Some years ago, I reached out through social media to a celebrity chef/restauranteur/author and asked the most obnoxious and boring question a journeyman chef could ask. “Where do you get your ideas for dishes?”

With respect to Tim Ferriss and his “nothing ventured, nothing gained” philosophy in The 4 Hour Work Week, social media has created an atmosphere of parasocial relationships. Celebrities, influencers, authors, writers, and other famous personalities put their thoughts and ideas out into the public, and we feel a bizarre approximation of intimacy with someone we don’t know. Why else would a pastry chef from Portland, out of the blue, decide he was entitled to an answer to a fundamentally involved and idiotic question from a guy with a restaurant brand and empire to manage?

So when I got the one-word answer to my question- “Life”- my initial reaction was “Wow, no kidding jackass.” With the benefit of hindsight, I know this individual didn’t owe me an answer at all. I was the random asshole on the internet bothering them with a childish question.

I also have, with time and experience, found that the answer to that question is both insanely simple and involved and personal. Had they wanted to give me a full answer, it wouldn’t have been wrapped up in anything pithier than simply saying “life.”

Well this is my blog. I have time and lines to fill, and I answered some parts of that question already. No one’s asked me (yet) but here’s my best explanation for how I come up with new desserts for the winery.

1. What Will/Do I Have On Hand?

My boss keeps a relationship going with local growers and farmers. He has a generally good idea of what new produce will be available in the coming weeks, and the winery focuses on seasonality. We’re not above reaching out to get some more particular ingredients out of season, but ultimately it comes down to the same thing cooks, chefs, mothers, caretakers, and hungry people have asked themselves since we figured out how to eat- “What’s available, and how do I make it taste good quickly?”

With summer coming to an end, the melons and stone fruit that he had featured will be drying up. Sure we could keep bringing in plums and peaches and watermelons from hither and yon. That’s the global market, isn’t it? September in the Pacific Northwest means nothing to plums from Chile, blueberries from Mexico, and watermelons from Bumblefuck, but that’s not what’s here. They won’t be as good, they won’t be cheap or plentiful, and they won’t be what customers pulling their hoodies and Uggs out of storage will be looking for.

According to the boss, Kiyokawa Orchards is selling off the first of their crops of apples and pears- tens of varieties for hundred of different flavors and uses. We’ll start seeing sweet potatoes, yams, squashes, nuts, and a bunch of hardier greens.

Think of that as a casting list for a show. A-Listers everyone’s looking for, B-Listers people love to see but rarely get a spotlight, and support cast- flavors, concepts, and ideas that add background color and hold it all together. Only way you’re gonna see summer fruit on these plates is jammed, sauced, or preserved somehow.

2.What Do I Want To Conjure or Invoke With Them?

This is where the gallery comes in. This where you wonder How to Serve A Season.

“Are we ready for poached pears yet?”
“What have we done that screams ‘apple pie’ in the past?”
“Can I really serve a Baked Apple that makes customers feel like they’re on a Boy Scout camping trip like I had as a kid?”
“How do we make them glad they came in from the rain?”

Running a restaurant is about “selling food” in the same way that giving a concert is about “plucking a guitar and hitting a snare drum.” That’s the medium for sure, but you are selling a lot more than that. You are selling a fantasy. A story in which the customer or audience is pulled out of the “real world” into something they’re convinced matters just as much. All performance, all art, all creative expression is meant to be persuasive like this. The Wailers needed to convince you that music and love could win the day. A novel writer needs to convince you that what happens next is just as important as paying your bills or getting the laundry done. I need to convince you there’s some insight to be gleaned from reading my blog.

What is a restaurant trying to convince you of? That right up until the check is paid, you are the Main Character, that it’s all about you and the world outside can fucking wait till you’re done.

As fall comes in then, I need to find flavors and ideas that put you in a metaphorical Hallmark movie. You may have never actually gone to farmers market, but damn if a baked apple dessert won’t make you want to. Restaurants survive on feeding you stories, written in your emotions, translated into food.

That settles it then. I need to conjure Changing Nature. I need to conjure Comfort, Coziness, and Coming In From The Rain. Firesides, fluffy blankets, hygge… the works. There’s a reason autumn is my favorite season to bake for.

Apples need to make an appearance. Warming spices too, for the first time since winter. I need toastiness and caramelization without the smoke of summer bonfires. The summer was light and floral- I need Depth and Settling In. No more fireworks and sea salt, I need changing trees and apple cider.

Nuts are always good. You can treat them any number of ways, but toasted nut flavors can communicate anything you want treated well. Fall means Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving means Pie (my PTSD from the pie shop can attest to the truth of that if nothing else,) and I know how to make a solid Pecan Pie. Bourbon in a pecan pie is trope at this point- but at a winery? If you’re dropping three to four figures on the check, people don’t necessarily want to order a pie they could get at a diner. I need to make it familiar, cozy, but upscaled.

Bourbon is the touchstone there. The winery has a whiskey list, including some rare pours. What if I was to offer something that was pecan pie, but tasted like a fine whiskey cocktail?

That could be something. An actually “Old Fashioned” Pecan Tart.

Then there’s the Chocolate Cake. A “signature” “safe choice.” When everything else on the dessert menu looks to wild or out there for stodgy white suburbanites, at least we offer a damn decent and basic Chocolate Cake. It needs an update all the same though- a practice I’ve come to call “putting a hat on it.” The cake stays the same, the toppings and garnishes change with the season.

We did florals in spring. We did cherries in summer. What goes with chocolate in fall? Back in the Gallery, I remember my mother loving to get chocolate-covered frozen bananas before the weather got truly cold. I remember one of my favorite desserts being Bananas Foster. On crepes, ice cream, or pancakes it was hard to beat that warm brown sugar, cinnamon, rum glaze with chunks of banana partially dissolved in the cooking process. Could we offer Bananas Foster and Chocolate Covered Bananas at the same time? That might be something.

