With its floating mini-meringue,

this citrusy vodka-and-Tuaca-

KATHY CASEY

based cocktail from mixologist

Kathy Casey is like pie in a glass.

A
PASTRY CHEF
walks into a Bar…
As kitchens and bars cross-pollinate, American bartenders
find inspiration in dessert ingredients and techniques
BY JACK ROBERTIELLO
ver the years, the men and women working
O behind the bar have taken on many different
roles: Apothecary, advisor, bouncer and
mixologist are some of the most prominent. But lately, as
many bartenders push the boundaries of their craft in an
attempt to expand the definition of the cocktail, they’re
taking on the role of pastry chef.
“The pastry chef and the mixologist have more in
common than either of them do with the head chef,”
contends Jackson Cannon, bar manager of Eastern
Standard Kitchen & Drinks in Boston, a high-end bar and
restaurant where drinks like Blueberry Thrill and
Raspberry-Lemon Fizz add sparkle to the seasonal menu.
INGREDIENTS IN COMMON
Since the pastry kitchen and the bar employ so many
similar types of ingredients, including sweeteners, fruits
and spices, crossover seems inevitable.
“The pastry area is such a great place to look for
ingredients and inspiration,” says Kathy Casey of food-
and-drink consultancy Kathy Casey Food Studios and
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BEVERAGE TRENDS
Liquid Kitchen in Seattle. “There’s a plethora of
sweeteners, for instance, and pastry routinely uses coulis
and purees, which definitely go well in today’s cocktails.”
Some well-known pastry chefs have been getting more
involved on the drinks side of the restaurant business.
Pichet Ong, chef and owner of P*ong restaurant and the
adjoining Batch bakery in New York City and author of
“The Sweet Spot,” was the only chef participating in the
2008 Marie Brizard Cocktail Challenge, but expect more
crossover in future contests. Johnny Iuzzini, executive
pastry chef at Jean Georges and author of the recently
released “Dessert FourPlay,” pops behind the bar regularly
at PDT, one of New York City’s cocktail hot spots. The
name stands for “Please Don’t Tell,” and the place is
accessed through a vintage phone booth in a hot dog
joint; it’s one of a growing group of hush-hush, speakeasy-
style establishments cropping up in major cities.
SWEET COCKTAILS EVOLVE
Dessert cocktails like the grasshopper, a cool, after-dinner
sip of crème de cacao, crème de menthe and vodka shaken
Spring 2009 FLAVOR & THE MENU 121
BEVERAGE TRENDS

The
FLAVOR PAYOFF At Jack Astor’s Bar & Grill, a frozen
raspberry twister combines lemon
and raspberry Smirnoff with ices of
the same flavors. Raspberry liqueur
Dessert Drinks Create Incremental-Sales Opportunities provides the final touch at the table.

Not every operation has the time or the resources to

devise special dessert drinks, but David Commer, owner
of Carrollton, Texas-based Commer Beverage
Consulting, has some cost-conscious tips for making
dessert drinks a value-added proposition for any
restaurant. Commer works with national multi-units to
develop new drink ideas and keep bar programs on-
trend. While sales of both desserts and after-dinner
drinks may suffer in the economic downturn,
Commer thinks that combining the two as dessert
drinks could spark incremental sales.

“People see [dessert drinks] as a lighter, lower-fat

alternative to dessert, and they can get the flavors
without all the calories,” says Commer.

Create New News: The rule of thumb in

selling cocktails, notes Commer, is offering
something new to capture the first sale. A dessert
drink can do the trick. Capturing the second sale is
a matter of making the drink delicious and

R’S
craveable, which also means creating one that’s

JACK ASTO
not overly sweet and is sized right.

Follow the Food: “Rather than be generic with your dessert

drinks, look to your dessert menu and recreate your best-sellers in
liquid form,” advises Commer, who used this tactic when working
with casual-dining multi-unit Tony Roma’s. The chain’s R&D team
wanted to turn its Apple Crisp a la Mode into a drink, and Commer
helped create the Apple Crisp Tini, a blended martini featuring
Absolut Vanilla Vodka served in a martini glass and finished with a
drizzle of caramel syrup and apple-crumb topping.
Cross-Utilize: Key to the apple crisp cocktail is the crumb topping.
Tony Roma’s used the broken bits and pieces of crumb topping from
the menued dessert’s ingredients. “We were able to use product
that would have been loss or waste to create a signature drink,” says
Commer, who suggests working with vendors to repurpose existing
ingredients on a larger scale.
Slim Down: Commer is experimenting with low-fat vanilla yogurt to
turn high-calorie drinks like the mudslide into a more smoothie-like
alternative that “still satisfies a sweet craving, but without the huge
calorie intake.”
with ice, have been around seemingly forever.
In the late 1990s, bartenders fully explored
the possibilities of chocolate martinis and
such, and Michael Waterhouse, bartender
and owner of New York City’s Dylan Prime,
patented the terms “Caketails” and “Pietinis”
for his wildly popular sweet-cocktail
creations.
The form is evolving further, as the latest
and greatest renditions keep pace with
cutting-edge desserts. Todd Thrasher,
sommelier at Restaurant Eve and bar whiz at
PX, both in Alexandria, Va., has had great
success with such creations as the Butter
“Nut” Craig, a pie-inspired drink combining
butternut squash, spice bitters, Pyrat rum and
Grand Marnier. He’s also known for poaching
peaches in Riesling and for his recent

