RESTAURANTS: The sweet spots

SUGAR DADDIES Sam Mason, Pichet Ong and Iacopo Falai, from left, offer more than dessert.

Let’s play a game: Think of three celebrity chefs. Easy, huh? Now try to do the same with pastry chefs. Not so simple. But in the next few months, the divide between the two titles—revered executive chef and obscure dessert maker—may diminish.

Three pastry chefs are opening their own restaurants: Pichet Ong, formerly of Spice Market and 66, will unveil P*ONG, a dessert-based West Village eatery, in October; Sam Mason, formerly of wd-50, is opening his own, as-yet-unnamed pastrycentric Soho restaurant in November; and Iacopo Falai, onetime Le Cirque pastry chef and already co-owner of Falai and Falai Panetteria on the Lower East Side, is working on a third spot, this one in Soho, slated for a December arrival. These developments come after the success of Will Goldfarb’s Room 4 Dessert and Francois Payard’s InTent, two other pastry-chef–owned venues. It’s a boom year for sugar pushers.

At the root of this movement is a desire for independence. “When you’re a pastry chef in a restaurant, you have to follow the courses that preceded,” says Ong, 37. “At Spice Market, I had to do desserts that made sense and were Asian, and at RM restaurant, the desserts had to make sense with a seafood meal. But now I’ll just serve whatever I want.” This time around, Ong, who will occupy the role of executive chef for the first time at P*ONG (150 W 10th St between Greenwich Ave and Waverly Pl), will take his inspiration from the Union Square Greenmarket, which is walking distance from the restaurant.

Iacopo Falai, 34, is already a proven success as a pastry-chef-turned-restaurateur: He opened Falai, an Italian restaurant, in February 2005, where he also ran the kitchen, and followed up just ten months later with the more casual Falai Panetteria. His new project at 265 Lafayette Street (down the block from Room 4 Dessert) confirms Falai’s status as a contender in the downtown restaurant competition. The 750-square-foot space, more than twice the size of his last venture, will feature his now-signature white-painted brick walls and white tin ceilings. The menu will offer house-made chocolates in addition to light meals, breads and pastries.

Falai credits the dessert-only eateries Chikalicious (in the East Village) and Room 4 Dessert with breaking ground for the current round of pastry-chef–owned venues. “The customers realized how interesting it is to have a different option on the dessert menu,” notes Falai. “People are tired of eating just a slice of cheesecake.” But this latest spate of restaurants bucks the dessert-only trend, turning attention to savory foods as well. Both Ong and Mason will challenge the accepted notions of what a restaurant and menu should be, blurring the lines between salty and sweet, and between appetizer, dinner and dessert, even cocktails. P*ONG’s menu is divided into sections like Savory, Sweet-Savory and Sweet. “In Asia, sugar is just one of the seasonings, like salt and pepper, chili and spices,” says the Thailand-born Ong, who grew up in Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong. “Generally, a pinch is always added just to round out the flavor profile of the dish.”

Mason, who frequently experimented with sweet, salty, bitter and everything in between at wd-50 (remember that goat-cheese panna cotta?), is composing a menu that is two-thirds sweet and one-third savory at his 3,800-square-foot, bi-level café and lounge (525 Broome St between Sullivan and Thompson Sts), where he’ll be conceiving and preparing his quasi-dessert creations.

At this stage, many of Mason’s projected offerings sound like hybrids of dinner and dessert: hamachi with olive oil and grapefruit, smoked eel in chocolate consommé with watermelon. “There’s going to be a lot of food that people won’t understand,” he admits. “My mom doesn’t like my desserts.”

Ong, Will Goldfarb and Johnny Iuzzini of Jean Georges (the James Beard Award Winner for outstanding pastry chef this year) all attribute the growth of pastry-driven restaurants to the Spaniards—small plates derive from tapas, and avant-garde cuisine borrows from the restaurant El Bulli outside Barcelona. “In El Bulli, pastry is responsible for most of the concepts and techniques that are coming out of that kitchen, and this is the most imitated restaurant in the world,” says Goldfarb, who worked there from 1999 to 2000. “Every chef has the ambition one day to leave a restaurant and open their own,” says Iuzzini. “It would be kind of hypocritical not to understand why a pastry chef would want to do that one day too.”

More in RESTAURANTS:
The sweet spots | Q&A: Gordon Ramsay | Awaited tables | Save the dates