You can have your banana cream pies, your strawberry bavarians, your poached pears and apple tarts.
In the dessert kingdom, chocolate is king.
Chocolate may be the ultimate aphrodisiac. It’s said that eating chocolate releases the same feel-good endorphins to your brain as does sex. In his book, “Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover Your Inner Center” (no, really), author Murray Langham suggests that personality types can be assessed by the sort of chocolate they prefer.
Notice it’s not whether they like chocolate, but which kind. Those indifferent to the siren call of the cocoa bean apparently aren’t worth talking about.
Veteran pastry chef Mindy Segal, last seen at MK restaurant, understands chocolate’s allure all too well.
“You know when you’ve met a chocoholic,” she says. “They have that look in their eye. They’re a different breed; chocolate satisfies them in different ways than chocolate affects others.”
(That’s certainly true in my house, where my wife only orders non-chocolate desserts to prove that she can.)
Also, and I can’t stress this enough, chocolate tastes good.
Our collective fascination for all things chocolate is a mixed blessing, apparently, to the nation’s pastry chefs, who toil mightily to create new and exciting dessert offerings, only to see customers put down the menu and say, “I’ll have the Chocolate Oblivion, please.”
“People are pretty traditional when it comes to desserts,” says Kim Stewart, pastry chef at Tweet restaurant. “And they love chocolate. The chocolate mousse pistachio torte and the European torte fly out of here. And my flourless chocolate cake is bulletproof. You can’t kill it. If I take if off the menu, people will scream.”
The same is true for regular chefs, too; they all have a dish or two that can’t come off the menu, no matter the season, because of customer demand. But a chef can easily stash an evergreen or two in a 24-item menu. For a pastry chef, whose menu typically consists of 10 desserts or fewer, the restriction is felt more keenly.
“We’re a business,” says Stewart, shrugging. “We can’t sit around and make wasabi ice cream all day; we have to make stuff that will sell. You try to give customers what they want in a way that pleases you artistically. Give them classics, done well, and everybody’s happy. And you keep your job.”
Matters are a little different at Sugar, whose menu consists exclusively of desserts. There, chef Christine McCabe Tentori has the freedom to create some 20 desserts daily out of fruit, nuts or whatever else catches her creative eye.
And what are the top-selling desserts at Sugar?
“The MacDeth by Chocolate is No. 1,” Tentori says. “Then either the Finnegan’s Cake, which is dense chocolate cake with soft coconut ice cream and caramel, or the chocolate creme brulee napoleon with poached blueberries.”
If you’re keeping score, that’s chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate.
Mary McMahon, pastry chef at Trio Atelier in Evanston, acknowledges that chocolate rules the dessert world, but says it doesn’t bother her. “I’m more or less at the point in my career,” McMahon says, “in which I take the pulse of what diners want and try to design something they’ll like. Why argue?”
Creme brulee is a big seller, so rather than fight the trend, McMahon started offering the classic dessert in different varieties, as well as a creme brulee sampler of several flavors.
Nonetheless, Segal says she has no trouble selling her non-chocolate desserts.
“My banana desserts totally sell; so do my other fruit desserts,” she says. “I think if you keep it simple, people will order it.”
Segal will be back in the dessert-selling business in a week or so, when her new restaurant, which features casual dining with a strong dessert component, opens Feb. 22 in Bucktown.
The name of the place?
Hot Chocolate.
Hey, you go with what sells.
