The Oregonian - August 24, 2007

Dessert Chefs put Classy spin on sweets
by David Sarasohn

Not too long ago, you could order dessert without looking at the menu. You could have pie or chocolate cake, and when those options evolved into cobbler, tart or tarte Tatin or Chocolate Decadence, Death by Chocolate or Molten Chocolate Cake, people weren't actually fooled.

Now, a dessert menu -- it's now always a separate menu, not an apologetic appendage after the entrees, or even a back page at the risk of being overlooked -- has the complexity of a post-modern novel.

Lists flash nouns like puff, terrine and -- nothing personal -- fool, not to say retro improvisations like melon creamsicle float. It's now hardly a question of not having room for dessert, any more than you might skip the last chapter of a novel; you could miss the whole point.

Recently, there's been a sucrose succession in the kitchens of many prominent local restaurants, with new dessert chefs bringing in their baking pans and fruit slicers.

A tour of lately arrived last-course artists shows a Portland dessert scene becoming steadily more sophisticated, with offerings that will not remind you of anything you had for lunch and that occasionally topple toward innovation over satisfying sweetness.

Prices, around $8 or $9 each, are fairly consistent, but the following menus change with seasons and inspirations, and each offers its own argument to save some room.

And you can still get chocolate cake...

Michelle Vernier at Wildwood

Like everything else at Wildwood, pastry chef Michelle Vernier, who arrived last year from Boston, rarely gets too far from the fields of the Northwest. A recent dessert list featured maple-roasted summer fruits, peach, caramelized black cherries and Viridian Farms blueberries.

It's something between a dessert menu and a harvest.

And it works.

A chocolate-espresso torta -- OK, fundamentally we're still talking chocolate cake -- gets enlivened considerably by the caramelized black cherries, adding a tart cherry assertiveness to a silken triangle of chocolate and coffee intensity.

The same style of using explosively vivid local fruit to cut through richness -- and infusing excess with a Northwestern identity -- surfaces in a peach upside-down cake with mascarpone-peach ice cream, a deft mingling of summer and butterfat.

The melon creamsicle float, with vanilla ice cream, does not actually flash slabs of fresh fruit. Besides, it would probably only work for you if you'd ever been 8 years old.

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