It would appear that dessert is making a comeback. Local pastry chefs say sales of their sweets have noticeably increased since pre-pandemic days.

“I don’t know if it was the pandemic and people are trying to grasp at bits of happiness, but it was kind of a shock in the beginning,” says Claire Jordan, pastry chef at Beard-nominated chef Philip Krajeck’s East Nashville eatery Folk. 

Noelle Marchetti — executive pastry chef at The Joseph, a Luxury Collection Hotel, Nashville — has seen her dessert sales spike too. She estimates that up to 70 percent of diners order dessert at the end of their meals.

“I think because it was taken away for so long, people don’t want to miss out again,” she says. “People realized what they missed.”

Also a likely factor? Dessert has gotten better. A lot better.

Historically, upscale restaurants have had a hard time justifying a full-time pastry chef. Desserts can have smaller margins than entrées and drinks, and they’re ordered less frequently, so restaurateurs will ask line cooks or whoever is working the pantry station to cobble together some kind of satisfactory sweet. Worse, they’ll bring in frozen mass-produced goods and just reheat and serve, which is why every mediocre steakhouse has the same mediocre chocolate lava cake.

Today’s pastry chefs are redefining what dessert can be, using not just sweet but also savory, sour and even umami-packed ingredients. Michael Werrell and Keaton Vasek put mustard in The Continental’s white chocolate caramel ganache, and Jordan’s menu at Folk currently features a bright and luscious sweet-pea ice cream. A dessert at Yolan called the Rubino features a beautiful ruby-red tart filled with sugared beet custard, and in the fall the pastry team flavored their seasonal gelato with toasted hay.

“People understand dessert is a lot more than just a slice of cake,” says Marchetti. “The perception has moved from simple to something that can be more elaborate. Pastry was a dying art for so long — seeing it come back up and be more appreciated is really amazing. Especially in Nashville right now, there’s an amazing pastry scene.”

Nashville, it’s time to get reacquainted with dessert. Here are five fantastic places to start.

Michael Werrell and Keaton Vasek, The Continental and Audrey

I’m hit in the face with a thick cloud of fog as I walk into The Continental’s kitchen. It gets thicker and thicker as the restaurant’s pastry director Keaton Vasek continues pouring liquid nitrogen into a stand mixer to flash-freeze a fresh batch of vanilla bean custard. 

Co-pastry director Michael Werrell is next to him stirring a container of dark liquid — it’s the “chocolate liquid shortbread,” he tells me. It’s the coating for the restaurant’s fantastic Cookies & Cream Quenelles, two-bite ice cream bonbons booming with chocolate flavor.

Any cookie can be liquefied, Werrell says.

“You bake it, cook it, dehydrate it until it’s super crispy-crunchy, then liquify that in a blender with any fat, oil or butter,” he says. “If you want to go savory, you can do ham fat, bacon fat — anything that will set back up. We dip [the frozen ice cream quenelles] into the liquid shortbread, and it sets instantly like a Magic Shell. The fact that we use the oil allows it to not freeze hard in the freezer so it still has that shortbread texture, but in this liquid, velvety, delicious sense.”

Werrell and Vasek — who got engaged in 2020 — came to Nashville from New York, where Vasek was the lead pastry cook at Eleven Madison Park and Werrell was the pastry sous chef at Eleven Madison Park and Dominique Ansel Bakery. Here they head the pastry programs for Sean Brock’s restaurants The Continental, Audrey, Joyland and, soon, June. Their desserts are joyful playgrounds of flavors and textures.

Also on the current menu is a creamy quenelle of chocolate ice cream and banana sherbet that floats on top of a glossy cloud of maple-and-roasted-banana foam and a decadent cookie ganache. This season’s cream ice is a silky smooth vanilla bean custard topped with icy-and-sweet pomelo granita and a pool of bergamot curd that’s tart enough to trigger the salivary glands at the back of your jaw. The dish looks like an abstract painting of a single cherry blossom.

“Approachability is big for us — you’ll normally only see three to four things on our plates,” says Werrell. “There’s always things hidden, fun things and textures. Then, when you dive in, the flavors start developing on your palate. That’s the fun part for us, keeping it simple but letting the food shine for itself.”

Claire Jordan, Folk

Claire Jordan’s approach to pastry at East Nashville’s Folk is also simple, but don’t mistake that for boring. 

“My chef still always says that simple food is actually very difficult,” says Jordan. “You only have a few ingredients to make an impression. I think it translates well with people because nobody wants to feel like ‘What is this?’ Or, ‘I’m not cultured enough.’ We want everyone to look at our food and think, ‘Man, this looks like something my mother or my grandmother used to make,’ and then blow your mind with flavor.”

As Jordan says this, she’s methodically constructing four apple galettes — a sort of free-form apple pie. Her rounds of crust are first filled with a layer of frangipane, the “really gooey, luscious, almond-flavored stuff” you find in an almond croissant. Then she peels and chops apples, tosses them in some house-made apple butter, and piles ’em on top. She folds the crust over, leaving some filling peeking through, and the galettes are ready to bake after a quick egg wash and a sprinkling of coarse sugar. Just like your mama made.

