At Dessert-Only Tasting Menus, Pastry Takes Center Stage

At Nicosi, the new dessert-focused restaurant in San Antonio, an elegant, eight-course tasting menu might include dishes made with coconut, caramel, sugar cane, and peaches from a local farm. But it also incorporates some unexpected ingredients like sweet onions, black garlic, and tomatoes. 

“I wanted people to have the same experience just as they would a savory tasting menu,” says 2020 F&W Best New Chef, executive chef, and partner Tavel Bristol-Joseph. The chef, along with his chef de cuisine Karla Espinosa, aims to hit all the major flavor profiles during the experience, including sour, salty, bitter, and sweet, he says, “but all through the lens of a pastry chef.”

Related: What It’s Like to Eat a 50-Course, 6-Hour Tasting Menu

Nicosi is one of a new slate of restaurants putting the spotlight on the course that’s traditionally served last. The concept isn’t new, of course — pastry chef Chicka Tillman pioneered the space in New York starting in 2003, when she and her husband Don Tillman opened ChickaLicious Dessert Bar. (The couple closed the restaurant in July after a 21-year run.)

World renowned pastry chef Will Goldfarb started Room 4 Dessert in New York in 2005, and his avant garde tasting menu experience lives on in Ubud, Bali, and Cronut king Dominique Ansel opened the sweet and playful U.P. (Unlimited Possibilities) in 2015. These innovative concepts laid the groundwork, but as demand for novel, experiential dining experiences continues to grow thanks, in part, to social media, chefs across the country are putting their own new spin on dessert for dinner.

Bristol-Joseph credits a visit to Golfarb’s Room 4 Dessert in New York, when he was 17, with the inspiration to create his own dessert bar. “Over the years, with more experience under my belt, I realized that a tasting menu offered a more intriguing and immersive way to tell a story through dessert,” he says. “Every menu has the potential to showcase the same level of drama and technique.” But, he notes, while savory dishes follow certain conventions, “desserts offer more creative freedom.”

At Nicosi, guests can watch that creativity from one of 20 front row seats surrounding the kitchen space. Although Instagram has played a big role in the popularity of dessert tasting menus, though — theatrical, often colorful concoctions look especially enticing in the Juno filter — at Nicosi cameras are banned. The rule is meant to encourage being present at the table, and to help maintain some surprises of the experience.

While Nicosi focuses only on dessert, some traditional restaurants have embraced the trend with dedicated dessert tasting menus. At Kayu by Hiraya, which opened in January in Washington, D.C., the restaurant known for progressive Filipino cuisine serves an eight-course chef’s counter menu as well as a three-course dessert menu at the bar.

Pichet Ong, lauded Jean-Georges Vongerichten alum and famed sweet tooth, oversees the program. For the first menu, the chef used recipes from his 2008 cookbook The Sweet Spot, which were served in Vongerichten's Asian restaurants. Currently, the menu features a tart plum vinegar granité, “based on a classic Shanghainese salad of tomatoes marinated in plum wine,” he says, paired with soft chevre, and a sheet of Concord grape jelly. The second course uses the chocolate malt powder Milo for a pudding with malted chocolate and caramel popcorn, “because it is light, and ramps up well in sweetness and intensity of the course to follow,” says the chef, adding that durian ice cream, pandan sticky rice, and smoky coconut caramel for the last course, “should hit the spot for any fan of southeast Asian flavors.”

Still at other restaurants, pastry chefs are experimenting with limited-run dessert tasting menus. In Asheville, North Carolina, which is currently recovering from severe damage after Hurricane Helene, Katie Button’s La Bodega by Cúrate staged a five-day dessert pop-up last August. Pastry chef Andrew Buie’s four-course menu featured Spanish flavors in the form of sweets like burnt basque cheesecake, sacher torte, and citrus flan.

In Brooklyn, Restaurant Yuu opened last May with an exquisite tasting menu blending chef Yuu Shimano’s Japanese heritage and traditional French training. More recently, the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star, and has hosted limited-run dessert experiences led by executive pastry chef Masaki Takahashi.

The chef, who trained in Osaka, Japan and worked in exalted Tokyo restaurants like Joël Robuchon and Narisawa, had some concerns that the experience might be too many sweet courses in succession. But diners have embraced dishes like apple pie, made using traditional French tarte Tatin techniques and Honeycrisp apples, Calvados caramel, chestnut cream, and fig oil, and Mont Blanc, inspired by a nineteenth-century classic Parisian dessert with sweetened local chestnut purée, Yamazaki 12-year whiskey cream, and smoke.

Related: Why Pastry Chefs Are Making the Jump to Savory

For the first tasting menu in July, Takahashi chose color as a theme, with a green course featuring fresh melon, mint, and matcha, for example, and a purple course with blueberry foam, cassis sauce in blackcurrant meringue, cream cheese ice cream, and red shiso jelly. 

“This thematic approach made it easier for guests to understand the concept,” he says. 

For a true sweet tooth, though, the concept of dessert for dinner makes perfect sense.