the finished work lives: the pastries, the cakes, the dessert tables for events. Her bio is short and to the point. French pastry, cakes and event catering. Halal. Michelin-trained. Ilford, East London.

@platedbyfatima_ is where she cooks for everyone else. The account used to go by @foodxaffair, and it's built a real audience as a recipe channel, with several of her TikTok videos passing 100,000 views. This is the home-cooking side of Fatima: rice dishes, Ramadan meals, kitchen basics, quick sweets.

What Michelin training actually gives you

"Michelin-trained" gets thrown around a lot, so it's worth saying what it means in a pastry section.

It means every component is weighed to the gram, every day, and the plate at 10pm looks exactly like the plate at 6pm. It means learning that a mousse set a few minutes too long is a mousse you start again. You don't learn that from a course. You learn it from a head chef who sends things back.

That discipline is what Fatima brings to a celebration cake in Ilford. It's the difference between a cake that looks good in a photo and one that still holds its shape when it's cut at the party.

What she makes

At The White Tiger Patisserie, the work is classic French pastry and cakes, made to order. She also caters events, which is where a pastry chef's skills really show: forty desserts that all have to look identical and survive a car journey.

This Pecan crusted banana bread with vanilla brown sugar caramel chantilly, salted caramel and sesame tuille looks quite incredible. Watch some of her magic on Instagram.

Over on Plated by Fatima, the food gets more personal. Her Ramadan series ran as a recipe a day, with maqluba landing on day 15: the layered rice, chicken and vegetable dish that gets flipped out of the pot at the table. There's a Yemeni zurbian with tender lamb and a spicy herb chilli sauce, which she shared as an Eid dish. There's fatteh made with aubergine. There's a Turkish cacık, with a lesson on how to actually pronounce it.

She also posts the unglamorous stuff that makes people better cooks. One video is simply a reminder to devein your prawns, followed by grilled butterflied prawns. And because she's a pastry chef at heart, there are sweets too, like no-bake pistachio kunefe cookies made from just three ingredients.

In one caption she makes the point that, for a chef, the ingredients and where they come from are part of how a dish tells its story. You can see that across both accounts. The fine-dining pastry and the family rice dishes come from the same place.

Why she's worth knowing about

There are plenty of home bakers in London, and plenty of halal cake makers. There are very few who have done service in a Michelin-starred pastry kitchen and then chosen to bring that level of work to their own neighbourhood.

That's the pitch, really. You get the technique of a fine-dining pastry chef, without the West End postcode, and without having to wonder what's in the glaze.

If you've got a wedding, an Eid gathering, an aqiqah or a birthday coming up in East London, she should be on your shortlist.

How to order and where to follow

The White Tiger Patisserie works out of Ilford, with collection and delivery available. The simplest way to enquire about a cake or event order is through her Instagram.

• Orders, cakes and catering: @thewhitetigerpatisserie

• Recipes and home cooking: @platedbyfatima_ on Instagram and TikTok

Follow both. One will feed your guests. The other will teach you to make maqluba.