Dessert Done Right
secrets behind your favorite course
The apple sorbet actually tastes like green apples—real, ripe, crunchy apples made into frozen deliciousness and carefully spooned into a gourmet quenelle upon a pristine serving dish.
It doesn’t stop at green apple, either. The Lever House Restaurant’s pastry kitchen is home to no fewer than 12 seasonal creams and sorbets, all freshly spun every weekday morning by the opening pastry cook. Among the other stand-out flavors are mulled wine (though don’t try ordering it—it is already a casualty of a winter passed), lemon curd, and peanut, which has a flavor so distinct it could never be mistaken for peanut butter.
The freezer drawer containing ice cream is just one small component of a larger pastry kitchen full of cookies, cakes, sauces, spices, and sugars. An artfully created quenelle of ice cream, scooped out with a serving spoon rather than an ice cream scoop, is just a side compliment to a full-plated last course at Lever House. The secret behind their amazing mélange of dessert offerings is the dedication and talent of a handful of people that make up the pastry team.
On the cold Saturday afternoon that I visited, the pastry cook on duty, Julian Plyter, welcomed me from the back entrance of the restaurant on 54th Street, wearing a white chef’s smock and a bright red bandana. Plyter is one of three pastry cooks, along with a sous chef, under head pastry chef Rachel Binder (formerly of Savoy).
Over the course of the next three hours before the restaurant opens for business, it is his job to create a foundation, a mise en place (a chef’s term, literally, “set in place”), to allow for quick and professional plating of any of about eight rotating desserts on the menu once the dining room fills up.
“Most of our stuff is done ahead of time,” Plyter says as he begins taking out rolls of cookie dough, cutting them into individual pieces, and placing them on a baking sheet, ready for the oven. “There is a very specific, extensive mise en place. You have to have all of the components there so they are ready to go.” By the end of the conversation, the cookies are already in the oven, beginning to fill the kitchen with their warm smells.
But before beginning his shift, Plyter takes a minute to sit down with me in the private dining room that overlooks the main dining areaof the restaurant. I looked through the room’s large window into the softly lit, cushy dining room below. The setting is futuristic, with architecture that may have come out of Star Trek. The bright white of the furniture and walls is subtly muted by the soft lighting.
The Lever House Restaurant, situated in the historic Lever House building on Park Avenue at 53rd Street (entrance is on 53rd between Park and Madison), is one of those signature New York restaurants that should be saved for a visit from the parents or a very special date. Reservations are recommended and the clientele reflects the foreboding office buildings that dominate the area—it’s a suit-and-tie kind of place. As Plyter puts it, “We do a lot of fancy stuff here.”
New American cuisine dominates the menu, changing with the seasons and reflecting the freshest ingredients around. “We don’t do out-of-season fruit,” Plyter says. This is important because most of the dessert menu is fruit-based, with the necessary chocolate dish or two.
Much of what is used is bought locally, not just because it is environmentally friendly, but also because, according to Plyter, “It just tastes better.” That sort of food ethos is one that Binder and her staff share.
The fruit that Plyter and the other cooks use in the kitchen is at its ripest because of the local focus. “When you ship something, if it is hard enough to survive shipping, it is too hard to be picked,” he says of the ripeness of fruit from out of state.
The menu changed from the day I visited the kitchen to my memorable dinner in one of the semi-private, raised booths along the wall of the dining room two weeks later. My favorite, the ginger stout cake with frozen cream cheese soufflé and candied kumquats was gone, as was the chestnut crepe with pear butter and mulled wine ice cream.
However, the apple crème brulée with apple fritters and green-apple sorbet was still available, along with a blood-orange cake with lemon curd gelato and the chocolate caramel tart and peanut ice cream.
“It’s nice to change just a little bit at a time,” Plyter says. “That’s the hallmark to me of a New American cuisine—you find that you have to change your menu. American cuisine is still a young thing, so the rules are slightly different,” especially when compared to a classical French cuisine where, according to Plyter, the rules are set in stone.
Plyter’s job goes beyond cutting cookie dough, scooping out ice cream, and sharing his passion for fresh fruit. Cakes, tarts, cookies, and soufflés all have to be prepped with enough time to ensure that they don’t run out, but in small enough batches to ensure little waste. Things like cookie dough can be prepped a few days in advance, but cakes have to be baked and become stale within a day or two.
Once a batch of something starts to go stale, the pastry cooks have to either throw it out or “staff it,” meaning it ends up gracing the personal kitchens of the restaurant staff. The pastry chefs put a lot of energy into making sure that their desserts are top notch. “It is more work to do small batches, but it is better to have to make more than to have to throw things out,” Plyter says.
Working in a high-end pastry kitchen like the Lever House takes a bit more effort than practicing in grandma’s kitchen (though that never hurts). Plyter spent six months in culinary school at the International Culinary Institute and spent some time working in the pastry kitchen at Le Bernardin before beginning at Lever House last September.
Pastry is a passion that followed him through life, and he finally gave into it two years ago and went to culinary school, though he had a degree in music and a steady job. As with most chefs that I have met, the culinary world is an obsession to live for. “I love to cook, but I live to bake,” he says.
Maybe that’s why my apple sorbet was so damn good.