NYC's Luxury Dessert Scene Is Booming and Higher Priced Than Ever

Eater

7 days ago

At Le Chêne in the West Village, a refined French restaurant that opened in May, dessert comes in the form of a double-handled aluminum baking pan, still warm from the oven and oozing with fresh fruit and baked custard. The oversized dish is their off-menu clafoutis — served with apricots and lavender or cherries, depending on the season — set atop a folded towel on a plate, accompanied by a side of goat's milk ice cream. It's rustic yet traditional, familiar with a twist, gooey in the center with crispy edges, and costs $28 — a dessert price once unheard of on restaurant menus.
Much like the $26 'boozeflation' cocktails that have now become standard around the city, entree-sized prices have come for the final frontier of the menu: desserts. It's the $30 meringue with rhubarb at Sailor in Fort Greene or the $39 strawberry cobbler with chamomile ice cream at Stissing House, an upstate destination. But there's more to it than just an outrageous price tag. As restaurants try to stay afloat amidst the rising cost of, well, everything, outsized, high-priced desserts have become a way to stand out.
Even as New York's bakery scene flourishes, fewer restaurants are investing in full-time pastry chefs — and those that do increasingly expect those hires to justify their cost with splashy, high-return creations.
King Restaurant in SoHo, serving British, Italian, and French-inspired seasonally-driven food, has long been one of the progenitors of modern large-format desserts in New York, before it 'was a trend,' says pastry chef Fiona Thomas. (Lately, it serves a berry pudding, made with brioche, macerated berries, and rosé for $42.) Increasingly, showstopping desserts that surprise and delight are just one more way to bring in more business, whether it's tableside service or larger portions, and set a restaurant apart in a crowded dining landscape.
West Village restaurant Zimmi's serves a Far Breton with Armagnac-soaked prunes and crème frâiche ice cream for two at $30, inspired by chef Maxime Pradié's 'family table' in France. Under pastry chef Clodagh Manning, Pradié says the desserts have 'an element of food anthropology,' as it relates to their sharing size. 'I think people really enjoy the interactive element of a large-format dessert,' he says. 'It has a little bit of a cross-pollinating effect too, where people see this larger thing in the dining room and want that.'
At Cafe Carmellini, the cherries jubilee for two is $29. Executive pastry chef Jeffrey Wurtz says it's 'an old school, fun presentation, where the servers come out to the table and do a little show where they light it on fire, so there's a nice flame element to it… If people are going out and spending money, they want the full experience.'
In Wurtz's view, those kinds of head-turning desserts require dedicated staff. 'I think it's really hard for restaurants that don't have pastry teams to produce really good, elevated pastry desserts,' says Wurtz. 'I would almost rather not have dessert, because why send something out that you wouldn't be proud of?'
The clafoutis at Le Chêne.
Alexia Duchêne, chef and owner of Le Chêne, says they sell about 12 to 14 large-format clafoutis per night, which amounts to about 25 percent of customers. Diners 'enjoy the fact that we are serving a traditional dessert with a twist,' she says. 'It is fun and playful, and dessert should be generous and decadent, so it totally makes sense that people are leaning toward larger format desserts.'
One point to keep in mind is that often, many of these desserts are meant for two. A 'higher priced dessert makes sense if the price doesn't exceed what two individual desserts would cost,' says Duchêne. (The menu makes sure to list it as a shared item to assuage potential sticker shock.) 'I love them, but it needs to stay reasonable in terms of pricing.'
Size isn't always the differentiating factor in higher dessert prices. At the Dynamo Room in Midtown, a chocolate tart is $34.95 because of a caviar dollop. 'It's definitely a bit of a splurge, and the pairing is unusual by U.S. standards, but people order it and are pleasantly surprised,' says Jaime Young, co-founder at Sunday Hospitality. It's the most expensive dessert across their group, which also oversees the restaurants at the Hotel Chelsea. While the caviar add-on might be an upsell, the restaurant can get away with it due to being one of the only full-service spots to ball out after a Knicks win at nearby Madison Square Garden.
However, MSG ticket holders tend to come and go quickly, the restaurant admits, and they're looking to see whether those diners will stay for a splurge-y finish as the events amp up in the fall.
Still, some chefs see the oversized hit of sweetness as a respite for everything going on in the world. 'Desserts offer joy and pleasure, and a celebratory moment,' says Thomas of King restaurant. 'I think people are really happy to have those special little moments in their day that they're sharing with others around a table.'