Isabel Coss Wants to Champion the Art of Mexican Pastry in America

Nothing is quite as it seems on Isabel Coss’ dessert menu at Lutèce. Take the cheese plate of 18-month-aged Comté and honeycomb: Coss transforms the honey into a velvety, but not too sweet, semifreddo that arrives crowned with thick curls of salty Comté. It’s not exactly the cheese plate one might expect from a charming French restaurant in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Then there is the dessert labeled simply “Canelé.” Although it is made using silicone canelé molds, it’s a far cry from the temperamental French pastry. For her version, Coss creates a liquid ganache from caramelized white chocolate that she infuses with fig leaves (plucked from her neighbor’s trees) to form the luxurious shell for a filling of rum caramel ice cream so silky you’ll contemplate immediately ordering another one. Even the sorbet arrives paired with an unexpected element: gelatin. Coss spins her Bosc pear sorbet to order, stacking quenelles of the refreshing dessert high in a bowl, and then surrounds them with a moat of bouncy Savagnin Blanc (not to be confused with Sauvignon) and verjus gelatin cubes. The combination is a nod to her upbringing in Mexico, where gelatin desserts are much loved, and embodies her playful outlook when it comes to pastry. “There’s no way you don’t feel like a kid eating it,” she says.

Coss is a proud “postre chef,” as she likes to call herself, using the Spanish word for “dessert.” Though she has spent many years working in professional kitchens, she still has a childlike wonder and excitement when it comes to her work. She is always eager to learn, going so far as to wake up at 4 a.m. to improve her ice cream–making skills at The Creamery at Union Market while also running the pastry program full-time at Lutèce. (She also hopes to open a Mexican ice cream shop one day.)

Her career has been shaped by that same driving curiosity. Growing up in Mexico City, Coss dropped out of college to work in the kitchen at Pujol, the legendary restaurant from chef Enrique Olvera. She fell into the pastry kitchen because she found a lot more freedom there. “I was like, ‘Why am I going to be fighting to get over there to the stoves? I really want to be here doing sorbet and making bread,’” she says. “And it had the good snacks.” She considered going to The Culinary Institute of America but found it way too expensive. Instead, she took a job at pastry chef turned restaurateur Alex Stupak’s high-end taqueria Empellón in New York while crashing on a friend’s couch. Coss eventually took a job at the now-closed Agern; it specialized in Danish cooking, which she had very little familiarity with. “When I don’t know how to do something, I become obsessed with the dishes,” says Coss. “I didn’t know how to work with their native ingredients and make things like pine needle frozen soufflé.” A job offer from a friend at a New Year’s Eve party led Coss to another one of Olvera’s restaurants, this time Cosme in New York City. (“I never worked in such a big restaurant with such high demands. I think it leveled me up as a chef,” she says.) Coss remained at Cosme until December 2020, when she joined her husband, fellow chef Matt Conroy, at Lutèce in D.C.

For the first year at Lutèce, Coss found herself doing whatever she could to help out the tiny French bistro: “We didn’t have any staff. I was the hostess. I was the manager. I was the graphic designer. I was taking photos. I was doing social media. I was painting. I was doing pastries.” Finally in 2022, the restaurant staffed up, and Coss was able to stop spreading herself so thin. She launched a full, ambitious pastry program at the restaurant, which she ran solo until earlier this year, when she was finally able to bring on a cook to help manage it.

Though Coss plays around with her Mexican heritage at Lutèce — she often uses French techniques to highlight Mexican flavors and ingredients­ — the bistro is a French restaurant at the end of the day. To delve more deeply into her roots, Coss is in the process of opening a new project with Conroy called Pascual, named after the patron saint of the kitchen. There, Coss will have a full-blown Mexican pastry program, plus a window to dole out her delights. “I think they are so much fun because they’re like French pastries but on steroids. I think Mexican pastry really needs its own space.”

With Pascual, she hopes to help other people find their home in this industry — especially when it comes to cultivating the next generation of pastry chefs. “I really love this industry. And I think it has this space for people of all ages and people of all backgrounds. It has given me everything I have,” she says. “I want to see more pastry cooks in the States. I want to help build that."