Three updates. Three ideas. Three trips down to their emotional cores. Time to execute.

3. How Can We Make This Happen?

I truly love it when people send me videos or TikToks of people making these beautiful, elaborate desserts for themselves and for dinner parties. Cooking and baking are at least partially art, and it’s always good to see people making room for it in their lives. Eventually though, someone says “you should try this at the winery” and I feel like a heel throwing water on the idea.

The reality is I can have as much as I want of the finest ingredients in the world, and I can have a million and ten amazing ideas, but the last hurdle is “what can my people and I deliver regularly, on time, smoothly, and well?”

Making four, ten, or even fifty of an elegantly plated dessert for one dinner with a set guest count is straight-forward- “get all the plates done and out, on time, looking beautiful.” You know in advance how many portions and what time it needs to be served, you plan in advance and maybe get a little help. If you aren’t utterly useless and/or over your head, you can manage that. I did it while I was functionally cosplaying as a pastry chef and trying to punch way above my weight as far as ideas and serving went.

Dinner service is a radically different animal. Tickets come in with orders, several at once, and my team needs to be able to deliver all of those desserts- all different desserts, semi-randomly- “done, on time and beautiful” within a matter of minutes. We do not have an hour-plus to fuss over individual plates and preparations.

All those ideas my team and I came up with then get modified and whittled down through execution:

“What can we make ahead? How can we hold it?”
“What elements can we make in batches? How long can THOSE hold?” A
“How can we adjust the plating to make it smoother and easier, but still clean and beautiful?”

We talk about “touches” on the plate as a number. A “touch” is any time a cook has to put something on the plate before it can be sent out. Too many touches? Too long to plate. Whittle down some of the elements. Too few touches? Fast to plate, but looks shitty and cheap for what we’re selling it for. Fancy it up a bit. Only a few touches, but some are technical or slow or fragile? A fuck-up can cost time and material. Simplify it. Even though I mainly do the production end, I plate everything at least a few times myself to see if it makes sense and I get feedback from my team. They’re the ones who will actually be plating most of the time, and I rely on them to tell me when my head is up my ass. “Matt, it looks great, but we need to be able to whip out several of these quickly.”

In this process, sometimes the tweaks are small. Sometimes the whole idea is scrapped. It can be a case of “let’s move the ‘orange’ component from candied zest to scented cream- the candied zest is too powerful on its own and we need a ‘cream’ component.” It can also be a case of “a tempered chocolate cube serving dish would be awesome if we had the time and facilities to make and store the damn things. Do you want to make new ones every day for ONE mousse dish? I sure as shit don’t.”

4. Finding Balance

Back when I started dreaming up desserts, my half-joking ethos was “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” Gonna make an apple pie? Make it the most apple-y apple pie ever. The perfect blend of apples, filling made with apple brandy, apple cider in the crust, apple pie spices everywhere they can be.

Even if it doesn’t go wrong, it can be wasteful. One-note dishes are easy- balance takes intention and skill.

Since I started doing this baking thing, I’ve learned that a meal doesn’t just tell a story. Each plate needs to be a scene, a one-act performance of its own. It need a “star,” and it needs enough of the right supporting roles to make the entire plate shine around it. That happens with textures, with flavors, and (when it comes to the actual plating) with drama.

Let’s use that Chocolate Banana Cake idea from earlier. The cake is a flourless layer cake with chocolate mousse. That checks off the metaphorical “squishy/creamy” and “chocolate” boxes. We said “Bananas Foster,” but making and holding the actual dessert for service would be difficult. We’re not a cruise ship or That Kind Of Restaurant, so our servers won’t be making it table-side. Some of them read this blog, so I won’t say which ones I don’t trust with open flame near customers.

Something that tastes like Bananas Foster then. On top of the cake, let’s make a rum caramel with bananas. Check off “caramelized,” “sweet,” “fatty.” Need some actual bananas on there, because duh. Plain banana slices will brown immediately. What if we brulee them and double-down on the caramel angle, but this time with a little crunch and drama to boot? Three pieces of banana rubbed with sugar and torched per plate isn’t that wild of a touch- my team knows how to make that happen.

The plate needs something light on there. A lot of heavier flavors so far, it needs a blank slate. Can’t beat plain whipped cream for that, but lets cut back on the sugar- there’s plenty of sweetness on the plate, and sweetened cream would just be overkill.

That is a lot of sweet, heavy, sweaty flavors on there. It needs some crunch and some bitterness. Crunch the way a salad needs croutons, and bitterness to make all the sweetness that more lovely. We’ve already got candied cocoa nibs. Nut-like pieces of raw cacao that are pungently bitter chocolate transformed into a bittersweet brittle. Crush some of those up, scatter them on the cream and plate, and people have a break from all the sweet squishy stuff when they want it.

With proper mise, that’s five touches on the plate executed from ticket to sending in three minutes or less. During a rush, we could even pre-fire the bananas to have a few plates worth ready (a.k.a. “sandbagging”.)

Repeat this process a few more times, get it over that last ever moving hurdle of “does the boss like it,” and you’ve got a menu for at least a few weeks.

Believe me, even if I didn’t have a management to please, balancing all those other considerations is where the real work is. Pleasing the boss is timing and psychology- pleasing myself with my work is damn near impossible. Even looking at these plates I can see the moment where ideas ran up against the limits of the medium and reality and said “Alright, that’ll work.” To quote my father, “Don’t let good be the enemy of perfect.”

All the same, when someone tries what I made and says “This reminds me of [childhood memory they love]” or “It feels so balanced,” I can give myself some slack. I did my job.

Stay Classy,