The pastry chef who skipped pastry class
Photography by Michelle Magdalena
When executive pastry chef Ron Mendoza first went to work at Aubergine restaurant in L’Auberge Carmel, he says that the boutique hotel was importing hard candies from Italy for the guestrooms. Mendoza suggested soft, smooth, buttery caramels instead, and said he would make them by hand.
“We could buy caramels from all kinds of places,” Mendoza says, “but why, when I can make them especially for the hotel. Besides the salt in them, I add something different—just enough lemon zest to give them a flavor that goes beyond, cutting through the richness of all the butter and cream and sugar, to give them a little zing.”
This amenity now provided to overnight guests is also kept at the front door of L’Auberge for anyone to purchase, and they sell—by the dozens.
Mendoza’s caramels, he says, are exactly what pastry is all about: taking a recipe and seeing what you can create from scratch, what you can do with it to make it your own. This kind of innovation likely helped him earn Edible Monterey Bay magazine’s 2015 reader-selected Local Hero Award for Best Pastry Chef.
But pastry didn’t always capture Mendoza’s imagination.
The whole time Mendoza was in culinary school at what is now Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, he ditched his pastry class, believing that pastry, like math, was something he would never need. He was attracted not by the sweet, but the savory, and that’s where he focused his attention.
Mendoza’s first real job, in downtown Los Angeles, was at Nick & Stef’s Steakhouse, where he started as a prep cook and then moved up the line. (On his first day, he started his shift at 7am and was invited to stay on to work a special dinner party for Julia Child’s birthday. He met her, talked with her and shook her hand. And he missed school, putting in an 18½-hour day. It was, he says, worth it.)
It was after going to work for Patina, which was—in his mind and many others’—the best restaurant in Los Angeles, when Mendoza began to feel the allure of pastry.
“At Patina,” Mendoza says, “I was a pantry chef [preparing cold foods], working next to the pastry station. Fascinated by what they were doing, I just kept asking questions. When the chef asked me to help them for two months, I jumped at the chance to learn pastry and never looked back. Ultimately, I realized I was always meant to do pastry. It takes a certain mentality—calculated, well thought out, yet free and creative.”
When working as a savory chef, Mendoza points out, he must create his dish with a pre-existing centerpiece, like a piece of fish or meat or some vegetables. “We don’t make the fish, we cook it,” he explains.
“But with pastry, the chef is coming up with something from nothing. A cake is the product of all the raw ingredients combined to make something, and how I bring them together is going to be different than what anyone else would do.”
Mendoza’s absolute favorite thing to make is ice cream, mostly because, when it comes to flavor, he believes ice cream allows him to do anything.
“In a fine dining restaurant,” he says, “where people come in for a peak experience, I do ice cream in flavors that surprise people. It has the best texture and is the most intense it can be on all levels. Rarely do I serve just a scoop of ice cream. I think, ‘With what will I pair this ice cream?’ It’s a study in how to build a dish. Maybe I’ll introduce lemon or orange or Grand Marnier.
“I’m a bit of a mad scientist,” Mendoza says, “far more so than anyone else in the kitchen.”
Aubergine
Monte Verde Street and 7th Avenue, Carmel
831.624.8578
auberginecarmel.com
About the author
A fifth-generation Northern Californian, Lisa Crawford Watson has enjoyed a diverse career in business, education and writing. She lives with her family on the Monterey Peninsula, where her grandmother once lived and wrote. An adjunct writing instructor for CSU Monterey Bay and Monterey Peninsula College, Lisa is also a free-lance writer, who specializes in the genres of art & architecture, health & lifestyle, food & wine. She has published various books and thousands of feature articles and columns in local and national newspapers and magazines.
