RESTAURANTS : Pastry Chefs Who’ve Risen to the Top

There is a shortage of good pastry chefs in Los Angeles. And the reason for this particular pastry-chef crunch is simply that so many of the city’s best pastry masters now run the whole kitchen.

Duplex’s Mark Carter (see review above) earned his dessert stripes as L’Ermitage’s head pastry chef under the tutelage of the late Jean Bertranou, who also started out as a pastry chef. Opera’s Claude Koeberle constructed brilliant desserts at Ma Maison before moving on to Les Anges and his own critically acclaimed but financially troubled 30th Street Bistro. Laurent Quenioux learned pastry making the old-fashioned way at Maxim’s in Paris, but he found fame at the Seventh Street Bistro as chef de cuisine . Citrus’ Michel Richard first achieved name recognition with his Michel Richard pastry shops.

“I had to stop (pastry) because I didn’t enjoy it anymore,” says Richard, who is famous among pastry aficionados for his brilliant sugar work (the almost lost decorative art in which pastry chefs hand-mold elaborate designs from hot sugar). He shows me his hands, still scarred from years of pulling sugar, an act that requires amazing patience. “I think sugar work is passe now. I’d spend hours and hours pulling sugar, and it was so hard and so unappreciated (by my customers). I’d work sometimes 14 hours, all night long, only to have most people think it was plastic.

“In a restaurant, you can express yourself better,” Richard says. “Your entire personality can show--in the style of decor, in the menu. It’s more like being an orchestra conductor; in pastry you are more alone--that’s why I was so tired.”

“Let me tell you, if (becoming a pastry chef) was that easy, more people would go for it,” Laurent Quenioux says. “In pastry, you need skill, attention to details and inspiration, lots of inspiration because you don’t have much variety in ingredients--it’s all basically eggs, flour, sugar and different fruits.

“You can tell what we call cuisine patisserie ,” Quenioux says. “You can see it in the presentation, in the mix of color and in the precision.”

And you can see it in the dishes each of these very different personalities serves in his restaurant. Quenioux might serve a melon terrine with layers of prosciutto and sauterne gelee (“That’s typical pastry inspiration,” he says); Koeberle has been known to serve a wonderful charlotte made with smoked salmon; Carter has an apple and sausage pie appetizer on his menu; and Richard’s food is famous for its stunning use of color.

“Most sauces go from white to beige to brown because everything is cooked so long,” Richard says. “But I think food has to look the way it’s going to taste. If it’s a parsley sauce I want the customer to see a beautiful green; if we do a red bell pepper sauce, it has to be red and bright and fresh, right from the garden.”

Richard also attributes the “crunch” in his food to pastry: “There are lots of tricks in pastry.”

But don’t get the idea that any of these chefs make what one might assume to be typical pastry chef cuisine.

“You might expect everything en croute ,” Richard says, “but we don’t do that. We don’t use too much crust, period. I’m afraid that people would say, ‘that’s the food of a pastry chef.’ And I don’t use any fruit--you’ll never see a raspberry duck from Michel Richard.”

Another thing: The food at Citrus and the other places is less sweet than one might expect from a pastry chef. “I use sugar like salt and pepper,” Richard says. “In the old days sugar was a preservative to keep pastry fresh, but now, instead of using one pound of sugar, we use 3 ounces.”

Quenioux, like Richard, believes that the training of chefs should start with pastry. He cites the examples of French chefs Paul Bocuse and Michel Guerard, two superstars who worked in pastry before perfecting their cuisine.

“You learn the detail (of cooking),” Quenioux says. “And you acquire better taste with color and with placing things. You become more picky because pastry can’t look mediocre--it must look perfect. If you miss a detail, everyone can see it.”

Duplex’s Mark Carter agrees that his pastry years helped his food look beautiful, but more than that, he says, “Pastry helped me have a sense of humor. I’m playful in terms of my entrees, my choice of ingredients and the way that I name things. Of course, you don’t see us all in the kitchen wearing clown hats--this isn’t pie-in-the-face cooking. You can’t have a joke simply for the sake of a joke; it has to work.”