Sweet Success

“I dreamed about rhubarb and white peach cobbler last night,” Natasha MacAller says while glancing nervously at her watch for the tenth time in the last two minutes.

We are standing in the middle of the intersection of 2nd Street and Arizona Avenue at the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Most of the vendors have been here since 7 or 8, stylishly mounding tables with purple-tinted Scots kale, spiky Greek oregano, bundles of round, golf-ball-size roasting carrots and, of course, luscious fruit: blackberries the size of stuffed olives, peaches with names only a grandmother would recognize, and apricots so fragrant you can smell them over the heat waves rising off the asphalt.

MacAller often dreams about desserts. Last night, she tells me, at 2 in the morning she had this vision of rhubarb. Now she can’t stop thinking about it.

But unlike most people obsessed with food, MacAller doesn’t dream of eating it--she dreams of preparing it for others. She is the pastry chef for Santa Monica’s Union restaurant. The young chef, who stands not much more than 5-foot-4 in clogs, doesn’t so much walk as glide--hips and toes out, heels in--like the ballerina she once was. She has already made a mental checklist of what she wants to buy this morning. But she has to wait for the blow of an air-horn, precisely at 9, to begin shopping. Even so, once the market opens, she is easily distracted by tempting delicacies missed the first time through, from the first-of-the-season lapin cherries, with their yellow blush, being sold by a farmer in a curling straw hat from Pritchett Farms in Visalia, to the deep-red Chandler strawberries covering the tables of Harry’s Berries from Oxnard. “He’s really expensive,” MacAller whispers before sampling berries so soft that the juice runs down her chin as she takes a small bite.

“Oh, God,” MacAller says, grabbing my arm. “I have to have some of these.” MacAller isn’t alone in her pursuit of the best and the brightest berries. The market is filled with chefs looking for organic apricots for compotes and black raspberries for complex Merlot sauces. But while the primary purpose of these weekly, or even twice-weekly, market jaunts is ostensibly to find rare gooseberries and downy white peaches, there’s something else going on here. The downtown Santa Monica farmers market is to these mostly young and up-and-coming culinary stars what Manolos are to shoe lovers. It’s the place where young pastry hotshots mingle, talk shop and even do a deal or two (“I’ll work your charity dinner if you’ll work mine”). They hug, kiss each cheek--there and there-- and ask about each other’s restaurants the way film stars might make small talk about an upcoming project. “I heard you’re doing that dinner with Raphael.” “I’d love to work with him but I can’t. I already committed to an event with Peel that week.”

In a city where celebrity status is often times conferred on hairstylists and fitness trainers, pastry chefs are suddenly hot--very hot. Look at the bottom of your menu: If the pastry chef isn’t named, it’s hardly worth ordering the mascarpone cheesecake or Meyer lemon tart, no matter how good it looks. We don’t just want a souffle--we want the Valrhona chocolate souffle with a delicate scoop of prune-Armagnac ice cream, whipped up by Shelly Register of Aubergine in Newport Beach. If you really feel like finishing off that dry-aged New York steak with baked Alaska, then it simply must be Annie Clemmons’ baked Alaska at Balboa in West Hollywood, with little peaks of singed meringue, rising up like Brad Pitt’s spiked hair, prettily pouting in a pool of blackberry-Cabernet-lavender sauce. Why would you settle for anything less?

Just as wine aficionados easily order a Joe Heitz Cabernet or maybe a Gary Eberle Zinfandel instead of just “a glass of red wine,” these days true gourmets want signature desserts. Dishes, like the Swedish Princess cake at Gustaf Anders in Orange County, that are every bit as impressive, if not more so, than the appetizers and entrees.

If anyone doubted it before, the coronation in May of Spago pastry chef Sherry Yard as a James Beard Foundation Award winner--the Oscars for chefs--made it clear to foodies everywhere that dessert chefs in L.A. have been elevated to culinary royalty. (Appropriately enough, Yard, the unofficial queen bee of L.A. pastry chefs along with Campanile’s Nancy Silverton and Kimberly Boyce, received her award while wearing a tiara above her blond bangs and hoisting a glass of champagne.) This is, to coin a phrase, The Age of Patisserie.

But why the sudden limelight on the creators of sweet plates? after all, our love affair with chocolate dishes is as ancient as the Mayan civilization that first discovered the cocoa tree around 600 AD. Our homage to decadent cakes goes back at least as far as the 7th century French bishop of Amiens, Honore, who had a sugary gateau, ringed with caramel-coated cream puffs and filled with gooey creme patissiere, named after him, and is also the patron saint of pastry chefs (cradling an armful of baguettes, the French mystic is often portrayed in artists’ renditions holding a baker’s shovel).

