Chef Marco Canora Defends Dessert
It’s the beginning and the end that people remember most. That’s why dessert matters. It’s the final moment, that last bit of sweet.
My pastry chef, Siobhan Decarlo, was with me for a long time, but after two and a half years of running the department, she wanted to get out of the restaurant business. She stayed on for eight months as I looked for a new pastry chef, and when I finally hired another woman, she was the perfect fit until her family suffered some bad news, and she had to leave with very short notice.
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It was an awful situation, and it left the restaurant in a tough spot. But as it was happening, I’d just come off of reading Adam Platt’s article, “The Dark Age of Desserts,” and Josh Ozersky’s piece asking why people even have pastry departments when all anybody ever wants is a piece of cake or a little bite of pudding? And I thought, You know, this could be an opportunity to rethink how I run my restaurant.
Pastry departments with their $10-$12 desserts aren’t known to be great revenue generators. And lately, sugar and simple carbs have been so demonized that many people avoid it like the plague. Typically less than 40 percent of our diners opt for dessert.
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Understandably, fewer and fewer restaurants are keeping pastry chefs. The ones that do aren’t acting from financial motivations. They do so because they believe that pastry chefs add value to the bigger picture, like fresh bread before the meal, baked goods at brunch, or ingredients for savory, like the brioche we make in-house for our foie gras torchon. I’ve never questioned the value that these touches add, and thankfully for the time being, Siohban has come back. But she doesn’t want to stay forever, and I need to figure out what I want to do about our pastry department at Hearth. At the moment, I’m entertaining three scenarios.
Option A: I hire a pastry chef and a pastry cook and do what I’ve been doing for ten years. This is the most expensive option with the most challenges, but it yields the best results.
Option B: I make the pastry chef job more appealing, give the chef regular hours—Monday-through-Friday, nine to five. No late nights, no service, production only. The savory cooks would handle plating during service. The hope being, a happy pastry chef will stick around for years to come, and I save some much-needed dollars.
Option C: I don’t hire a pastry chef. I buy my sorbets and ice cream, offer a great cheese board, and I’m already halfway there. For the rest, my team of chefs and cooks would create a repertoire of simple, satisfying desserts we know our guests will love. I.e. An ice cream sundae, a panna cotta, a chocolate budino. You get the idea. There would be five desserts on the menu, and it would save me an immense amount of money.
So those are my options. How I’ll choose will depend on what hat I want to put on. If I want to be the savvy businessman who’s driven by numbers and profit margins, the answer is simple: option C. The guests probably wouldn’t even perceive it, and we would figure out a way to manage. But if I want to be the restaurateur who cares deeply about the guest experience, then I’m going to opt for getting a hardworking, passionate person who wants to drive the department and provide constantly changing seasonal desserts that wow my customers.
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As for now, I’m planning to hire a pastry chef. If I went with option C, it would be a dumbed down approach. I doubt any of my customers would balk if I served great gelatos and sorbets and a good olive oil cake because ultimately, I think Josh Ozersky is right. People aren’t looking for some grand experience at the end of a meal. Half are full and don’t want anything and the other half—most of them would be satisfied with a little something sweet. It could literally be a square of really good dark chocolate.
But necessity isn’t a benchmark for quality, and not every decision revolves around profit. I don’t need to go to the green market four days a week. And I don’t need to change the menu as much as I do. And I don’t need to buy $20/gallon cream from the Finger Lakes. I do these things because I want to create a culture in my restaurant where we act according to a belief system rather than fulfilling the basic demands of a demographic. I want to deliver a product that is consistently great and evolving, and in order to do that, my restaurant demands and requires a pastry chef.
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