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Let's Do Dessert

10 Tempting Taste Sensations

It’s a formidable task to choose desserts that represent the best or most interesting of a community. Individual preferences vary so widely. Do you love lemon desserts? Do you worship chocolate? Does an apple dessert call your name? And just how sweet do you like your sweets?
    The 10 desserts featured here represent a wide variety of flavors and styles. You may notice that elaborately constructed desserts are a thing of the past; a new simplicity reigns. And the focus on ingredients, though always important, has taken on new emphasis.
    There’s a new movement—a dessert movement. With the advent of specialized gourmet dessert stores that sell extremely high-quality ice cream, gelato and pastries, an increasing lot of diners are having dinner at one restaurant and then heading to an entirely different establishment for dessert.
    Some of the desserts here are seasonal, but without exception the talent of the individuals who created them is not.

Chocolate Budino with Espresso Ice Cream

Garibaldi’s

Budino is the Italian word for pudding, and that’s what Garibaldi’s budino ($9) is, a mocha pudding, but it doesn’t start out that way. It begins as a moist chocolate cake baked in a small round bowl, still hot to the touch when it’s brought to the table. Espresso ice cream tops the cake and melts furiously into it, rendering the entire mixture pudding-like and creating the mocha flavor. Caramel sauce and a sprinkling of praline-coated almonds and hazelnuts add to the party. The total effect is something like an ice cream shop sundae, but a sophisticated one, minus the whipped cream and maraschino cherry. There are delicious contrasts of hot and cold, crunchy and soft. Italians have another word to describe this budino: saporito. Tasty.
Garibaldi’s, 5356 College Ave., (510) 595-4000, www.garibaldis-eastbay.com.

Coconut Cream Pie

Café Gratitude

The menu at Café Gratitude reads like a list of affirmations: I Am Fulfilled is the name of the mixed greens salad; I Am Abundant is the sampler plate; I Am Vivacious is the stuffed avocado. The coconut cream pie is named I Am Devoted, and after only a few bites of this pie made with four different forms of coconut, devotion—even if it’s of the ephemeral type—comes easily. Café Gratitude’s coconut cream pie ($6.50) doesn’t stand mile-high with a stratosphere of whipped cream. Instead, it’s compact and dense, more like a tart, with unrelenting coconut flavor. The café combines Thai young coconut meat, Sri Lankan dried coconut, coconut milk, coconut butter and Medjool dates to create the filling. Yet more coconut and dates form the crust. None of this is cooked, by the way—Café Gratitude is a raw food vegan restaurant. Though prospective diners might squirm at Café Gratitude’s upbeat psychology and raw food philosophy, its coconut cream pie—as well as its refreshingly tart key lime pie—succeed on sheer flavor alone.
Café Gratitude, 1730 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (415) 824-4652 (press option No. 3 for the Berkeley restaurant), www.withthecurrent.com/cafe.html.

Blancmange Pierre Robert

À Côté

A couple of years back, Elaine Osuna, the imaginative pastry chef at À Côté, noticed that diners were increasingly ordering cheese plates as their final course rather than dessert. Miffed that dessert sales were slipping, Osuna developed a dessert that could satisfy cheese lovers and dessert lovers alike: the Blancmange Pierre Robert ($8). Blancmange is a delicate custard similar to panna cotta, but at À Côté, Osuna adds the triple-cream French cheese Pierre Robert to it, giving the custard a nutty richness and surprising tang. Accompanying the blancmange are Blossom Bluff white peaches and nectarines. “Whenever I need more, I call the farm, they pick them off the tree and bring them to me,” Osuna says. She poaches the fruit in Moscato wine, then creates a syrup from the poaching liquid. The ripe fruit, Pierre Robert cheese and Moscato syrup together create a flavor experience that is distinctive and compelling.
À Côté, 5478 College Ave., (510) 655-6469, www.acoterestaurant.com.

