Let Them Eat Cake!

By Mimi Sheraton

Desserts these days are rarely what they seem. What looks like a slice of - chocolate layer cake is really a reward for jogging those extra two miles in the morning. A towering wedge of vanilla-scented cheesecake, laden with calories, is no more than fair compensation for eating only salad or fish for lunch. And warm apple pie a la mode is not the obvious self-indulgence it once was, but a vital, midday energy booster for a deserving workaholic. Whatever the reasons (or sweet excuses), desserts are back in style with a vengeance, in restaurants and bakeries, even as diet-obsessed Americans vow to cut their calories and cholesterol levels.

"I ran three miles this morning and did sit-ups so I could have these," says Edward Edelman, 43, a New York financial consultant, as he dips into a bowlful of raspberries crowned with a snowfall of whipped cream at Vico, an uptown Italian trattoria. In San Francisco, Sterrett Brandt, 30, until recently traffic coordinator at U.S. Recycling Industries, says she wouldn't hesitate to order chocolate tortes or cheesecake when treated to a business lunch. "Since I'm not paying, the calories don't really count," she rationalizes. In Chicago, Donna Needy, 41, a casualty-company exec, begins each weekday with a healthy dose of high-fiber Metamucil powder and follows up with a strict 900-calorie diet. But, she confesses, "the 900 calories can be anything: ice cream or Fannie May lemon butter creams."

She is not the only one known to make a complete meal out of sweets. Gail Beck and Barbara Peck periodically order desserts as main courses in New York City's Oyster Bar & Restaurant in Grand Central Station, which lays out a whole table of alluring confections to tempt its mostly seafood-eating customers. "We wear sunglasses when we do that," says Peck, who wouldn't want to run into her diet doctor. "And walk in backward," adds Beck.

Restaurateurs are amused by such antics. And delighted. "Dessert sales started going up two or three years ago, and there seems to be no end in sight," reports Leonce Picot, owner of the Down Under and Casa Vecchia in Fort Lauderdale, La Vieille Maison in Boca Raton and the Old House in Monterey, Calif. Ten years ago, only 25% to 30% of diners in his restaurants ordered dessert. Now, says Picot, as many as 70% of Florida customers and 80% of those in California are indulging. Boston's Ritz-Carlton hotel and Shaw's Crab House in Chicago confirm the trend: dessert sales at both are up about 15% over last year.

Nationwide, 42% of Americans admit they ordered dessert more than once a ! month last year, according to Restaurants & Institutions magazine, up from 17% the year before. But the boom is not confined to eating out. Supermarket bakery sales were up 21% in 1986 and '87. And bakeries are bursting with business. "Desserts in restaurants are only half the loaf," affirms Elliott Medrich, co-owner of Cocolat, a San Francisco Bay-area chocolate shop renowned for its truffles. "The real dessert action is in the high end of take-away- food places or for people cooking at home."

Whatever the venue, desserts ring up rich profits for purveyors. Because they are based on relatively inexpensive ingredients that can be prepared in advance, there is a higher profit percentage in desserts than in most appetizers or entrees. "Waiters also like to offer pastries because that raises the check and, therefore, the tip that is a percentage of the total," observes Dieter Schorner, the gifted pastry chef whose velvety chocolate cake and supple, sugar-glazed creme brulee have caused many a dieter's downfall at such restaurants as Le Cirque in Manhattan and Potomac in Washington.

Schorner has just opened his own rose-pink confection of a bakery-cafe, Patisserie Cafe Didier, in Washington's Georgetown, where chocolate cake ($2.50 a slice) and cream-puff swans ($2 each) are among the offerings. "Desserts sell better when they are beautiful," he notes, "so decorating is important."

So is display. A growing number of restaurants and cafes are raising the temptation factor by presenting their delectables on a rolling cart or a table strategically placed near the entrance. "Some customers reserve their choices before ordering dinner because they know we run out of certain things," says Sam Rubin, owner of the seafood restaurant John Clancy's in Manhattan, where individual lemon meringue tarts ($6) and dense, moist chocolate velvet cake ($6) are among the first to go. Another trend: dessert samplers, with an assortment of up to seven different confections. Joyce Goldstein, chef-owner of San Francisco's Square One, describes her $6.50 version as "a ritual platter, a little orgy."

Not all restaurants prepare their own desserts, which is a boon to suppliers like Just Desserts, the San Francisco bakery. In addition to running four retail shops, it services 550 restaurants. Its best sellers: chocolate sour- cream fudge cake, apple pie and carrot cake. In five years the business's butter consumption has jumped from 3,000 lbs. a week to 7,000, while its weekly flour order has doubled from 20,000 lbs. to 40,000.

With the American sweet tooth ever aching for fulfillment, it is no wonder that the role of the pastry chef has become more glamorous and more highly paid in recent years. At the Culinary Arts Division of Johnson & Wales University in Providence, a two-year pastry program that began with 13 students in 1983 now has 208 who are learning to perfect such all-American favorites as cheesecake (the choice of one out of four restaurant dessert eaters), apple pie, fruit tarts and chocolate everything. "Making pastry requires creativity," says Arlene Chorney, an administrator at the school. "It's edible art."

Perhaps one of her graduates will become a latter-day Careme, the incomparable 19th century pastry chef to Talleyrand. All it would take is the right proportions of diligence, talent, eggs, butter and sugar, and perhaps a short prayer to St. Honore, patron saint of bakers.

With reporting by D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco and JoAnn Lum/New York