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 BEVERAGE TRENDS
ZESPRI KIWIFRUIT
This Lemon Drop, a McGriddle, made with bacon-infused
variation that blends bourbon, maple syrup, milk and egg.
vanilla vodka and a sorbet
Casey, whose new book “Sips and Apps”
of golden kiwi fruit and
lemon, makes a cool includes recipes for drinks like the Blue Thai
ending to a meal. Mojito, with coconut syrup, red pepper flakes,
mint and cilantro, recently came up with the
Lemon Meringue Puff, a cocktail reminiscent
of lemon meringue pie, featuring citrus vodka,
Tuaca, lemon juice and simple syrup, topped
with a mini-meringue floater.
Clearly, today’s pastry-bar connection
doesn’t focus solely on satisfying the
customer’s sweet tooth, and, like modern
desserts, these cocktails use interesting,
sweet-savory pairings and layered, contrasting
textures to bring new interest to the category.
FANCY FINISHES
As bartenders return to using eggs in drinks
like Casey’s Lemon Meringue Puff and in
124 FLAVOR & THE MENU Spring 2009
classics like the Ramos Gin Fizz and the pisco,
two citrusy drinks that get extra texture from
frothy, well-shaken egg whites, the
connection between pastry and bar gets even
closer. Ingredients like flavored sugars,
common to pastry, long ago leapt the divide
to the bar, and flavored creams, signature
whipped creams, froths and airs can expand
the flavor profile of drinks.
Edible flowers, dried fruit and even hard-
crack sugar offer garnish possibilities. Casey
likes the garnishing effect of ultra-crispy,
paper-thin slices of pear, apple or citrus, made
by dipping fruit slices in simple syrup and
drying them between pieces of silpat, a pure
pastry technique.
Cannon says the technical approach to
garnishing drinks is similar to the way a pastry
chef might work. Less gaudy garnishes, even
restrained ones, like micro-planed pieces of
lemon, dried and adorned with colored sugar,
can add just the right touch, compared to
yesteryear’s multiple chunks of fruit skewered
on a toothpick.
TAKING PASTRY CHANCES
Customers’ willingness to take chances with
the pastry course and indulge a pastry chef’s
experimental notions has emboldened
bartenders. “People are much more open to
having a foam or a jelly with dessert or a
cocktail than they are with the main course,
so trying those things is easier for us,” notes
Thomas Wellings, pastry chef at Mio in
Washington, D.C.
With that greater acceptance come many
opportunities.
“There’s a symbiosis that can occur,” says
Cannon. “With pastry and the bar, you start
to get into more of a dialogue with the
guests.”
And with each other. A pastry chef
working at preserving fruit or infusing or
macerating ingredients can provide
inspiration for bartenders. In fact, says
Cannon, the very production process can
generate ingredients for a bartender.
When Eastern Standard pastry chef
Graham Schave worked with rhubarb last
year, the byproduct of his efforts was an
intensely fragrant syrup. Cannon made a
cocktail combining it and the artichoke
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 BEVERAGE TRENDS

apéritif Cynar. “We hand products back and

forth,” notes Cannon.
Making in-house the infusions and other
ingredients formerly available only
commercially has become second nature to
many bartenders, but it wasn’t always so.
“The first time I made bitters, I didn’t
know how to caramelize sugar,” says Thrasher.
“I went to the pastry chef and said ‘Hey, how
do you do this?’
“There are so many cool techniques that
come from pastry that I’ve used at Eve in the
past few years,” he adds. He learned how to
pull sugar in order to create a drink garnish
and says that contemporary techniques like
foams, airs and gels started in pastry before
moving to the bar.

