Best restaurant dessert you ever had

[etalanian]

What is the best restaurant dessert you have ever tasted? The one that, when you think about it, delivers you to dessert heaven. I'm talking flavor here. And texture. Was it the complexity or the simplicity of it that turned you on? Or was it the perfect balance of the flavors and texture that sent you to the moon when you ate it?

Mine is the "Coffe and Donuts" at the Cosmopolitan restaurant in Telluride, CO. Four perfectly fried French beignets (not the yeasty things served at Cafe du Monde, although they are pleasant) soft, tender, and very moist inside, with just a hint of lemon, perfect in its seduction, served hot, drenched in confectioners' sugar, tucked into a carefully folded cloth napkin, with a latte on the side. Sensuous, with impeccably balanced flavors, and a texture that sings.

What is yours?

Eileen

[akwa]

borracho of mandarins with lavender sabayon and cocoa sorbet

el bulli 99

[SuzySushi]

Simplicity itself:

Tiny wild strawberries served on ice at a restaurant in Rome. They were a revelation to me: until that time, I'd only had tasteless overbred California strawberries.

A great runner-up for a "prepared" dessert was the fresh raspberry tart we had in Versailles. Impeccably fresh raspberries carefully arranged on a thin layer of creme patisserie in a perfect pate sucree tart shell.

Give me perfection of flavor over chi-chi presentations any time.

[cbarre02]

warm mandarin tart with jasmine sabayon & curry mango sorbet

[Ling]

^The curry mango sorbet sounds very interesting!

(As for best restaurant dessert...I need another day to think about it. )

[prasantrin]

This hazelnut pie, from Bistro Dansk in Winnipeg, is my favourite restaurant dessert. I've had many that have awed, and which may have even tasted better, but I always come back to this hazelnut pie. I'm a nut freak, though, and I love whipped cream, so this pie has the best of both worlds. I also like it because it's pretty much just caramelized hazelnuts (though there might be a wee bit of cream in there somewhere).

I should say, however, that sometimes this pie is better than others. Sometimes the crust is too hard, or tastes a bit stale. But the nuts are always good!

[Siren]

There was a malaysian place in Chinatown that closed a few months after 9/11 and they had something, and forgive my spelling, called Boabo chacha.. sweet potatoes, black eyed peas and coconut milk... it's still one of my favorites. I do believe Penang sells something like it..

[Pan]

I know it as bubur caca/cha cha, or just plain bubur. When you go to Kuala Lumpur, get some at any stall that sells it, and it'll be way better than anything you had at a restaurant in New York. But Penang is a chain and there are a bunch of them; Nyonya is also part of the chain.

I'm having trouble remembering what restaurant dessert was the best. Seems like the desserts I remember most were from bakeries or home-made.

[K8memphis]

The sweets and stuff I had at Chez Philippe that my son chefed up for us in combination with the whole fantastic meal and ambiance is far and away an ultimate in dining that nothing could approach. My first & only time for durian & tarot sorbet, umm, quince sorbet, etc etc etc, et cetera.

With that said, for just regular deserts, taste & texture is the deep fried banana wrapped in spring roll with the coconut ice cream and it has some chocolate drizzle and I think some cinnamon from Fred P Gang's here in Elvis-town is the bomb.

The banana is quartered or so--not full size. Because it is a great contrast of crisp/soft/hot with melty/firm/cold plus sweet contrast with bitter chocolate, nicely nicely tropical too. Feel the trade winds, mop up the drool All made in house, I'm told. Really a wonderful experience. And you feel satisfied too, not just dessert-ed.

In my pre-SouthBeach Diet days, we would go there just for dessert.

[Wendy DeBord]

If you consider presentation, take a look at this similar thread.

[Busboy]

At the Bateau Ivre in Courcheval, France, after six courses of anal-retentive two-star cooking (fuck understatement, I say) the pastry chef sent out a perfectly poached pear half resting in a lake of lime foam, with a licorish stick (the wooden kind, not the candy kind) sticking up out of its belly. Stacked up on the stick, like were pear sections that had been sauteed in sugar. Somehow I overcame my inherent distrust of foams and stacked food to chew the licorish stick in between bites of the two pears and slurps of lime. Exquisite.

[etalanian]

Give me perfection of flavor over chi-chi presentations any time.

←

I agree! I've been misled too many times by fancy presentation that leaves me terribly disappointed after tasting the dessert.

et

[etalanian]

No, no, no...presentation can be deceiving. But that thread made me think of this one.There have been too many times in my long life of eating restaurant desserts that I have been miserably misled by the presentation of a dessert, only to have my hopes dashed to the rocks. I am looking for the perfect sensual experience someone remembers from eating a dessert at a restaurant.

Sometimes the simplicity of impeccably balanced flavors and textures in a simple dessert can provide way more "shock and awe" than the most spectacularly presented dessert.

These are two very different threads.

best,

Eileen

[Katie Nell]

The apple pie at Yia Yia's in Overland Park... it's no longer on the menu and everytime I go in, I ask them to bring it back! It was a sad day in my life when they took it off the menu! Wrapped in a phyllo crust with a cinnamon ice cream and caramel sauce... apples just the right texture too!