 

Ice Cream

Sketch

Sketch’s ice cream excites. All the flavors ($3.50 each) are made fresh every day in small 3-gallon batches. The fresh fruit is hand-selected, the chocolate is estate-grown, the coffee is Blue Bottle and the organic milk is from Marin’s Straus Family Creamery.
    Sketch’s ice cream flavors are both classic and unusual. The burnt caramel has a nuttiness that comes from cooking sugar in a difficult two-stage process. It’s like no other caramel ice cream. Another flavor, Earl Grey, seems confounding till you taste it and smell its aromatics of roses and bergamot. The pistachio is on par with the great pistachio gelato of Italy.
    This is 4-star restaurant ice cream, and it should be. Owner Eric Shelton was pastry chef at SF’s Aqua during its heyday (where he met Ruthie Planas, his wife and co-owner) before working at another Michael Mina restaurant, Arcadia in San Jose, and at Fifth Floor in San Francisco. And technically, since Sketch uses milk instead of cream, this isn’t ice cream per se. Curiously, because the ingredient flavors aren’t competing with the higher butterfat of cream, they taste purer and brighter.
    Try the chocolate and the peach and berry flavors if they’re in season. Then go back to the burnt caramel. Sketch’s ice cream is the best out there.

Sketch, 1809 Fourth St., Berkeley, (510) 665-5650, www.sketchicecream.com.

Sour Cherry Tart

Jojo

Jojo is another of those restaurants where you could order almost any dessert and be blissfully content. Mary Jo Thoresen has the “baker’s touch,” and it shows in every one of her desserts. Her sour cherry tarts ($8.75) are little jewels, jam-packed with Montmorency cherries with just a touch of sugar. (“I halve the cherries so I can fit more into each little tart,” she says.) The dough is simple: flour, butter and a healthy pinch of salt. Thoresen honed her pastry skills at Chez Panisse, working for 12 years under famed pastry chef Lindsey Shere. She is thoughtful, thinking about dessert philosophically and reverently: “I appreciate the beauty of a peach, a nectarine, all these cherries that I have pitted to make these tarts. Growers work so hard to bring you something special that I want to make sure I use it well, that I don’t plow through the making of a dessert or be separate from it.” Before she was a pastry chef, Thoresen was always fiddling with desserts, even as a child with her Easy-Bake Oven and Hasbro Sno-Cone Machine. At Jojo, her passion has come into full flower. Try the chocolate soufflé cake with black currant tea crème Anglaise ($8) as well.
Jojo, 3859 Piedmont Ave., (510) 985-3003, www.jojorestaurant.com.

Bittersweet Chocolate Cake

Oliveto

You could order almost any dessert at Oliveto and dine well. But there is one dessert that eclipses all the others: the Bittersweet Chocolate Cake ($9.50). It’s dark, moist, dense on the fork but light in the mouth. The chocolate flavor has power and depth, so much so it lingers after you’ve swallowed. It’s not sweet. That says a lot about Julie Cookenboo’s desserts. She’s been the pastry chef at Oliveto for 11 years, and she’s been tweaking the recipe for this particular flourless chocolate cake for 20. She makes it with only a few ingredients—Belgian Callebaut bittersweet chocolate, coffee, lots of eggs and heavy cream. The Bittersweet Chocolate Cake is served simply and elegantly, with a dollop of whipped cream. It amazes.
Oliveto, 5655 College Ave., (510) 547-5356, www.oliveto.com.

 

Ginger Custard

Soizic

The chef of Soizic, Sanju Dong, doesn’t talk much. She does, however, speak through her food—in a lively French-accented banter. Case in point: Soizic’s ginger custard ($6.50). It is, simply, an extremely fine crème brûlée-style French custard: rich, thick, full of cream and eggs, but with the snappy zing of fresh ginger. Each bite registers the interplay of the creamy with the spicy, and the custard’s flavor seems to command that you eat it slowly, perhaps so you fully appreciate it. Dong pairs the custard with a couple of plain almond cookies that aren’t at the level of the custard but still adequate. She also makes a standout pecan tart ($6.50), whose sweetness is tamed by white pepper ice cream. White pepper ice cream? It works: The initial creaminess of the ice cream gives way to the heat of white pepper at the back of the mouth. Both desserts demonstrate the inventiveness of Dong, whose motto may well be, “Speak softly and carry a big whisk.”
Soizic, 300 Broadway (entrance on Third Street), (510) 251-8100, www.soizicbistro.com.

