Will Goldfarb made a name for himself with his intimate Room 4 Dessert in New York (which has closed temporarily), where he serves up distinctive dessert combinations. He helped found the Experimental Cuisine Collective with New York University’s departments of chemistry and nutrition, food studies, and public health as a forum to produce advances in cooking.
Do you follow any guiding principles?
Experiential cuisine means understanding relationships—the relationship between the chef and the technique, the technique and the product, and the product and the guest.
Your idea of dessert is counterintuitive to a lot of diners, many of whom just want chocolate cake. What kind of reactions do you get?
People love it because they can see us making it, so they want to root for us. It doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s cup of tea.What are the most innovative desserts you serve?
The dishes that are the most innovative philosophically are Plat du Jour and Voyage to India, and the reason they’re the most interesting philosophically is that they represent an idea, an abstraction.
What’s in those two dishes?
Voyage to India is chocolate parfait with chai, mango caviar made from a sodium-alginate and calcium-chloride mix, coconut ice cream, and mini India tuiles with brown sugar and spray-dried coconut. The Plat du Jour never changes; to me, that’s funny. The Plat du Jour is homemade nutella, caramel ice cream, brioche, and a frozen lemon meringue cloud made with gelatin and egg-white powder mixed and whipped.
Through Willpowder.net, you distribute a line of hard-to-find specialty ingredients. Talk about how you use one of these ingredients to manipulate food.
I use tapioca maltodextrin to dry olive oil and make olive oil powder, which I sprinkle over everything. It adds flavor without greasiness.
What ingredients are exciting to you now?
Water, because you can use it for everything.
For example?
To hydrate basil seeds [which makes them gelatinous and digestible]. I toss them with lychee jelly and put them over a passion-fruit mousse and coffee gelato and praline of coconuts.
How can your food, as creative as is it, be translated to events and still retain an edge?
Every meal [at Room 4 Dessert] is an event. And we frequently do large events, like a couple thousand [guests]. We prepare everything here. Something people [are] always crazy for is the “Pancetta Financier,” an almond flour cake with brown butter and pancetta. We [did] it for 400 at a New Yorker conference. It’s awesome. People love sweet, fatty, and salty things.
What do you think of the food that’s served at events?
People try too hard to impress themselves and don’t try hard enough to make their guests happy. That aphorism can be applied to anything in life, but especially event catering. I think providing a good experience [at events] is more important than creating good food. But I don’t think they need to be mutually exclusive, either.
What would you do for a big party?
Something fast, fun, and tasty. Sushi, Jell-o, ice cream. Ice cream is awesome at events. Those are the things I like to eat when I go to a party. There’s no mess. They require little if any cutlery. Less puff pastry and more drinkable things, like soups and cocktails. More champagne.
Do you think cuisine will become even more innovative?
No, because people are timid. It’s just human nature. People prefer the known to the unknown.
Do you follow any guiding principles?
Experiential cuisine means understanding relationships—the relationship between the chef and the technique, the technique and the product, and the product and the guest.
Your idea of dessert is counterintuitive to a lot of diners, many of whom just want chocolate cake. What kind of reactions do you get?
People love it because they can see us making it, so they want to root for us. It doesn’t mean it’s everyone’s cup of tea.What are the most innovative desserts you serve?
The dishes that are the most innovative philosophically are Plat du Jour and Voyage to India, and the reason they’re the most interesting philosophically is that they represent an idea, an abstraction.
What’s in those two dishes?
Voyage to India is chocolate parfait with chai, mango caviar made from a sodium-alginate and calcium-chloride mix, coconut ice cream, and mini India tuiles with brown sugar and spray-dried coconut. The Plat du Jour never changes; to me, that’s funny. The Plat du Jour is homemade nutella, caramel ice cream, brioche, and a frozen lemon meringue cloud made with gelatin and egg-white powder mixed and whipped.
Through Willpowder.net, you distribute a line of hard-to-find specialty ingredients. Talk about how you use one of these ingredients to manipulate food.
I use tapioca maltodextrin to dry olive oil and make olive oil powder, which I sprinkle over everything. It adds flavor without greasiness.
What ingredients are exciting to you now?
Water, because you can use it for everything.
For example?
To hydrate basil seeds [which makes them gelatinous and digestible]. I toss them with lychee jelly and put them over a passion-fruit mousse and coffee gelato and praline of coconuts.
How can your food, as creative as is it, be translated to events and still retain an edge?
Every meal [at Room 4 Dessert] is an event. And we frequently do large events, like a couple thousand [guests]. We prepare everything here. Something people [are] always crazy for is the “Pancetta Financier,” an almond flour cake with brown butter and pancetta. We [did] it for 400 at a New Yorker conference. It’s awesome. People love sweet, fatty, and salty things.
What do you think of the food that’s served at events?
People try too hard to impress themselves and don’t try hard enough to make their guests happy. That aphorism can be applied to anything in life, but especially event catering. I think providing a good experience [at events] is more important than creating good food. But I don’t think they need to be mutually exclusive, either.
What would you do for a big party?
Something fast, fun, and tasty. Sushi, Jell-o, ice cream. Ice cream is awesome at events. Those are the things I like to eat when I go to a party. There’s no mess. They require little if any cutlery. Less puff pastry and more drinkable things, like soups and cocktails. More champagne.
Do you think cuisine will become even more innovative?
No, because people are timid. It’s just human nature. People prefer the known to the unknown.
Chef Will Goldfarb
Photo: Marina Fragoso Senra for BizBash
Chef Will Goldfarb.
Photo: Marina Fragoso Senra for BizBash
Goldfarb brings together wine-soaked cake, meringue with coconut flakes, a raspberry sorbet push-pop, and raspberry coulis.
Photo: Marina Fragoso Senra for BizBash
