A Pastry Chef Takes Charge, Reinvigorates Aquavit: Review

Why go to Aquavit? The old restaurant has been wedged for nearly a decade in a dreary concrete and glass block on 55th Street. And as you are sitting in one of those high-backed leather chairs that look like they were nicked from an abandoned conference room, the seats cracked from the wear and tear of a thousand bottoms that sat here before yours, you might wonder why you bothered.

But then a small clay dish arrives and a server pulls away the lid. A rush of sweet smoke dissipates to reveal a few tiny potatoes, no bigger than peanuts, draped in pickled mustard seeds. The server pours over a little potato and leek soup, silky and bright. It’s just a couple of bites to get you in the mood before Emma Bengtsson’s eight-course tasting menu ($135) really kicks off, but it’s delivered gracefully and tastes precisely of fall.

Bengtsson, who was born on Sweden's west coast and raised in Stockholm, was the pastry chef at Aquavit for four years until this spring, when she took command of the entire kitchen and earned the restaurant a second Michelin star. Those who were already paying attention to her work on desserts might have noticed the chef’s style quietly evolving in the pastry kitchen, pushing the aesthetics toward something less stark. Bengtsson rarely emerges from the back of the house, but her dishes can be stylishly loud, glamorous, and complex, often wearing many layers of texture and color.

Take the dessert that closes out the tasting menu. Bengtsson first introduced her Arctic Bird's Nest in 2011 to replace a fine, but predictably presented dessert of goat cheese parfait and blueberries called the Arctic Circle. She reconfigured the elements into something far more extravagant and wild-looking, and it has evolved over the years into a proper masterpiece. It’s now a cool, egg-shaped parfait in a delicately thin shell of white chocolate that hides a soft, jammy core of sea buckthorn gel resembling a softly cooked yolk. The egg is cradled in thin strands of crisp pastry, and knotted with blossoms and pea shoots, twigs made of tempered chocolate, and a fine snow of frozen yogurt. The dish is stunning and delicious, with savory notes. It’s also one of the few plates where a bit of gold leaf has made me smile, instead of roll my eyes. That’s because here the fluttering, battered piece of gold caught in the nest isn’t there to distract the eater from a mediocre dessert, as it usually is, but to add a detail to the story -- it makes it easy to imagine being this bird, snatching up something shiny.