Why Pastry Chefs Are Making the Jump to Savory

There’s a cliché in the restaurant industry that line cooks are afraid of pastry. They’ll complain it’s too precise, requires too much measurement. Add to that the fact that most culinary schools silo savory and pastry, and the result is that many chefs have zero experience making desserts. For some chefs, though, the magic is in the crossover.

Among these is 2013 F&W Best New Chef Alex Stupak, who worked for many years as the pastry chef at acclaimed restaurants like wd~50 and Alinea, but switched back to savory food and now owns five restaurants, including The Otter, which recently opened in Manhattan. The menu there is deceptively simple, but dishes are constructed with an attention to detail that reveals his time as a pastry chef at some of the country’s most famous modernist restaurants. 

But Stupak says he doesn’t make a strong distinction between pastry and savory.

“You hear from cooks who say, ‘Oh I don’t like pastry… it’s so accurate,’” Stupak says. “But I’d argue everything should be accurate.”

Stupak trained at the Culinary Institute of America, choosing the school’s savory program and barely dabbling in pastry. Soon after graduating, he took a job as a line cook at The Federalist in Boston. Just as he was settling in, the job of pastry chef opened up suddenly.

“I was a bit of an opportunist …I raised my hand for the job,” Stupak remembers. “I was obsessed with it, but it had less to do with dessert, and more to do with freedom.” That desire for liberty sent Stupak on a nearly decade-long foray into cooking dessert. As he approached 30, though, he knew he wanted to own his own restaurant.

“It really wasn’t my dream to own a bakery,” he remembers. It’s the accuracy, the importance of measuring ingredients to the gram, and heating to the specific degree that is often the dividing line between pastry chefs and savory ones. But Stupak says all the dishes in his kitchens are developed with recipes that specify amounts down to the gram. His commitment to accuracy is shared by Max Wittawat, chef-owner of New York City’s Bangkok Supper Club.

Though he focused on savory cooking during his training at the Cordon Bleu culinary school in Bangkok, Wittawat spent the majority of his career as a consultant before opening Bangkok Supper Club, his love letter to the food he grew up eating. As a consultant, Wittawat worked on a variety of projects, helping owners and operators develop menus and train staff. One of his longest running consulting projects was Spot Dessert Bar, a pastry-focused concept owned by Ian Kittichai.

“I’m not a pastry chef,” Wittawat says. “But when you’re consulting, you learn to do pretty much everything.”

 Wittawat says he also doesn’t make a distinction between pastry and savory.

“For me, the difference is the ingredients,” he says. “It’s chocolate and sugar, versus meat and spices, but the approach is the same. You have to be very precise.”

As a consultant, Wittawat’s job was to develop recipes and systems to set restaurants up for success. He needed to ensure a team could execute consistently on any dish without oversight, and he’s carried that approach to Bangkok Supper Club.

“The cook who makes the cakes at Bangkok Supper Club is the same person who makes all the dressings and curries and the master sauces,” Wittawat says. “He treats the sauces and the cakes the same: they’re another component that he has to prepare and he doesn’t have any fear about that.”

Wittawat says his staff is mostly Mexican, so many of them don’t have a strong touchpoint for what something like Massaman curry or a galangal lemongrass stock should taste. Wittawat sidesteps that issue by providing his team with to-the-gram recipes, which allows them to cook consistently without constantly tasting.

For Alexandra Holt, the chef-owner of Roxanne in Philadelphia, tasting along the way is a savory cooking skill she’s incorporated into all her cooking. Holt trained at the CIA in pastry, partially because she was struggling with disordered eating at the time and wanted to cook without eating.

“In the pastry program, they highlight techniques,” Holt said. “We often wouldn’t taste anything until the dish was completely finished.”

Today, though, Holt’s food often pairs unexpected flavors like vanilla and tobacco or ice cream made with St. Malachi cheese and topped with caviar.

"A lot of times I’m trying something and I don’t know if it will work,” she explains. “So I am tasting constantly along the way.”

 Holt says it’s been a long time since she cooked from a recipe, but part of the appeal of Roxanne is that it’s different every night. Holt works in her kitchen alone, serving about twenty guests at a time. The whole point is the inconsistency, the way the menu changes to suit her whims and ideas.

Whether they’re leaning into precision or away, Stupak says the real distinction between pastry and savory is emotional. “In savory food, people are eating because they’re hungry,” he says. “Dessert is the only time when you’re eating exclusively for pleasure.”