It is a sunny morning in May and boulangerie Fournil Didot in the 14th arrondissement of Paris is buzzing with patrons. The industrial oven in the kitchen is spitting out warm baguettes and loaves of airy French bread — Boule de pain — their crusts golden and dusted with flour, dispersing the heady primal scent of fresh bread being baked. Neat little rows of croissants, pain au chocolat, and pastries including macaroons and flans, and sandwiches like jambon-beurre, line the glass counter.

But the bestseller at Didot is their baguette and there is a reason for it. Didot’s Baguette — officially Baguette de tradition française — has recently been ranked number one, picked from around 150 (143, to be precise) bakeries around Paris and crowned earlier this year. A jury comprising experts from trade federations, journalists and citizens evaluated each competing baguette based on various factors in an annual competition called Concours de la meilleure baguette de Paris in late February.

Located in a predominantly French speaking neighbourhood, Fournil Didot is a typical boulangerie as far as French bakeries go in Paris, except for one detail. Its owner, the baguette competition winner, is the Sri Lankan Tamil baker Sithamparappillai Jegatheepan. He is missing this morning because he is accepting his award from Paris’s recently elected mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, at this year’s Fête du Pain festival that celebrates the French craft of breadmaking.

“I did not expect to win, so it came as a surprise,” Jegatheepan tells me later. Civil war forced Jegatheepan, whose family were farmers in Jaffna, to flee Sri Lanka in 2003. He landed in Italy and travelled to France where he sought asylum.

His lack of French language skills restricted his employment opportunities, and he says he took whatever jobs he could find. “One of my first jobs was at a French restaurant that served cuisine from Normandy,” he recalls. He started out washing dishes in the kitchen and slowly rose through the ranks to become a cook, a cuisinier, expert at handling prized ingredients like scallops and entrecôte – a premium cut of beef.

By then, cooking, even as he confesses he had little to no experience in it back home in Jaffna, became his professional expertise. In 2008, he joined a French bakery in Paris and learned to make macaroons, a notoriously difficult French pastry to master. In a decade, with the confidence of a professional baker who learned the ropes of French baking by putting in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, he became an entrepreneur starting Fournil Didot with a few friends. The bakery was so successful he started another one down the street in 2022.

On the surface, Jegatheepan’s story might appear to be one of a passionate small-fish baker rising through the ranks in the roughshod world of French baking to win a prestigious competition. It is all that too, but it is also one of perseverance, where success is not dictated just by passion and hard work but also influenced by circumstances that forced him into the business of gastronomy.

Back at the competition, Jegatheepan’s baguette was tested to meet the stringent requirements of the competition for its shape, size, crumb structure resulting from fermentation, and its saltiness. A blind taste test followed that crowned the winner.

“Traditional baguette is made only with flour, water, salt, and leaven (yeasty dough),” he says. “Anyone can perfect the measurements, but the success lies in factors like fermentation.” Jegatheepan says his bulk fermentation lasts for 12 hours for every batch of baguette.

The winning carries a prize money of 4,000€ along with a chance to deliver a year-long supply of baguettes to Elysee Palace, the French president’s residence, starting June. Jegatheepan had already visited the palace after an invitation, an experience he describes as surreal. “I was introduced to the head chef of the palace, and I got to tell all the kitchen staff about my baking process,” he adds.

Paris’s annual baguette competition is increasingly becoming diverse, the winners representing various immigrant subgroups. Jegatheepan himself is the second Sri Lankan to win the competition, the first being Tharshan Selvarajah, who won the competition in 2023 and runs his own bakery bakery Au Levain des Pyrénées in Paris.

The win has brought fame, followed by an increase in his customer-base, he can now also proudly display his certificate in the bakery. “Recently a Korean journalist followed me around because she wanted to observe my work for a whole day,” he says, amused. There have been calls and interview requests from everywhere from both sides of the Atlantic, although none from either India or Sri Lanka until I visited him early May on the day he received his award from the Paris mayor.

The day I visited Didot, Jegatheepan’s staff thrust a couple of fresh baguettes into my hands, apologising for his absence. Later as my friend and I savoured it in a nearby café — I pulled it apart and it gave in with a delicious crunch to reveal itself with a mildly nutty and tangy mouthfeel, a result of long fermentation.

People like Jegatheepan’s win in the closely gatekept world of French gastronomy represents one simple truth — staking ownership of food traditions is a fool’s errand because gastronationalism will crumble in the face of good taste created by talented professionals, no matter their nationality.

For now, Jegatheepan is busy basking in the success of his win and fielding interview requests from around the world. There is a three-year limit on his re-entry in the competition. He will compete again, he says, because the taste of winning is indisputably addictive. “The competition is going to get more intense in the coming years, but I’m prepared for it,” he declares.