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Season two of restaurant drama The Bear brought us Chicago-accented profanities, beef subs and Hot Chef summer. In a more tender episode, the mild-mannered pastry chef Marcus visits Copenhagen to do a stage at a Noma-esque restaurant. Tasked with creating his own pudding, he concocts a dessert featuring a white gelato, orange sauce and caviar.
Caviar for pudding? It’s having a moment…
At two-Michelin-starred Kitchen Table in Fitzrovia, London, caviar sits atop a walnut ice cream drizzled with walnut oil. The Cocochine Mayfair, opening in spring, will dollop it on a chocolate tart. You’ll find it alongside Jersey royal ice cream at Heaneys in Cardiff, with a parsnip crème brûlée at Opheem in Birmingham, and on a banana soft serve at Ynyshir in rural North Wales. At Birch & Rye in San Francisco, rye doughnuts are stuffed with caramel and their own private-label caviar. On the east coast, The Living Room in New Hampshire has a brown-butter miso ice cream with caramelised black garlic sauce and caviar. Further south, Oteque in Rio de Janeiro, run by Alberto Landgraf, who recently opened Brazilian fine dining spot Bossa in London, serves a tantalising Brazil-nut ice cream topped with caviar.
At Petrossian in South Kensington, a café run by one of the world’s leading caviar companies, I’m presented with a caviar-sprinkled chocolate mousse. The dessert was introduced in the Paris branch earlier this year, explains chef Ikram Abdi Mohamud, and proved so popular that introducing it to London was a no-brainer. “The silky textures with bursts of flavour heighten all the senses,” he says. “When the sweet, creamy richness of chocolate is united with the salty, briny burst of caviar, this contrasts and complements, surprising the palate and elevating both ingredients.”
The sweet, airy mousse is pleasant enough, but four dollops of pearlescent eggs, perched like late-summer raspberries, lift the dish, adding a creamy, fatty, almost citrussy thwack. There’s saltiness, of course, but it’s more complex than a salted caramel – it’s briny, and iodine-y. It’s delicious.
High-quality caviar is increasingly accessible (mostly from farmed rather than wild sturgeons, for good political and environmental reasons). And with producers and chefs ageing and smoking it for different flavour profiles, it can add a stunning array of tastes and textures, and can work wonderfully with sugar.
At Amelia in San Sebastian, a dessert of rum ice cream with banana mole and caviar has become a signature dish, so popular that Argentinian chef Paulo Airaudo has taken it to his other restaurants, Aleia in Barcelona, Noi in Hong Kong, and Da Terra in London’s Bethnal Green. There, caviar is now added to a cachaça baba with pistachio ice cream, and helps make a “perfectly balanced dish”, says chef and owner Rafael Cagali. The spirit’s sweetness and pistachio ice cream’s maltiness combines with “saltiness and umami from the caviar,” Cagali explains. Served as a pre-dessert, the aim is to “create an unexpected element at this moment of the meal”.
For many diners it’s a surprise, but the majority love it. Why does it work? Like salt or miso, caviar adds contrast and umami, and more complexity than mere sea salt. Hermes Gehnen, founder of Munich-based N25 Caviar, explains: “It’s a very complex flavour profile, very long on the palate, and the salt is very low, so you can feel the nuances and the nuttiness.” A bog-standard caviar, which can taste mostly of fish, he cautions, wouldn’t work.
Anya El-Watter, the chef behind the caviar-filled doughnuts at Birch & Rye, says the initial intention was to add pizzazz to the end of a meal with something elevated and unexpected. “The gentle brininess of caviar was a perfect complement to caramel,” she explains. It has remained on the menu ever since. For Evan Hennessey of The Living Room, it was about adding a sense of place. With the restaurant a couple of miles from the sea, “the addition of the oceanic salt element was perfect”, he says. “Our guests were stunned, and very pleasantly surprised.”
You can easily recreate caviar desserts at home. “It’s my go-to when friends visit,” says Gehnen. “Buy really good ice cream, it works with almost every flavour.” He recommends white chocolate, stracciatella or vanilla, with a drop of olive oil and a teaspoon of caviar. Simple, refined and absolutely delicious.