Unlike traditional galettes, however, Jordan’s crust is a flavor-packed rye crust that’s especially flaky and earthy — the caraway is strong with this one — and it’s served with a dollop of whipped cream that’s dotted with fresh dill. Alone, the galette is deeply comforting and cozy, like a fall day, but the dill cream makes it a different dish entirely. It transforms the galette into a bright, fruity and grassy dessert that feels appropriately light and breezy for spring.

Another mind-blower? Jordan’s sweet-pea ice cream with chunks of white chocolate. She adds a small pile of toasted pine nuts on top for a satisfying salty and buttery crunch. My first bite made me feel like a kid again, recalling warm summer afternoons in my backyard, where I’d pull pea pods off the vine in the garden and scrape the bright-green orbs out of their shell with my teeth while I waited to hear the jingle of the ice cream truck.

Jordan has been with Folk for only a little more than a year now, and one might assume she’s simply benefiting from this wave of dessert’s popularity. But really, she’s contributing to its rise. Not every chef can pull off vegetable ice cream. (Believe me, I have tasted disastrous attempts.) 

“I feel very lucky, I feel like I’ve been really well-received in Nashville,” she says. “I feel like there has been a community here that was willing to embrace what Folk was doing before, throughout, and on the other side of the pandemic. It’s really nice to see.”

Rebekah Turshen, City House

It’s not rare for passionate chefs to name some of their most crucial kitchen tools. Sean Newsome at Hi-Fi Cookies named his floor mixer Jolene. The staff at Nicky’s Coal Fired calls their giant brick oven Enrico. The floor mixer at City House, which pastry chef Rebekah Turshen has been using to make some of Nashville’s best cookies and cakes since 2009, is called Breadly Cooper.

On a recent Sunday morning, Mr. Cooper was hard at work helping Turshen prepare the day’s dessert special, a lemon-poppy-and-cornmeal butter cake with ricotta Bavarian and passionfruit curd frosted with toasted marshmallowy seven-minute frosting. 

“This is some sprouted wheat flour,” she says as she sprinkles it into the bowl of all-purpose flour, cornmeal and salt. “It adds a little digestive enzymes, and I like the texture, too. I’m really into texture.”

Turshen’s desserts look familiar when they hit the table — fat wedges of pie with whipped cream, slices of layered cake with scoops of ice cream and City House’s beloved cookie plate are almost always on the menu. But Turshen is rightfully respected around town for her ability to elevate the classics with playful and surprising twists. 

“I like people to, when they eat [dessert], feel like they remember it,” she says. “But I hope to make it just a little bit more. When people are paying $10 for a plated dessert, you want it to have a little more magic, you know?”

A recent slice of ooey, gooey fudge pie, for example — with a filling even more decadent than the deepest brownie batter — was topped with a smattering of rum-and-Coke raisins. Plump and soft with the marinade, the raisins were a lovely complement to the pie filling’s sturdy texture. 

Turshen is inspired by flavors in the South as well as her own family’s recipes. The coconut cake she serves is based on one of her grandmother’s recipes, and buttermilk, sorghum, cornmeal, bourbon and other favorite Southern ingredients are always around.

“I have one Brooklyn Jewish grandmother, and I have one Southern grandmother, so I’m sort of combining those two things with the food style here and Italian influence,” she says. “That’s what’s wonderful right now — people are pulling from all their different histories and putting them together. Everything is personal.”

Noelle Marchetti, The Joseph and Yolan

The desserts at Yolan are dazzling, each one a menagerie of colors and textures with sometimes as many as a dozen different components on the plate. 

The Rubino is a celebration of beets. A beet-custard tart is adorned with a whimsical, looping ribbon of bright-white-chocolate-citrus crème, sangria sorbet, shiny beads of pomegranate caviar, dollops of red wine gel, cubes of sour apple compressed in beet puree, pink chocolate curls and tufts of airy, fuchsia-colored moss that’s not actually moss at all. 

The Zucca Dolce, my favorite on the current menu, is all things candy-roaster squash — squash custard, cubes of squash cake, bright-orange squash gel. There’s a quenelle of tangy quark gelato to cut the sweetness, and it’s all under a swirly, whirly baked meringue cage that you can either lift away or shatter with your spoon. (Always shatter with your spoon if presented with the opportunity!) Each element takes a turn on your tongue, leaping from tangy to sweet to creamy to crunchy and around again in a matter of seconds.

Noelle Marchetti says she and her pastry team — “I will say over and over again pastry is a team sport” — follow two rules: The texture rule and the count rule. The texture rule is having “something crispy, creamy, sweet and acidic” in every dish. The count rule is all about having things in odd numbers.

“Your eye doesn’t like things in even numbers,” she says. “So we try to do one or three of things.”

One beet tart, three plops of red wine gel; one scoop of pine gelato, three clove meringue cookies. It’s a lot to take in, so don’t be ashamed if you’re at a loss for what to do as your eyes dart across the plate.

“I tell everyone to try to get a little bit of everything,” says Marchetti. “When we create these desserts, we try our best to make sure these textural components are in different areas around the plate. We want you to get something crunchy and something creamy and something sweet and have all those flavors in your mouth at the same time. They’re designed to create this little musical in your mouth — as much as you can fit on your fork, take a bite and close your eyes.”

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