Save Room for Dessert?

Often restaurants and their patrons overlook that sweet ending to the meal: dessert. All the focus gets put into the meal itself, and dessert menus simply feature the expected chocolate layer cake or brownie sundae. Diners, full from polishing off those last morsels of their entrees, don’t give a second thought to these everyday desserts. But some restaurants (mainly those with dedicated pastry chefs) actually go out of their way to make sure dessert stacks up to dinner. If you’re heading to any of these spots, it’s highly recommended that you save room for dessert.

Bergamot

Bergamot’s Pastry Chef Stacy Mirabello tantalizes diner’s tastebuds with combinations like chocolate and avocado and ingredients that sound more savory than sweet like black pepper, basil, and olive oil. Her desserts are whimsical and never boring. On a typical evening, you might find That Grapefruit Dessert, a warm madeleine cake topped with grapefruit wedges and white wine sabayon, or fresh, sugary beignets with a sweet-sour lemon filling.

Market

Market is Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Boston outpost. Like the savory dishes such as frisee and goat cheese salad with pickled peaches and crystallized wasabi, dessert is quite a novelty. A play on peanut butter and jelly, the grape soufflé with a nutty praline sauce is light, airy, and memorable. It’s not always on the menu, but you’re likely to find another type of soufflé and other interesting dessert choices.

Mistral

If you can spare any stomach space after indulging in Mistral’s truffle macaroni with Madeira and Parmesan, dessert is a must. Executive Pastry Chef Shane Gray can take a basic concept like a s’more and fashion it into an elegant dish of chocolate mousse topped with a graham cracker crumble and a towering swirl of toasted marshmallow.

Oleana

Oleana’s desserts are so good that Pastry Chef Maura Kilpatrick opened nearby bakery Sofra to sell more sweet treats. Some of Oleana’s plated desserts can be found as to-go bakery items over at Sofra. One of which is the chocolate-hazelnut baklava — cinnamon-honey syrup-soaked phyllo dough layered with bittersweet chocolate and hazelnuts. The desserts change with the seasons, and in the summer when Oleana participates in Mass Farmers Markets’ Strawberry Dessert Festival to raise money for local farmers markets, you’re likely to find fresh strawberries incorporated into an upscale shortcake. The Baked Alaska with coconut ice cream and passion fruit caramel is also intriguing.

Sel de la Terre

At Sel de La Terre, the creative desserts abound, but luckily, you don’t have to choose just one. The Grand Dessert for Two provides miniature versions of all the desserts. If you go all in and order this sampler, a large platter will be set on your table and you won’t know whether to start with orange vanilla bean crème brulee or maple goat cheese mousse. And then when you start digging into chocolate desserts like the flourless chocolate decadence cake with blood orange gel and the almond chocolate mousse layer cake, you’ll be happy to see there’s also chai tea panna cotta with red wine-poached Anjou pears to cut some of the richness. Each dessert is unique and layered with flavor.

Ten Tables

One could go to Ten Tables just for the chocolate terrine with sea salt and Thai basil ice cream and leave perfectly satisfied. The rich chocolate cake paired with the cool, slightly savory ice cream is a definite crowd-pleaser. And while panna cotta might seem a little ordinary, Ten Tables takes it from ordinary to extraordinary with the addition of Greek yogurt for a little tang and some fresh strawberries to simultaneously complement and cut the creaminess.

What restaurant serves your favorite desserts?