SUGAR BABY
By Leslee Komaiko
For dineLA.com
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In 1994, the effusive and — dare we say — cute as a (candy) button, Sherry Yard accepted the position of pastry chef at the original Spago on Sunset Strip, then the most star studded restaurant in town, if not in the world. Today, Yard has been honored by just about every food authority including the James Beard Foundation and Bon Appétit, which named her best pastry chef of the year. She holds the position of corporate pastry chef for Wolfgang Puck Catering and Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining, which comprises 15 restaurants, including Spago and Chinois. She’s also a key player in Wolfgang Puck Worldwide, an even larger entity of 80 plus restaurants and other ventures. Considering her earliest restaurant gig at a McDonald’s in her native Brooklyn, she’s certainly come a long way.
Do you do the dessert menus at all the restaurants?
For the most part the pastry chefs in all the restaurants have their own autonomy. I’m like the pollinator or the big sister. If I have an idea we all work on it. Also I do the pizza line with Wolfgang. I do all the doughs. We do about 25,000 [pizzas] a run. And we have a little catering company. We’re doing the ESPYs tomorrow night for 2,700 people.
I imagine this wasn’t exactly what you pictured when you went to culinary school.
I don’t think there was a position like this when I went to culinary school. Wolfgang is so dynamic and hands on. There’s also the coffee line. I work with him on his cookbooks. He was the first chef to have a Food Network show shot in Los Angeles. We joke around: that’s just a part time job. I’ve got my full time job. When we open up a new restaurant, I have pastry chefs fly out to me anywhere up to a month in advance.
So you’re mentoring a lot of people.
It’s so wonderful to watch everyone. A guy Frank, who has been working for us three years, he’ll be the pastry chef at L.A. LIVE. We’re opening up a Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill down there in October or November.
Is this the first bar and grill?
This will be the fourth. The one at MGM Grand is the best example. It’s a little more casual fare.
You dedicated your first book to your grandma. Tell me about her.
She was a turn down maid at the Waldorf Astoria in the 20s and 30s. My uncle was a bellhop who became a GM in the 1970s. So the hospitality industry is in my blood. My grandmother taught me to set a table, drink tea properly, what fine dining should be. She also taught me to taste.
How did she do that?
She would close my eyes or tie a hanky around my eyes and line up strawberry soda or pour coffee over vanilla ice cream. I wasn’t more than three or four years old. I would be like, “That tastes like yuck.”
Do you have another book on the way?
Desserts by the Yard just came out in November from Houghton-Mifflin.
So you’re probably recovering then.
It’s been quite the whirlwind. I got engaged in December, married in April/May. He’s a dentist.
You’re kidding. That must be the source of a lot of jokes.
We hit it straight on at the wedding. We served two cocktails: a “Sherry blossom,” made with cherries. The other was called a “toothache.” It’s so perfect. He has the biggest sweet tooth ever.
To a certain extent, pastry chefs toil behind the scenes. They play second fiddle. How do you deal with this, especially in your case, since you work for perhaps the best known chef in the city?
Years ago there were people that broke that glass ceiling: Jacques Torres at Le Cirque,
Emily Luchetti at Farallon in San Francisco who now does consulting. The truth is, if you’re a pastry chef that has juice — by that I mean if you’re really good at what you do — there’s no way you can be hidden by a chef. A great example is Zoe Nathan at Rustic Canyon. Evan Funke and the chef before him do a good job. But she rivals it. She’s finishing off that meal on such a high note.
What should a good dessert do?
It just should be yummy. The thing I always say is, “You’ll drive back across town for it.”
Where do you find inspiration?
The farmers market is huge for me. Tomorrow I’m going to the farmers market. I want to work on a peach tarte tatin but I want to make it in a cake. I want the cake to have a little girth, a little strength. I want the peach to be high acidity, very fruity. Tomorrow that’s my job. I am going to hunt down that peach.
Do you have a sweet tooth?
Me? Oh, my god, yes. There still isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t eat a chocolate chip cookie with vanilla ice cream. This morning I had a pain du chocolate at breakfast. I think I only work at Spago for the food.
Do you cook at home?
We’re big grillers.
Do you grill dessert?
I was showing the hubby — he doesn’t know how to cook at all — how to take plain old pineapples on the grill and à la mode them with ice cream.
Do things like Oreos or Breyers ever enter your house?
Very selectively. Haagen-Dazs coffee, Frusen Gladje chocolate. We just make everything.
Where do you like to eat out?
We walk to Greenblatt’s for the pastrami sandwiches and for the Reubens and we walk back; that’s important. At Jinpachi we do the tasting menus and drink tea.
Most home bakers do cookies and muffins, maybe cakes. What’s a good next step?
Buy an ice cream machine. They’re not that expensive these days. The great part about it is, say you have a leftover banana. What are you going to do with it? You have to run the oven if you want to make a muffin. Instead, you could blend it with milk or cream and put it in the ice cream machine. It’s so easy.
A lot of people think if they worked around sugar and butter all day, they’d be 300 pounds. But you’re not. How come?
‘Cause all I eat is ice cream and cookies. If you leave all that other stuff out, that’s really the problem. The ladies in Beverly Hills all say, you don’t look like you’re 44. I tell them it’s the sugar and butter. They fill in the lines. It’s a preservative. Everyone’s turning away from it. I’m like, you have to run into it.
