CITY Issue 53

Living the Good Life in the Big City THE AMUSED BOUCHE Half Baked Slave to grandma’s pie recipe? Free spirit behind the stove? How about both? Eva Hagberg discovers that the divide between bakers and cooks is blurring. IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, OR SO I THOUGHT, that there are two types of people who work with food for a living. There are the cooks—flashy, experimental, flamboyant, unafraid of heat and change, and living on the edge. And then there are the bakers—quiet, careful, thoughtful, afraid of too much heat and mismeasuring and uncertainty. I have always been a baker, a careful leveler of teaspoons, a compulsive checker of the clock. I am undaunted by Julia Child’s cake recipes that call for a whittling of each of two bowls of ingredients—wet and dry—by thirds and sixths, and I was probably one of the few 13-year-olds I knew of who made ultra-elaborate desserts for eight without so much as a moment of worry. But ask me to cook a steak and I freeze in terror. There is something about the public ease of cooking, about the way that the recipes are seen more as guidelines than absolute truths, about the way I have watched people look at the fridge to see what they have and then make something up, that strikes at the very core of everything about preparing food that makes me nervous. I couldn’t be the only one, I figured. Surely everyone comes down on one side of the divide or the other, or at least has a general tendency towards either retentive pastry or expressive cooking. So I believed, happily, until last month I noticed two pastry chefs—Sam Mason and Will Goldfarb—had both opened joints that offered savory as well as sweet. Then I remembered my dinner at pastry chef Pichet Ong’s restaurant P*Ong, and suddenly wondered if maybe, just possibly, I was alone in my obsessive-compulsive baking-only. So I set out to discover just what the difference between the two is (if there is one) and if my truth is, indeed, universally acknowledged. I started with Ong, who opened P*Ong in April after working as a pastry chef in Jean-Georges’ Spice Market. There, Ong’s desserts started standing out on their own, particularly after the then-Times-fill-in-critic Amanda Hesser discussed just how her spoon “found” tapioca pearls and everyone else discussed just how Hesser discussed her spoon. P*Ong started out as a mostly dessert place—with a few necessary savory dishes here and there— but Ong says now that it’s mostly the savory things that make the cut. Still, pastry, he says, takes a completely different mindset, and it’s one that his training as an architect (those most uptight of professionals) fits right into. “Pastry chefs work a lot more with their hands,” he says. “It’s very tactile.” Sounds like playing with dough is like playing with play-dough, and for a second I think I’m on the wrong track here, but he corrects me on my assumption that this means it’s all loosey-goosey. “You’re following the recipe, but you still have to feel it—how it crumbles, when it falls apart in your hand,” he says. “For chefs maybe the closest is feeling the temperature of a meat, but that’s not really feeling the inside of it.” So it’s not necessarily that pastry chefs are super OCD compared to chefs, I think, but that they’re just incredibly intricately invested in every last moment of everything. Nicole Kaplan, pastry chef at Del Posto, who has managed the enviable feat of making a name for herself even while producing what is essentially the end of a Mario Batali meal, sees it just like that. “There is a lot more attention to detail and patience and exactness that you have to have,” she says. “A lot more prep work goes into it—you might make eleven elements for just one dish.” While there are cooks that work on that level of intricacy—Thomas Keller and his multi-multi-multi-stage dishes come to mind—Kaplan sees what the boys (and it is so often boys) do in the kitchen as much rougher. “A lot of it is just adding a sauce,” she says. As for the idea that there’s a fundamental divide between the two? “I really think it’s about different personality types,” she says. Hypothesis: still being proven. The last pastry chef I talk to turns out to have worked on the line, so she’s got more than an inside view of both sides of things. Emily Isaac left her position as pastry chef at Union Square Café to open the Park Slope place Trois Pommes five months ago. It’s on my daily walk home so, full disclosure, I have been rigorous in my investigation of her baking, which has always struck me as just a little bit different from the ultra-dainty things I’d come to expect at sweets-focused restaurants like the now-shuttered Room 4 Dessert or P*Ong. “I come from a cooking background,” Isaac explains. “I’m much more relaxed, I make up a lot of my own stuff, I’m not quite as anal as other pastry chefs.” Shocked, I ask how it’s possible to make things up in pastry. Doesn’t it kill the dough to have one more teaspoon of flour? Won’t the cake be ruined with the addition of one too-large egg? Worse, has my spastic doesn’t-bakewell-with-others over-control been all for nothing? “Obviously the dough has to be the same every time,” she says. “But other things—the filling, the flavors, you can experiment.” In a snap, the particular dark notes of her pumpkin cheesecake make sense, her salty caramel tart comes together. Isaac came to baking after deciding that she didn’t love being on the line— the hours and the roughness of it—but she says that she runs Trois Pommes like a restaurant, that getting ready to open is like getting ready for service. She’s mixing and matching but it seems to work for her. Then again, Ong’s delicate approach is necessary for the dishes he makes—fine-grained tastes like a Meyer lemon sorbet with mascarpone or a sesame Napoleon—and Kaplan’s complete removal from the rest of the Batali world is necessary for her complex desserts that involve moments like caramel popcorn and peanut butter powder. I thought I might have been too rigid in calling myself a baker, in marking such a firm division between two similar camps. But even with Isaac’s line cook–inspired approach, Ong’s embrace of the savory, and Kaplan’s alliance with an empire, there’s something particular about the detail, the proportion, and the perfection of what they create. There really are two types of people in this world. And I, for now, am completely a baker. CITY 39

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CITY Issue 53

CITY Issue 53 Contents Letter from CITY Our Friends Action Wanted City Moment In Rogue Fast Food The Amused Bouche Fit Unnatural Wonders Paradise Found Gold Standard Parc Yourself Get Wet Naughty or Nice Raise the Roof Luxury Is... Bird of Prey Hardwear To Die For Twisted Sisters Basic Instinct Where To Buy It Socials Icon

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