Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
In case you associate dessert with all things sweet and fluffy, think again. As dining editor George Mahe discovered over the past year, in visiting the region’s finest pastry chefs and studying countless dessert menus, it’s often anything but.
“Pastry-making is a science,” explained Chouquette’s Simone Faure. “There is no fixing in pastry. There’s math and science and emotion involved. If a pastry chef screws something up, it gets thrown out—what was money is now garbage.”
Most top pastry chefs perfect their craft only after years as apprentices, learning each step through painstaking repetition and long hours under the watchful eye of the industry’s best. Faure recalls a year early in her career spent prepping and flat-icing cakes again and again, with her mentor adding the finishing touches—and taking all the glory. “It was very Karate Kid,” she says, “all work and no credit.”
It’s no coincidence that Faure’s successor at The Ritz-Carlton, Nathaniel Reid, wanted to be a scientist when he was a boy. Instead, he attended Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. “There are what we call chef’s desserts, ones that allow for freelancing and interpretation,” he explained, “and things like entremets, which follow a more structured formula.” Reid learned to make such delicate creations from an MOF, or Meilleur Ouvrier de France, one of the “best artisans of France”—a rare distinction.
Chesterfield-based chocolatier Rick Jordan was also fortunate enough to learn from an MOF in Europe. “The art is held in such high regard that every piece was expected to be perfect,” he recalled. “Just when you learned something new, they said, ‘Good, now go do it half a bazillion times.’” (Fortunately, we diners are on the receiving end of all that agonizing practice.)
So why all the pressure over pastries? Well, simply put, dessert represents the last opportunity for restaurants to make a good impression—and the finer establishments pay top dollar for quality pastry chefs. Yet, as Mahe found, rarely do restaurants post their dessert menus online. Restaurateurs might contend it’s to preserve the mystique, or because of a more practical reason: Desserts often change, with seasonal ingredients coming and going. But Mahe proposes a little more disclosure. “It could be a further enticement for potential diners,” he says, “a way to seal the deal.”
And if this month’s cover story—with its cookies and cakes, tiramisu and stuffed tarts—proves nothing else, it shows that St. Louis has no shortage of ways to seal the deal.
