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Your favourite signature dessert now available at a bakery near you
Restaurants are tweaking their signature desserts into pre-packed offerings you can pick up from a bakery or a store. But is the visual appeal and taste lost in translation?
If you are a regular at Ellipsis — the fine-dining restaurant in Colaba — you may have spent a few minutes gawking at its signature dessert — house-made chlorophyll yogurt. Swirls of dark green chlorophyll float on sweetened yogurt adorned with edible flowers. This dish comes all the way from Los Angeles, where Phuong Tran (Ellipsis’ executive chef) owns and runs a restaurant. Now, you’ll be able to simply pick it up off a shelf, at Ellipsis’s second bakery, which opens in Bandra this week (inside Nature’s Basket).
Increasingly, high-end restaurants are moving their signature dishes — especially popular desserts — out of the restaurants and into bakeries and smaller stores. For Ellipsis, it was a matter of demand. “This dessert is healthy and has clean flavours as opposed to sugar-laden varieties. Our customers would often ask for it at the bakery in Worli,” says Sanjnaa Talwar, owner, Ellipsis Bakery.
Read: #Foodgasm alert: When did Mumbai get so dessert-savvy?
At Sassy Spoon’s Juhu bakery, Sassy Teaspoon, signature desserts from the restaurant — sassy stacks (red-velvet cake with cappuccino foam and raspberry caviar) and seven-textured hazelnut and chocolate dessert — are now packaged to be taken away. “It is about making our signatures available to a larger audience,” says Irfan Pabaney, head chef and co-owner, Sassy Spoon. Now, the restaurant plans to set up bakeries (store-in-store format) at its Bandra and Nariman Point outlets, where people can walk in and take away the desserts.
One of the most important draws of a signature dish is presentation. Packing in all those elements into a plastic cup or a jar poses the risk of taking away from its appearance. “But it also cuts down on overheads like restaurant rent, staff in the kitchen and other costs involved in dining out,” points out Pabaney. The seven-textured hazelnut dessert at the bakery is priced at Rs 220; the one at the restaurant costs Rs 365.
Apart from the pricing, restaurants tweak the original form of the dish to fit into a bakery/store format. For instance, the yogurt-based dessert is packed into small plastic cups, and the red velvet dessert (from Sassy Spoon) is turned into a cake. “As these desserts have been created specially in small portions for the bakery, they don’t need fancy plating,” adds Talwar. Chef Anees Khan of Star Anise (a bakery in Bandra) agrees. He says factors like limited space and shelf life are some of the considerations to keep in mind. “Desserts made for a patisserie can’t go overboard. They need to be simple yet retain their visual appeal,” he adds.
