The best chocolate soufflé in Los Angeles does not come out of a $30,000 combi oven. It does not come out of a wood-fired hearth or a steam-injected deck oven or anything with a nameplate that makes equipment salesmen weep.It comes out of a toaster oven.Okay, technically it’s a Breville Smart Oven, the gleaming countertop appliance you may have gotten for a wedding present and the one currently crisping chicken nuggets and poppy bagels in a million American kitchens. But here in Los Angeles at Pasjoli, chef Dave Beran’s acclaimed French bistro in Santa Monica, that little box on the pastry station is the soufflé machine. And once you know chefs like Beran are using Brevilles, you start seeing them everywhere serious food gets made: in Michelin-level kitchens, in recipe-development labs, on photo shoots, in cafés running their entire baking programs off a machine most people use to reheat last night’s pizza.Chef Dave Beran prepares his table side duck for customers at Pasjoli. Some of his Michelin-star worthy pastries comes out of a Breville Smart Oven.Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesFull Disclosure: I’m One Of ThemI should say up front that I’m a convert, which is probably why I notice these things. Six years ago I wrote about the cult of the Breville Smart Oven Air among home cooks (the texting! tweeting! the evangelizing masses!). Since then, things at my house have escalated. We own a vintage O’Keefe & Merritt stove, a chrome-and-porcelain beauty that’s a little like having a 1958 Buick in our kitchen. It’s a workhorse but now it mostly fries eggs and makes pancakes. Everything else happens in the Breville. I make toast in it. I warm up Trader Joe’s meatloaf in it (don’t judge). It’s impossibly adept at crisping up frozen tater tots. My wife is a professional chocolatier and the appliance has become a business companion. She roasts cacao beans, dehydrates pineapples and peaches for inclusions. She dries her polycarbonate chocolate molds at precise low heat. At some point I stopped thinking of the Breville as a toaster oven and started thinking of it as “the” oven, with a large classic car backup nearby.Still, I figured this was a home-cook phenomenon. Then I started hearing the rumors.The Breville Whisper NetworkBrevilleIt began with a tip from inside the industry: professional kitchens were buying consumer Smart Ovens and putting them to work on the line. The big rumor (and I couldn’t confirm it) is that The French Laundry uses Brevilles for pastry. So, too, I’ve heard, does Galit in Chicago--a Michelin one-star run by a James Beard Award-winning chef. There’s a snapshot floating around of a coffee shop near Seattle’s Pike Place Market with a serious commercial rapid-cook oven on the counter... and a Breville Smart Oven sitting right on top of it. Maybe it’s just me but I find this stuff fascinating. Some of the best chefs in the country, with access to all the finest tools, are using what I just used to make a baked potato. Is this really happening? To find out, I posted on social media and started calling chefs.The responses poured in. On Threads, one cook says he’s run a café’s baking and reheating program on two Breville Joule ovens (for three years with both units still running strong). Vanessa Musi, the French-trained pastry chef behind Austin’s Healthy Baking Lab, teaches with the oven and says many of her bakers use it (her pro tips: it runs hot, so lower your baking temps and consider preheating twice). A professional food stylist confessed she prefers it to her full-size oven. Cookbook author, recipe developer and two-time James Beard finalist Nik Sharma commented that he uses his constantly for professional recipe testing — with the disclosure that he’s “partnered with Breville.” Understood, but the man tests recipes for a living and this is still the machine he uses.Even Alton Brown, patron saint of kitchen-gear skepticism, has called himself “fanatically dedicated” to his Breville countertop side piece.But the holy-grail confirmation came from Santa Monica.The Michelin-Starred Soufflé ShootoutDave Beran is not a man who improvises his equipment choices. He spent years as chef de cuisine at Alinea and executive chef of Next in Chicago, won a James Beard Award there, earned a Michelin star at his late tasting-menu restaurant Dialogue, another at Pasjoli, and this June collected both the 2026 James Beard Award for Best Chef: California and a Michelin star for Seline, his surrealist Santa Monica tasting-menu restaurant. When Beran designs a kitchen, he thinks like an engineer.Here’s what he told me by email: “Our kitchen design stems from my time at Alinea and the idea that the kitchen is a workspace designed to evolve with the team, menu, and concept. We are always on the hunt for versatile equipment that functions at a very high level and is also mobile.”A few years back, Beran was catching up with a friend who works at Breville and who had once cooked alongside him at Alinea. They were talking through R&D headaches when the friend made a suggestion: try one of the countertop ovens.“We used it at Pasjoli for a bit and found that it baked a more consistent soufflé than any of our other ovens, including a combi as well as a convection and static oven,” Beran said.In a head-to-head against the heavy artillery of a Michelin-caliber kitchen — the combi oven alone can cost more than a car — the $400 countertop unit won, and on the dessert perhaps most famous for humiliating professionals.“Shortly thereafter, we had two Brevilles on the pastry station.”Eight To Ten Breville Ovens And CountingIt didn’t stop at two. “We have probably purchased 8 to 10 of them over the last 8 or so years,” said Beran, who, for the record, does not have a Breville partnership. “We have them at both Pasjoli and Seline and use them as well at offsite events.”When Beran built out Seline — a kitchen famously conceived in a color scheme of near-total black, down to the equipment — he specifically requested his Brevilles in black to match.But it’s the function that matters most. “One at Pasjoli has basically run for 24 hours straight for the last year and a half, moving from dehy mode to bake, etc,” he writes. “They aren’t necessarily commercial," Beran said, “but they handle the work we put them through, and for the price I'll happily replace every two years if I need to.”I guess that’s true. At a cost of between $399 to $499 a unit (and you can find plenty of slightly used models for much less), a chef could burn through a new Breville every year for two decades and still not touch the price of one commercial combi oven.About That Breville Oven Warranty...To be clear, you have to know what you’re getting into. Breville’s warranty language is unambiguous that the coverage does not apply to products purchased for commercial use, meaning hotels, offices, restaurants, or “other business capacity.” So pros, you’re on your own, warranty-wise.The pros do not seem to care. Chefs point to the same features home cooks rave about: the Element IQ system’s independent heating elements and PID temperature control, which eliminate the hot spots and thermal mood swings that plague even expensive ovens; the super-convection fan; the fact that one box can proof, bake, roast, air-fry, dehydrate and reheat; and (crucially for modern kitchens built around induction and mobility) you can pick the thing up and move it. For Beran, whose menus and stations are in constant evolution, an oven that plugs into any 120-volt outlet is no doubt part of the creative toolkit. So Which One Do The Pros Use?Two models sit at the top of the food chain. The Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro (BOV900, about $400) is the OG pro-whisperer, with 13 functions, six quartz elements and a cubic foot of capacity. The Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro (BOV950, about $500) is its app-connected sibling, adding Joule Autopilot guided cooking and remote control from your phone. Some Reddit users say the 950’s not worth the extra $100 for something most home users will try twice and never use again. Others really like it. Either way, know that you’re buying not a toaster oven, but a piece of equipment some of the best chefs in America trust with their fussiest dishes, including the most temperamental dessert in the canon.Just maybe don’t mention the restaurant thing to the Breville Oven warranty department.Also From ForbesForbesThe Museum That Charges You $129 To Read Your HeartbeatBy David HochmanForbesSkip Japan’s Tourist Circuit And Walk These Ancient TrailsBy David HochmanForbes5 Alluring Hotels Built Into Train StationsBy David Hochman