[Lifestyle] Save our pudding! Why restaurant desserts are disappearing

[BirSaNN]

Nothing baffles Grace Dent more than being deliberately served “stone-cold” bread and butter pudding: “It should obviously be hot. That’s what makes it soft, delicious and yielding. I’ve had that twice.”

While it’s a quick, simple way for a restaurant to conclude a meal, cold bread and butter pudding is, for the Guardian restaurant critic, symptomatic of a wider issue. “Puddings are disappearing in Britain and they have been since the end of lockdown,” says Dent. “I talk about it all the time. That gorgeous moment at the end of dinner when the long list of different puddings comes out, it’s beginning to be a thing of the past.”

There are restaurants that still go big on dessert, from the Ritz where crepes suzette are flambeed at your table, to chain pubs with extensive menus of profiteroles, sundaes and sponge puddings. But in modern, independent restaurants, places serving a disproportionate number of broadsheet critics and, yes, Observer Food Monthly readers, the story is different.

“A reasonable choice of desserts is becoming rare,” agrees Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner. “If I find a proper sponge pudding and a tart involving pastry, where they’ve done something beyond creaming mousses, I’m thrilled. Real pastry work: pastry shells, sponges, savarins, require precision and patience.”

You never run into a restaurant going: ‘I’m starving, send me the dessert menu’
Jay Rayner
The days of the classic three-course menu have been over for a while. Today, a menu of 20+ sharing plates might include a maximum of four desserts, with some restaurants – given diners are likely to fill up early on savoury dishes – serving just one or two. They are drawn from an increasingly narrow field, as kitchens seek practical dessert formats: a tart case, meringues, parfaits, the ubiquitous panna cotta, which can be made to a high standard in a time-efficient manner, easily plated in-service and – by changing a filling, flavour or garnish – tweaked as the seasons change.

Rather than delving into painstaking sugar work, laminated pastry or tempering chocolate, modern kitchens are more likely to serve you chocolate mousse, homemade ice-cream or arrangements of fruits, yoghurts, creams and crumbles, what Rayner wryly refers to as “a few creamy things in a bowl”.

Key to this is the scarcity of pastry chefs and the salaries good ones now command. Chef Sam Grainger would love to hire one at his acclaimed Liverpool restaurant Belzan but he cannot justify the cost. “For that wage, you could have another head chef and open a couple more days,” he says.

This problem has been decades in the making. Historically, pastry chefs struggled for respect. “Pastry” was often regarded as a frivolous footnote both creatively and financially, given how much take-up of dessert varied.

Writing for the industry website Countertalk last year, pastry chef Taylor Sessegnon-Shakespeare suggested little has changed: “A recurring theme is being told you’re an unnecessary expense.”

These days, few new restaurant kitchens include a dedicated pastry section. Financially, it makes more sense to squeeze in more tables. In turn, the level of knowledge in the industry has declined as many pastry chefs have opted out, preferring to work in patisseries, bakery-cafes or consultancy. “All the pastry chefs I know opened their own businesses during lockdown,” says Grainger.

Good restaurants now have to box clever with dessert. Manchester’s Climat serves four on its menu of 26-ish sharing dishes. Be it a plum frangipane tart with creme fraiche, or a creme caramel with sauternes and golden raisins, those desserts must be achievable without, says executive chef Luke Richardson, “having one person solely dedicated to pastry”.

Rather than wasting time on complicated techniques that, for Richardson, add little, he has Climat focused on nailing a smaller repertoire that reflects his “simple” tastes: “I love a good tart or ice-cream. I’m really happy with sticky toffee pudding.”

Richardson is particularly proud of Climat’s choux buns. They took time to research and develop, and as they bake, “you have to juggle your day around it” (do not open that oven door, chef!). But “it looks impressive. It’s consistent. You can put whatever you want in.”

“I don’t think desserts are dead,” says Richardson, but, in that emphasis on utility and reliability, they are “looking a bit different”.

link: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/21/save-our-pudding-why-restaurant-desserts-are-disappearing