Checking in with some of Boston’s best pastry chefs
By LOUISA KASDON | December 8, 2006
They are the sugarplum fairies and the sultans of sweets. Women and men, dressed in pristine white jackets, who use alchemy to transform unremarkable ingredients — sugar, eggs, cream, butter, nuts, chocolate, fruit — into delicacies that make the end of your meal the stuff of reverie. Boston’s pastry chefs are a cadre of talent who regularly spin sugar into gold, their deft hands and passion for perfectionism rivaling those of chefs anywhere in the world. They are generally under-publicized and underpaid, toiling mostly out of sight, early in the morning or late at night. But without them, dinner would be just be a meal, not an event to remember. If there is a prime season to celebrate Boston’s sweets team, it’s the holidays, when visions of sugarplums — not to mention candied quince, molten chocolate cake, crème brûlee, and gingerbread houses — dance in our heads.Recently, I got to be one of the judges at the annual Gingerbread House competition at the World Trade Center. (It’s a fundraiser for Rosie’s Place.) I was awed. These weren’t cute little Swiss chalets sprinkled with snow; they were enormous, three-foot-high elaborate undertakings that had taken the pastry chefs weeks to assemble. There was a perfect rendition of Trinity Church with Victorian carolers gathered under the eaves (created by the Legal Sea Foods pastry-chef team), and a whimsical ski resort and glacier crafted by Emily Wholey of UpStairs on the Square. My favorite was a bird’s-eye view of Fenway Park and its surrounding blocks, complete with the Green Monster, the Citgo sign, and ticket hawkers, created by Kristen Lawson, the 26-year-old-pastry wizard of Petit Robert Bistro. (Her entry last year was an exquisite replica of the Eiffel Tower.)
Alejandro Luna t the Langham Hotel's Chocolate Bar |
The competition got me thinking about the fanatic subset of diners for whom it’s all about dessert, the people who are just as finicky and loyal to their favorite sweets as dedicated oenophiles are to their vintages. These are the diners who actually do save room for dessert, the ones who are willing to commit — before they’ve even had a cocktail — to the soufflé or the molten chocolate cake or the tarte Tatin that all must be ordered in advance. Looking at the amazing gingerbread edifices, I realized how little I know about our pastry community. But for the most dessert-centric among us, top pastry chefs are like rock stars, and their groupies follow them from restaurant to restaurant (though it can be hard to keep track of the best; even among the superstars, there’s high turnover in pastry). The work is hard, the hours are long, and when business is a little weak, the pastry chefs are often the first victims of cost cutting. Among my current favorites: Maura Kilpatrick at Oleana, Paige Retus (in transition from Prezza, but soon to crop up in a new location), Nicole Coady at Finale, Michael Geldart at Sel de la Terre, and the Langham Hotel’s Alejandro Luna, the 27-year-old executive pastry chef who delivers an amazing chocolate buffet every Saturday afternoon from now through June.
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