Urge to Splurge: Diners Dive Into Desserts

Already, you can feel your stomach stifling a yawn. The reason is you’re at a black-tie event, and the salad and entree courses are a bore. As you pick at the wilted lettuce and rubber chicken, you console yourself by thinking of all the calories you’ve saved.

Then, suddenly, the waiter sets before you a sinfully rich chocolate cake layered with raspberry puree, iced with fudge and topped with fresh fruit.

Oops . Before you know it, you’re abandoning your low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-everything diet and gobbling up every last morsel of that chocolate ganache.

Sound familiar? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Because caterers and restaurateurs are noticing that after years of forgoing cakes, cookies and cremes brulees for the sake of fitness, almost everyone seems to be eating dessert again.

“People aren’t dieting the way they used to,” says Christopher Niklas, owner of The Bistro Garden, who reports that even those women who pass up butter and bread in favor of butter lettuce are now ordering the restaurant’s dessert souffles in record numbers.

“Salads go untouched, entrees are undisturbed, but desserts are something people are killing for,” maintains Carlo Karim, the Beverly Hilton’s director of food and beverage.

It’s not so much that everybody has gone off their diet en masse. Rather, it’s that everyone is dieting so much that cheating now and then isn’t really a disaster.

“I think with the new healthy living that Californians are enjoying, they can justify eating something sweet after a big meal because they’re going to work it off tomorrow,” says Karim.

Or, maybe, there’s a rebellion of sorts going on. (Remember the Boston Tea Party?) “We’ve been so bombarded with diet consciousness, that the time has come to say to hell with it,” says Clive David, the Beverly Hills party planner for whom dessert is the piece de resistance of any dinner. “We all have to sin sometime.”

In fact, demand for desserts has been so great that the Beverly Hilton recently hired a special pastry and dessert chef to take charge of whipping up 340 different kinds of meal-ending sweets for any function. “If you go by the way people are eating at catered functions,” Karim observes, “I think the new trend should be starting a meal with dessert and ending it with a salad.”

But which came first? The chocolate torte or our craving for it? Some in the food business think L.A.’s sweet tooth has been suppressed in recent years. Others, like Roger Pigozzi, executive chef for the Biltmore Hotel, believe that desserts at formal functions which used to be yucky have started looking so yummy that people simply can’t say no to them anymore.

“It’s easy to have willpower with something that’s resistible,” he explains.

Meanwhile, dessert ingredients being served at parties have improved in quality as palates have become more sophisticated. “People now can taste the difference between fine chocolate and that stuff that leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth,” says Gayle Cohen of Opus II caterers in Culver City.

“Just two years ago, everything was an ice cream bombe or glace, “ notes Sara Cameron, director of catering for the Biltmore Hotel. “Now we’re doing things that take more labor, more elaborate combinations and more beautiful presentations.”

For some people, savoring dessert means saving calories elsewhere in the meal. “They’re now going for the cake instead of the cordial,” says Cameron. And Niklas notes that he overhears his diners saying they sacrified the pasta special so they could treat themselves to a souffle.

Others are seduced by the fresh fruit that many chefs are adding to their pastries. “People think, ‘I’ll just eat the berries,’ ” notes Cameron. “But, before they know it, they’ve eaten half the cake, too.”

Take, for example, Paul Swerdlove, a Beverly Hills real estate investor who won’t eat desserts at home. “But I’ll eat them if I’m a guest somewhere. Then I feel guilty for two weeks and run home and eat a whole lot of grapefruits.”

As president of the Cultural Affairs Commission of the City of Los Angeles, Merry Norris also is a habitual black-tie attendee. And she always eats her dessert. “Primarily because it’s in front of me, and I was brought up to finish everything on my plate--no matter how many plates there are!” she laughs.

A reformed chocoholic, Norris looks for artistry in her desserts, “And mostly they are truly masterpieces,” she notes. In fact, Norris loves desserts so much, she’s known to polish off hers and then start on her neighbor’s. “The ‘darting fork’ trick,” she says.

Socialite Wendy Goldberg, whose husband Leonard is president of 20th Century Fox, says matter-of-factly that “I don’t trust women who don’t eat dessert.”

Luckily, she’s able to trust herself absolutely. “Will I eat desserts? Yes, indeed !” she confesses. “But, I must tell you, I am one of your best eaters. Joanna Poitier says that I will even eat airplane food! When my mother told me to finish my plate because of the starving children, I took her literally.”

In the end, Goldberg may have the real reason that Californians are turning back to sweets. “Because, my God, we all have to splurge. We’re so afraid of sex and alcohol and other things, that the last thing we have is our food!”