Lemon Bars

Bakesale Betty

Bakesale Betty wants to “make the best lemon bar that anybody’s ever tasted.” What makes this statement extraordinary—besides its boldness and the gauntlet she’s thrown down for herself—is that she does it. She’s even developed a following. The word on the street is that Bakesale Betty’s lemon bars ($2.50) are “not to be missed,” “to die for” and the oft-repeated, “the best I have ever had.” Betty’s lemon bars aren’t just lemon-y. They go beyond that. Each bite of Betty’s lemon bar is a thought-stopping blast of lemon, anchored by a buttery, almost caramelized shortbread. It’s a singularly intense food experience. Bakesale Betty is the blue wig-wearing, Aussie-speaking, camp humor-loving persona of Alison Barakat, who three years ago left Chez Panisse to grow her bakery business with husband Michael Camp. You can see her at her namesake bakery (open till 7 p.m. for early-dinner eaters who want dessert) cheerily tending to her customers and creations, which include more than just lemon bars. Her Sticky Date Pudding with Caramel Sauce ($12, serves 6) could easily have made this list, and her cookies, scones, brownies and pies also create buzz. “I like classics,” she says. “I like to make simple desserts and make them really, really well.”
Bakesale Betty, 5098 Telegraph Ave., (510) 985-1213, www.bakesalebetty.com.

Apple Galette with Caramel Ice Cream

Zax Tavern

Zax restaurant is sleek, elegant and romantic, with the kind of golden lighting movie stars clamor for—not exactly what you think of when you read the word “tavern.” Here, the signature dessert is apple galette with caramel ice cream ($7). It looks very French, bubbling with juices and loosely constructed as a free-form pie dusted with powdered sugar. The recipe for the galette itself is shockingly simple. Mark Drazek, pastry chef and co-owner of Zax, tosses apple slices with a bit of cinnamon and sugar, places them on a flat circle of regular pie dough, folds up the edges and bakes. That’s it. But he selects his apples very carefully: Gravensteins in the early part of apple season, Sierra Beauties later on. His caramel ice cream is richer and creamier than most, but he uses no special techniques or ingredients. What is special is the level of care and attention Drazek devotes to his desserts. He makes and bakes them during the day, and then he’s the one tending to them all through dinner service, plating them and making sure they’re exactly the way they should be.
Zax Tavern, 2826 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, (510) 848-9299, www.zaxtavern.com/zax.html.

Peach Crisp

Chez Panisse Café

John Gielgud was once asked for advice on acting in a Shakespeare play. He replied that since Shakespeare’s language is such perfection, little physical acting is required. All one need do is simply stand still and speak beautifully. You could say much the same about the fruit desserts at Chez Panisse Café. The fruit used in the desserts is such perfection, nothing much needs to be done to it—the task is simply to allow the flavor of the fruit to shine through.
    The peach crisp ($9), one of the cafe’s summer fruit desserts, arrives in a shallow soup bowl. It’s a simple, almost homey, presentation: soft chunks of gold peaches covered with a scattered walnut topping and a pale yellow orb of crème fraîche ice cream. Those peaches; those walnuts! Perfection. Each bite of a Summer Lady peach from Frog Hollow Farm tastes like the peachiest peach you’ve ever had. Each small bit of walnut from Dixon Ridge Farms is intensely walnut-y. No elaborate pastry techniques are needed; the flavors of the ingredients are enough to register quality of a high order.
    Peaches may have passed out of season, but exceptional fruit desserts are the norm at Chez Panisse with its legendary commitment to ingredients. In autumn, apples, pears and huckleberries will be at their prime, and after that, cranberries, Meyer lemons and tangerines. Every season a new array of fruit comes into perfect ripeness, and the cafe’s desserts are exquisitely in sync with that cycle.
Chez Panisse Café, 1517 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 548-5049, www.chezpanisse.com.