Are Pastry Chefs an Endangered Species?

Most pastry kitchens are tiny. A convection oven; a proofing rack; a giant Hobart mixer, looking like a squat, gunmetal-gray R2-D2; a long prep table (in marble for chocolate, if you're lucky) for tarts or laminated dough or maybe a few plated desserts; more speed racks, stacked high to make the most of any available space. Instead of imagining a French patisserie, think Das Boot. And that's if there's a pastry kitchen at all. Often there isn't: The space in any restaurant kitchen is at such a premium that the tables and ovens tend to be taken by the savory chefs.

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PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Nancy Silverton at the original La Brea Bakery

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

Nancy Silverton at the original La Brea Bakery

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• Nancy Silverton
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And if the world of pastry chefs has long been a small one, it has gotten even smaller since 2008, when the economic downturn translated into a disproportionate number of them losing their jobs.

"The financial crisis was devastating to pastry," pastry chef Roxana Jullapat tells me on a recent morning after breakfast service at Cooks County, the Mid-City restaurant she co-owns with her husband, chef Daniel Mattern.

If you consider the hierarchy of a traditional kitchen, the pastry chef usually is the lowest-paid managerial position, making an annual salary that was consistently quoted to me as about $35,000. Desserts often are seen as less important than the main courses, an optional portion of the menu that can easily be outsourced, with breads and individual desserts being brought in from an outside contractor. Or, increasingly, desserts are made by the chef or someone on staff: a few homey standards, say a batch of ice cream or a chocolate pudding, which can be made ahead and kept until needed.

"It's very frustrating," Jullapat, a veteran of the pastry kitchens of Campanile, Lucques and A.O.C., says of non-pastry staff taking over a restaurant's dessert production. "I've had terrible desserts from great chefs."

"Pastry chefs have always been on the fringe," Elizabeth Belkind agrees. She's the executive pastry chef and partner at Cake Monkey, a North Hollywood–based pastry and cake business. Before that, she spent three years in Nancy Silverton's pastry kitchen at Campanile and was the opening pastry chef at Grace.

"It's always been a last thought," Belkind says, one that businesses try to downsize or eliminate in order to survive. Desserts often are considered a luxury, both in terms of the menu and the restaurant's business plan. "You piss off a table, you send out dessert. You give them away."

Dessert wasn't always optional. In white-tablecloth restaurants — once the locus of a city's restaurant scene but now themselves nearly obsolete — the beautiful architecture of the plated dessert is the flourish of the entire meal, an accomplishment wrought from tempered chocolate and flaky pastry, from unbroken sauces and blown sugar.

It was not your mother's pie recipe, or the scoop of ice cream with seasonal berries that you'll see anchoring the dessert menus of so many well-regarded restaurants today.

"In our field you have chocolate work, sugar work, bread, dessert plating," says Sherry Yard, who spent decades running the dessert section of Wolfgang Puck's empire before leaving early this year to open what will doubtless become her own empire. "Desserts are all about form and function, about warm and hot and cold. I want every component to hit your palate on different levels at different times. You have to know when to give up control, and if you go to a good restaurant, you have to give it up — it's a trust factor."

For years Yard was famous for the control she exerted from Spago's pastry kitchen, and for the influence she had, by extension, over the city's other restaurants and bakeries.

It's a measure of just how small a world L.A.'s dining scene is that an astonishing proportion of working pastry chefs came out of just two kitchens, Spago and Campanile, and thus trained under just two great pastry chefs, Sherry Yard and Nancy Silverton. If not literally, then laterally, as the pastry chefs trained by those two chefs in turn trained the chefs and populated the kitchens of the entire town, their techniques and sensibilities moving out, as traceable as the fault lines of butter in a pâte brisée.

Through Yard's pastry kitchen came Karen Hatfield, co-owner of Hatfield's and Sycamore Kitchen; Michelle Myers, who not only trained many pastry chefs at Sona but also opened Boule, a patisserie that had an astounding influence itself in the all-too-few years it was open; and Clementine's Annie Miler, who also spent almost five years at Campanile with Silverton.

Silverton herself came out of Spago, where she wrote her influential 1986 dessert cookbook, Desserts. (She and Yard never worked at the restaurant at the same time.) Other Spago alums include Miho Travi, pastry chef at Fraîche and Riva, who's now at Littlefork; Sally Camacho, of WP24 and now the Jonathan Club; and Zairah Molina, pastry chef at the new restaurant Bucato, ironically next door to Yard's new project in the Helms Bakery complex.

But even in the heyday of fine dining, before the recession, Los Angeles' dessert scene was different from other cities'. Maybe because fine dining itself has always been different here, less entrenched, with never more than a handful of truly world-class restaurants. Maybe it was the huge influence of farmers markets, with stunning fruit available year-round.