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Room 4 Dessert


Bond Girl

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actually we do it all here

in the dish station

wg

An interesting bit of news from Chef Goldfarb on Grub St. today.  Apparently he's outsourcing his desserts.
“Fire your pastry chef,” the cake whiz says. “We’re your Bangladesh.”

Classic.

Full article here.

I guess he rents a seperate test kitchen/production space somewhere. The kitchen at R4D is...well there isn't a kitchen!

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  • 4 weeks later...

My wife and I had the pleasure of Will's company and food last Saturday night.

To start, we ordered the chocobubbles glass (described as "warm chocolate muscovado mousse, apricot chibouste, cocoa crispies, less sherry"), which was as swell as others have described.

The two tastings we shared were voyage to India (chocoate parfait with chai, mango sorbet, coconut cream, almond dacquoise) and plat du jour (nolitela and powder, basil brioche, brioche sorbet, lemon cloud 'truffle'). The brioche and dacquoise were both just okay (no detectable basil or almond), but the rest was outstanding. I was particularly taken by the nolitela and the lemon cloud, both of which were powerful flavor and textural statements and couldn't have been much more different.

Will was as attentive as possible given the absurdity of doing all of the FOH work he does. (As we left, he insisted I call for coffee the next day because he felt he had been insufficiently gracious -- the self-critique was absurd but the gesture sweet.)

He saw me peering toward the library and said, "They're all there to look at. It's a lending library; just get them back to me when you can." His copy of the latest El Bulli tome has a broken binding. We didn't borrow it but instead replaced it on the shelf with slightly quivering hands.

The answer to every cooking question I asked was "powdered egg whites and gelatin."

We really loved everything about it. I grabbed the nolitela jar from the server helping Will and swirled my finger around it to get every last bit.

Chris Amirault

eG Ethics Signatory

Sir Luscious got gator belts and patty melts

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  • 1 month later...

Chef Goldfarb's daughter, Lulu, makes her acting debut in this short online video, where Will and his wife reflect on family life, raising kids with developed palattes, and the competitive preschool admissions process.

My g/f sent me the link from Eater and even I thought it was devastatingly cute.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Here's the article Pastry Chefs, Refusing to be Sweet:

Mr. Goldfarb echoed Mr. Ong’s sentiment, saying: “There are really no opportunities in the traditional restaurant setting for the entrepreneurial pastry chef. That is one of the reasons that you are seeing this boom.” (At the moment Room 4 Dessert is closed as a result of ownership issues he was not eager to go into. He said it would reopen, perhaps at another address.)

And also:

Mr. Goldfarb won a contract to run concession kiosks along the waterfront of Manhattan between the terminals for the Staten Island and Statue of Liberty ferries, where the menu will run to easy-to-approach sandwiches and salads and the operations will be as environmentally friendly as possible. He already has a successful commissary business, supplying desserts to restaurants including 5 Ninth and Dennis Foy.

In addition to his see-through ice cream laboratory on wheels, Mr. Goldfarb has plans to open a virtual pastry shop called Mama Sugar in the online community Second Life. He also has plans for a children’s cooking show (his daughter, Loulou, will turn 3 this fall) and plans to write a cookbook on how to use Willpowders — his line of basic chemical building blocks of modern cooking, like sodium alginate and calcium chloride — at home.

"I'll put anything in my mouth twice." -- Ulterior Epicure
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  • 1 month later...
Can´t wait to go on my next trip !

Seems you (and everyone else) will have to wait. Room 4 Dessert is now officially closed, and will definitely not be reopening in the current location. Will has said it'll be about 6 months until his new place opens, and it probably won't be exactly the same (in name or structure) as Room 4 Dessert. Here's the link from a related article:

http://nymag.com/daily/food/2007/08/room_4....html#gs-digest

Best of luck to Will...we'll all be eagerly awaiting the new place!

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  • 4 weeks later...
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