[Betts]

Simplicity itself - perfect creme caramel flavored with maple and orange, served with tiny bits of fresh fruit. This was my latest bit of dessert heaven at Stargazers on the Thames in Chatham Ontario.

If there is a creme caramel on the menu I almost always order it but why is it so hard to get a good one? I want dense, utterly smooth, a hint of flavor besides eggy and most of all that clean break of good custard as the spoon slides through.

Creme brulee isn't the same and the crust shattering apparently doesn't satisfy me the way that it does for others

[rooftop1000]

Chocolate crepes at Ari I Oggi in Reykjavic Iceland...just a chocolate filled crepe covered, no smothered, no devastated by fresh whipped creme....and a hot chocolate also with whipped cream.

Even a cup of hot chocolate at the mall was smothered in cream...good place Iceland

tracey

[onehsancare]

At Postrio, in San Francisco, last Easter.

Carmelized Pear Baba, filled with St. Andre triple cream. Served with a scoop of black pepper ice cream. To die for.

We're going to try to replicate it at my European Specialty Baking class tomorrow and Thursday--I'll report if you want.

[etalanian]

I'd love to hear about it. Please do.

[maggiethecat]

I'm interested to see a few references to desserts featuring pears, because I think that pears are a vastly underrated dessert fruit, and deserve a special place in fruit and dessert heaven. Like apples, they can be baked, poached, caramelized. Unlike apples, they take well to chocalate. And unlike almost every other fruit save bananas they can be bought green and ripen on the shelf.

The shelf --that's where they were perched in the bars and trattorias in Tuscany in late February --giant, wide-hipped big-assed pears, pre- poached. The bartender would pull one down and smother it with dark chocolate sauce and conversation would cease while we really savored the pear and chocolate tastes and textures. Throw on some ice cream and would it be Poires Belle Helene? But these didn't need ice cream.

Tuscany isn't exactly the beating heart of patisserie, but my second favorite dessert is also a Tuscan thang: bongo bongos. Available, again at every bar, restaurant and cafe: profiteroles in chocolate sauce, served in a wide bowl with a big spoon.

The absolutely most beautiful and delicious sweets I've ever eaten in my life (and I consider myself so lucky!) were from the hands of out own nightscotsman. But the clean plain luxury of a big pear in hot chocolate sauce... almighty good.

[Ling]

I'm sorry. I can't choose just one. There are some of the best I've had in the past few months (bakeries excepted).

Port-poached pear with Roquefort ice-cream, candied pecans

I apologize for the picture...I dug my spoon into it. Very eager to try the ice-cream, and it didn't disappoint. I was hoping for strong blue cheese flavour, and it delivered!

Concord grape and pinenut filling tart, with browned butter ice-cream

The filling was delicious--thick and jammy, with a beautifully browned crust that was thick enough to stand up to the filling.

Valrhona chocolate tart

Thin, buttery, crisp crust and how can you go wrong with a simple ganache made from one of my favourite brands of chocolate?

Edited October 26, 2005 by Ling (log)

[Sethro]

I'm sure I don't have a favorite, but heres a few I really love.

The Olive Claufutis at WD-50. If you're not familiar with Sam Mason, you'd assume his desserts were odd just for the sake of being so, which is kinda the feeling I got myself when reading the menu description (knowing full well that the guy is a genius). However, it turns out that the flavor is quite natural and actually very comforting. I'm a big fan of salinity in desserts, but this was considerably less salty than some desserts I've tried which contained ingredients no where near as hard to put a leash on as olives.

It makes me seriously wonder why we haven't been eating olive pie for dessert for ages now.

I also love the Thai Jewels at Spice Market. I read a review recently that trashed them, but I think it must have to do with the execution nowadays, because in its intended form, it rocks.

Sure, its alot like Fruity Pebbles, but those rock too.

[onehsancare]

Postponement on the pear babas in class this week--I had a terrible time locating 10 oz. ramekins. They should arrive by next week, and I'll report on our attempts.

I had really high hopes that I could find some disposable paper baking molds that might work. The most complete site (name is escaping me now) had panettone

molds up to 9 oz, then the next larger mold was more tart-proportioned and was 12.5 oz. (I enjoyed the spreadsheet drafting that would allow me to take dimensions in inches, calculate volume as cubic inches, then convert cubic inches into ounces!)

So I gave up on paper and am buying ramekins on eBay. I'll report on the success of that, too!

[Andy Lynes]

I had the most amazing prune and armagnac souffle at The Restaurant, Hyde Park Hotel when Marco Pierre White was the head chef back in 93 or 94. It was huge, beautifully cooked and when the waiter poked a little hole in the top with a spoon and poured in creme anglaise, I was in heaven. The pastry chef at the time was Thierry Busset who is now at Cin Cin in Vancouver. I ate there recently, but had to leave before dessert because our jet lagged kids had to get to bed. A real shame!