“Dessert is such a celebratory event,” says Annie Clemmons of Balboa restaurant, tucked inside the Grafton on Sunset hotel in West Hollywood. “It’s like a present you give the table, and every pastry chef in Los Angeles wants their present to be so damn good that you leave no question in their mind who made it.”

Like MacAller, Clemmons did not start out as a pastry chef--or chef of any sort, for that matter. While doing graduate work in French and political studies in Washington, D.C., Clemmons had plans on pursuing a career as a foreign diplomat. “I was studying for my master’s degree when I suddenly realized that the best part of my day was coming home and cooking.” Much to her parents’ chagrin, she enrolled in a culinary school in Boston, eventually moving to Los Angeles to take a job at Campanile, where she worked with Kimberly Boyce in the pastry kitchen. It was there that she learned to combine the discipline and structure she’d developed studying foreign policy with the whimsical creativity lacking from the rest of her life, a key part of most pastry chefs’ fascination with the job.

“I get a giggle coming up with ideas,” she says, swinging her feet, cloaked in red-and-white striped Raggedy Ann stockings. She’s taking a break from perfecting several grape sorbets--Muscatel and Concord--that she’ll freeze in plastic beach toys used to hold sand and purchased that morning from Toys ‘R’ Us. “When I send something special to a table, I love to peek out from the kitchen and watch the reaction,” she says. “It’s like being Santa Claus.” The flip side to Balboa’s fanciful baked Alaska, for instance, is her cupcake picnic dish--three mini-cupcakes in ice cream-like flavors such as orange-vanilla--accompanied by ants made from chocolate-covered coffee beans. Diners love it.

There’s something very childlike--and comforting--about such desserts, says Kimberly Boyce, pastry chef at Campanile. Boyce started out studying anthropology at UC San Diego before first hiring on at Spago to work under Sherry Yard. She thinks something like her strawberry-rhubarb custard tart with rhubarb ice cream is “very elegant and has intricate, layered flavors.” She admits that a menu favorite for many at the La Brea Avenue restaurant is the “Childhood Favorites” plate: homemade Oreo cookies with a shot of chocolate pudding (made with Valrhona chocolate, of course) accompanying a small hot fudge sundae. “It’s comfort food done on a really, really high level,” she says.

English-born T’ai Chopping of Melisse in Santa Monica found inspiration for her vanilla crepes with candied kumquat ice cream from a childhood breakfast served by her British mum. High-end comfort food--desserts that remind us of our childhood but are made with more flair and better ingredients--seems to be everyone’s favorite these days. JiRaffe’s pastry chef, Artemio Sanchez, can’t help but break into a smile while describing his banana cream pie, caramelized and served with caramel sauce, while next door at Union, MacAller is hard at work perfecting what she calls a “sophisticated” Scooter-Pie. She’s also working on her own version of a Hostess cupcake. “These are desserts that bring back warm memories,” she says, “except people have never had them like this before.” Order one of MacAller’s brownies, 1718579744Berger chocolate propping up a mound of black raspberry ice cream covered in hot fudge and toasted almonds. “Not exactly your mom’s recipe,” she says. “We dress it up not only in the way it looks but the way it tastes. Everything is more intense.”

Shelly Register was pursuing a career in medicine when a friend convinced her to try her hand in the kitchen instead. You would think she might be restrained working within the confines of Tim Goodell’s French-inspired Aubergine restaurant in Newport Beach, with its five-course prix fixe menu featuring delicacies such as Maine scallops on “raw and cooked” asparagus with truffle vinaigrette. But she manages to explore her inner child anyway. “Like the other day I had a craving for pancakes so I created a Napoleon short stack, silver-dollar size, that was my version of bananas Foster. Today I’m obsessed with tapioca. I found this lime-green tapioca in a Vietnamese market and I’m just dying to use it in a sorbet course.”

When it comes to pastry chefs, cravings often seem to be the mother of invention. Working with a formal French menu at L’Orangerie has not stopped Donna Claxton from exploring her obsession with spices. Yes, the restaurant’s signature dessert remains the chocolate souffle, and the crepe suzette, profiteroles and creme brulee probably won’t depart the menu any time soon. Yet Claxton also blends such startling combinations as a strawberry tart served with balsamic ice cream, and--in summer--fresh berries mixed with hibiscus jelly and hot pepper and topped with yogurt sorbet.

“There really are no limits to what we can do,” says the 26-year-old chef, who took cooking classes while in high school in Canada. Then, as I stand up to leave, she adds with a girlish smile, “It’s an exciting time, I think, for pastry chefs, and it’s only going to get better. They are becoming restaurant stars, don’t you think?”

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David Lansing last wrote for the magazine on lemon grass.