Young at heart: fine-dining chefs offer novel, grown-up takes on childhood favorites

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 24, 2005 by Erica Duecy

S'mores, root beer floats, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are no longer just kids' stuff.

More and more pastry chefs are offering grown-up versions of those favorite retro treats at upscale and fine-dining restaurants around the country.

This haute dessert trend marks a second generation of retro revisions, following the success of Thomas Keller's cinnamon doughnuts and coffee semifreddo at the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., and David Burke's cheesecake lollipops at david burke & donatella in New York, both of which received extensive media attention.

Those trend-setting contributions likely inspired the nostalgic creativity of many of the latest entrants in the retro dessert arena. Burke, for one, continues to explore the concept with his "boardwalk plate," a dessert consisting of macadamia-nut-flecked caramel corn, black-pepper-specked cotton candy, a funnel cake with powdered sugar and a vanilla-ice-cream sandwich.

Burke says he is attracted to retro desserts as a fun, lighthearted outlet for creative expression. "Chefs are always looking for something to stimulate their creative appetites."

S'mores are among the childhood treats that have received a grown-up makeover recently. One Pico, an upscale American restaurant at Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., has gained a following for its s'mores. There chef Matt Lyman makes marshmallows and sweet graham crackers in-house and serves them alongside pots of warm dark- and milk-chocolate sauces, for dipping.

At C&L restaurant, a new San Francisco steakhouse, pastry chef Lionel Walter offers his version of "campfire s'mores," which feature house-made graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate ganache. Guests can toast their marshmallows over a small Sterno grill and assemble the s'mores to their own preferences. The dessert also comes with a caramel ice-cream. milk shake.

Another steakhouse, Stephen Starr's Barclay Prime in Philadelphia, offers toasted peanut butter s'mores with layers of graham crackers, flourless chocolate torte, peanut butter ice cream and house-made toasted marshmallows.

Elsewhere, peanut butter and jelly--that favorite childhood flavor pairing--are showing up in new forms. In the kitchen of Deborah Snyder, executive pastry chef at the Lever House in New York, they have become a tart filled with chocolate, peanut butter and strawberry jelly. The tart is served with peanut butter and jelly ice cream. Made from a peanut-flour tart shell, the confection is topped with strawberry jelly and peanut ganache. Dark-chocolate sauce is poured over it, and it then is baked, creating a warm, oozing filling, Snyder says.

"I definitely think desserts should be fun and taste good," she says. "I'm all for new ingredients and flavor combinations, but I'm not going to use something crazy in a dessert, like rose petals. I think they're disgusting."

Another rift on peanut butter and jelly comes from the kitchen of Patricia Yeo at Sapa in New York. She offers a peanut butter gianduja, a semifrozen mousse, which is glazed with chocolate sauce and served with blackcurrant jelly. When developing the dessert, Yeo first experimented with a peanut butter and marshmallow combination and various peanut butter and celery pairings before settling on her peanut butter and jelly dessert. "A lot of the stuff I do is tried-and-true," she says of the dessert. "You don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time."

At The Red Cat in New York, pastry chef Rebecca Masson serves her primarily adult clientele a version of cookies and milk that features old favorites like chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, New York black-and-whites, lemon bars and brownie cupcakes. Instead of milk, a chocolate milk-shake chaser accompanies the dessert. "The recipes are a little more grown up," she says. For example, she adds, the chocolate chip cookies use rich, dark chocolate chunks.

Before Masson converted the cookie plate to an "American favorites" theme last March, the cookie selection was a hodgepodge of styles, and the restaurant typically sold just two or three plates a night, she says. Now Masson serves 12 or more cookie plates nightly.

Last month Masson also introduced diners to her own version of a "Mallomar" cookie. She uses house-made marshmallows on top of "cakey cookies" made from graham flour. They then are covered with milk-chocolate sauce. "People seem to like them," she says. "Around Christmas I made them in the shape of a Christmas tree."

Hilda Terrero, pastry chef at Silverleaf Tavern in New York, also serves a grown-up version of cookies and milk, which substitutes bittersweet bourbon hot chocolate for milk. Recent cookie flavors have included mandarin-orange-hazelnut, rum fudge and chocolate chip. Last summer, Terrero served the cookie plate with a chocolate egg cream made from chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer water.

Doughnuts, too, have become a more common part of the fine-dining repertoire. At Wheatleigh restaurant in Lenox, Mass., pastry chef Tim Brown serves a maple-syrup-flavored doughnut as part of a maple syrup tasting that includes maple ice cream and a maple-poached Seckel pear.