We thought we had seen the last of desserts from hell — those ice creams and sorbets in flavors nobody can stomach, or “deconstructed” versions of old favorites like banana splits and sundaes. But now it seems they’re sneakily struggling to reclaim the high-fructose chomping ground.
Pastry chefs are slinking them in one or two at a time, perhaps hoping to avoid detection by frustrated customers.
At newish Greenwich Project on West Eighth Street, I bumped into a peanut butter/chocolate affair where two rounds of doughy cake were conveniently set apart by a big scoop of celery sorbet.
The sundae in a spring-roll wrapper at Tribeca Canvas should go back to the drawing board.
Never on a sundae! Harlow’s deconstructed ice cream dish is no fun at all.
Any way you crunch it, Lafayette’s pickled blueberry sorbet is fine brining — not fine dining. (
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Set between a pair of cakes, the celery sorbet at Greenwich Project is more shocking than sublime. (
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It’s presumably a smarty-pants riff on “ants on a log,” the old kids’ snack that drizzles peanut butter and raisins on a celery stalk. A crafty way to make a 7-year-old “eat your vegetables,” it isn’t my cup of tea in a grown-up joint where entrees run to $36.
At Lafayette, Andrew Carmellini’s new grand cafe, which I enthusiastically blessed with three stars, the otherwise marvelous dessert lineup ambushed us with blueberry sorbet.
The menu didn’t say it was pickled blueberry sorbet.
Fortunately, the waiter warned us. The innocent looking, purple-blue confection tasted mainly like a dill pickle. By unpopular demand, it’s since been banished to a lowly role on the house cheese plate.
At Masaharu Morimoto’s altogether embarrassing Tribeca Canvas, we stumbled into churros filled with red beans, which the menu also didn’t mention. Red beans inside a sugary fried doughnut! Other customers have encountered a “sundae” wrapped in a spring roll and Kahlua-tiramisu “sliders,” sadly not offered on my visits.
It’s no surprise that “Iron Chef” Morimoto is a Food Network star. On the Food Network, pastry chefs don’t win judges over with creme brulee. They do it by making something theoretically yummy out of a bunch of incompatible items. Like children showing off a dead mole they dragged in from the yard, they gloat, “See what I made from watermelon, vanilla and seaweed!”
For the moment, pastry chefs’ most out-there brainstorms seem mercifully at bay. Customers hated horrors like Cru’s “Liquid Lunch” — prosciutto ice cream, Epoisse cheese and grapefruit jelly.
Owners told pastry chefs: “Enough licorice panna cotta! Give us cherry pie with vanilla ice cream!” Herbs like lavender, hibiscus and verbena, which ruined many a pie and mousse, have skulked off to the bar, where they pop up in everything from Manhattans to Moscow Mules.
For all their well-traveled palates, New Yorkers prefer their sweets sweet. They line up for Cronuts and for Serendipity 3’s Frrrozen Ice Chocolate.
I’ll take the Frrrozen over Pearl & Ash’s gruesome Fernet Branca ice cream sandwich, made with a tongue-curdling Italian digestif allegedly good for a sour stomach but more apt to cause one. Hilariously, certain critics professed to like it.
You’d think restaurants would have learned not to play “assembly required” after short-lived V Steakhouse, where fussily deconstructed lemon meringue pie and berry cheesecake contributed to a premature demise.
If customers rejected the style from the great Jean-Georges Vongerichten, why would they embrace it in lesser hands? Yet, at Brooklyn’s fine Italian place Red Gravy, poor cannolis were torn to pieces.
Midtown’s sleek and sexy Harlow segments a common sundae into little bowls of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice cream, chocolate sauce, cherries, nuts and sprinkles. Treats that are magical when stacked in a parfait glass are prosaic in isolation: So much for attacking the damn thing from the top and letting it sink into a gooey blur.
The menu simply calls it “Harlow sundae.” Just because a dessert sounds like one you know, be sure to ask whether it is — or you might have to stop for a Cronut on the way home.