INSPIRATION FLOWS BOTH WAYS

Things move in the other direction as well;
Thrasher recalls working with a Belgian
pastry chef and serving him his first mojito.
“He loved it and made six different desserts
based on the mojito.”
When working with Thrasher at Eve,
Wellings recalls gaining inspiration from a
cocktail Thrasher made with lemon and bay leaf;
he adapted the combination to a custard dish.
Some pastry-bar relationships have

NATIONAL HONEY BOARD

become formalized. Bill Corbett, executive
pastry chef at Michael Mina restaurant in San
Francisco, creates grenadine syrup in-house
and provides lead bartender Borys Saciuk
with lemon-verbena syrup and ingredients
like mango paper — a mixture of mango
puree, egg white and simple syrup that is
spread, dried and broken into bits for use as a
crisp garnish.
Corbett also has started making the tricky
gum (or gomme) syrups, used frequently in
pre-Prohibition bartending. “It brings up the
issue of texture, something pastry chefs may
be more aware of when making things like
this,” he says. “Gum arabic syrup [an
emulsifier] is supposed to be denser than
simple syrup so as to allow flavors to linger on
the palate, but some bartenders haven’t yet
mastered the technique,” says Corbett.
TOGETHER IN MEASURES
Derek Brown, drink consultant and head
bartender at The Gibson in Washington,
D.C., frequently hosts cocktail seminars for In the Peppermelon,
The Museum of the American Cocktail, mixologist H. Joseph
Ehrmann of Elixir in
where he emphasizes the importance of
San Francisco pours on
proper measurement, an essential in great sweet heat with gin-spiked
pastry making. honey, pepper and
“I say, in cooking, you could put us closer watermelon.
to pastry chefs than savory cooks,” Brown
observes, “because there’s more precision in
baking and pastry arts than in savory, which is
more forgiving. But if you get the wrong
balance of gelatin, for instance, your panna
cotta just isn’t going to set.”
The same fastidiousness needs to be
applied to mixology, where it’s important to
learn, for example, the effect of different egg
sizes, as eggs become standard ingredients in
classic cocktails once again.

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 BEVERAGE TRENDS

“Pastry is so much more of a science than

savory cooking,” agrees Thrasher. While
savory chefs adjust flavors to taste as a dish
cooks, in mixology and pastry, constant
measurement is essential, and it’s harder to
improvise on the fly. Pastry needs to set
properly, and drinks can be put off kilter with
tiny additions of intense flavors.
Wellings compares the traditional,
artisanal approach in pastry, where as much as
possible is made in-house and from scratch, to
the trend among bartenders like Thrasher to
make their own infusions, syrups, reductions,
bitters and tinctures. Some bartenders have
investigated more cutting-edge ideas from the
pastry sector. Eben Klemm, director of
cocktail development for B.R. Guest
Restaurants, a group of 17 restaurants in
major cities across the country, turned to
Wellings to learn about spherification, a
process that employs calcium chloride and
sodium alginate to turn liquid into a
shapeable gel for use in drinks.
Casey notes that combinations of savory
and sweet, like bacon and chocolate or salt
RESTAURANT EVE

and caramel, are more common these days in

pastry, and she feels the bar deserves some
credit for leading the way here; consider red-
pepper-and-salt rims for margaritas. The way
Bar chef Todd Thrasher is “If they use a whole egg white in a drink, it pastry chefs are increasingly incorporating
known for poaching fruit can make a large, soupy drink and get out of savory touches is similar to the way
in wine, making his own
textural balance,” says Brown. “Eggs have a bartenders have always worked.
cherry cola and spiking
white-chocolate drinks very specific effect, and they can mute some Above all, there’s a glycemic connection
with chile powder. flavors and emphasize others.” between the two disciplines. Alcohol is made
from sugars, and for some people, it is as
satisfying as dessert.
TAK E -AWAY T I P S At Eastern Standard Kitchen, both bar and
pastry sales are on fire. “In hard times, instead
SET A PLAY DATE: Make time for of the $30 steak, people have a $12 steak as
bar staff and chefs to share basic their entrée but have a second martini
information and experiment with
crossover potential beforehand and then dessert after,” says
Cannon.
BALANCE THE BAR: Sweet heat and
“To me, the craving for dessert looks the
sweet-and-savory flavors suit modern
dessert menus and don’t risk sugar same emotionally as the craving for the
overload second martini.” &
CLEAR & SWEET: Lighten up on the
cream in drinks and opt for a light,
frothy finish on top instead JACK ROBERTIELLO writes about
FINER FINISHES: Candied citrus, spirits, cocktails, wine, beer and food from
paper-thin dried apples and pears or Brooklyn, N.Y.; he can be e-mailed at
spun sugar create delicate, eye-catching applejak@earthlink.net.
garnishes for sophisticated cocktails
MONIN

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