At The Noortwyck, Deliverance Lies in Dessert
A former fine dining pastry chef makes desserts that are the draw at this neighborhood restaurant.
Before I started writing Sweet City, going to a restaurant solely for dessert had never really crossed my mind. Skipping dinner for the dessert menu seemed to be about as sensical as showing up to a concert just in time to catch the encore. Sweet, but somehow unearned. A finale built on ethers instead of the steady set-list build of anticipation. Not to mention, it would all be over far too soon.
I think it’s fair to say I don’t feel that way anymore. But still, I consider myself to be in the minority; among the select few who use restaurants in such unconventional ways. Which is why I was delighted to find myself in the company of some equally dessert-minded diners recently at The Noortwyck in the West Village.
I was sitting at the bar, solo, around six o’clock in the evening when a couple strolled into the restaurant, settled into a small table nearby and announced to their server that they were on something called “the dessert train.” They would be jumping straight to sweets, no savory pretenses necessary.
I watched as they selected two desserts to share as if it was the most natural thing in the world. When I made a comment to the bartender, she was nonplussed. She told me that the restaurant’s pastry chef, Ileene Cho, had loyal fans who were known to just pop in for dessert.
The Noortwyck is a seasonal American restaurant that opened during the summer of 2022 — almost exactly two years ago. The proprietors, Andrew Quinn, who is the chef, and Cedric Nicaise, the sommelier, met while working at Eleven Madison Park. Cho, the pastry chef, also has a fine dining background; she most recently worked at One White Street in Tribeca, where ingredients are trucked in from the restaurant’s farm upstate.
Despite these high-end precedents, The Noortwyck is as its heart a neighborhood restaurant. It’s the kind of midrange, “finer dining” establishment that makes New York City the greatest eating out city in America (I said it, and I stand by it). Like Lola’s in Manhattan or Agi’s Counter in Brooklyn or countless other places that bridge casual everyday-ness with the sophistication of something a little more dressed-up (that said, there is no dress code at The Noortwyck, the website explicitly says so, and if you need a high chair, they have those, too).
Still, most neighborhood restaurants in New York City don’t have a dedicated pastry chef, let alone a three-person pastry department like The Noortwyck. (That is, unless you’ve got names like Vongerichten or Meyer footing the bill.) And yet, Cho’s desserts fittingly hover somewhere between easy to love and occasion-worthy, which makes them a perfect fit for dinner, any day of the week.
The dessert called Chocolate Cream Puff arrived as two orbs of cocoa-colored choux pastry, sliced open like an Arpège egg and filled with a ganache-like cream that Cho told me was actually called namelaka. The cream offers the same velvety richness as ganache without the added sugar. Cho topped each pouf with a barley cream that had the sensation of being creamy without tasting creamy, if that makes sense.
Pointing out the namelaka and the subtlety of the barley cream might seem like dwelling on kitchen technicalities, too much information for a diner like you or me, but it illustrates the usefulness of a pastry chef’s expertise. Plated chocolate desserts have a tendency to overwhelm the palate with sharp, bittersweet flavors, but here, a few deliberate choices from a pastry chef’s playbook resulted in something more balanced without sacrificing the satiating intensity of good quality chocolate. This was a consistent theme throughout the menu.
Summer season is fruit season, and for now, Cho pays homage with a mango parfait. The dessert is essentially the cream puff’s polar opposite — loosely assembled in a cup with the kind of forthright sweetness only sun-ripened fruit can get away with.
Cho built the parfait the same way my daughter builds with Lego. There was height, dimension, and a requisite pop of pink. Lush swirls of cheesecake filling, soft enough for a piping bag, created levels for shards of a deliciously caramelized coconut tuille while a mango puree fragrant with lime zest puddled at the bottom of the cup. And just in case you forgot in all that messy decadence that this pastry kitchen has a seriously French pedigree, the parfait was topped with a dry Champagne foam and a dusting of tart hibiscus powder.
Cho’s version of a mille-feuille was less a classic interpretation and more an inspired riff. Like the parfait, it was assembled from the ground up with alternating layers of crisp and creamy things. But unlike a mille-feuille, which cushions you with ribbons of cream and flaky pastry, this dessert was leaner and sharper. Cho told me she baked a thin batter into crisp sheets of pastry, which she then layered with chocolate ganache, ripe banana, and stout caramel, in the style of an English banoffee pie.
I get the feeling that the owners of The Noortwyck enjoy giving Cho room to show off her talents as she is also responsible for a handful of dessert-adjacent items on the menu. For weekend brunch, she bakes puffy, glossy brioche rolls for a very good dry aged burger. There’s also a pastry plate filled with her handiwork.
When I visited for brunch recently, the items included a white chocolate scone (or, on this side of the Atlantic, what I’d call a biscuit), a cinnamon roll, sweet potato milk bread, and a flan pâtissier.
Of the four, I most enjoyed the white chocolate scone topped with chunky pearl sugar, the kind you see embedded in domes of brioche at a French bakery. And the flan pâtissier, a custard-filled tart that I think Cho could start a neat little bakery business with. The flaky pastry dough was evenly cooked, a cozy vessel for the perfectly set vanilla custard. I know this is a classic French pastry, but to me, it was the best of a Cantonese egg tart (the buttery crust) blended with the best of a Latin flan (the dense, yolky custard).
There were a few times where I didn’t catch the nuance in some of Cho’s desserts. I missed the pecan praline in the mille-feuille, for example, and the camellia tea in the rice pudding (both were mentioned on the menu, but were harder to discern on the plate). The namelaka slipped past me while the mango, listed as the all-mighty Alphonso, failed to impart its wild, signature scent. These details matter, of course, but as I have learned over the years, at the end of the day, it’s taste overall that rules the final impression.
To underscore the point, surely the couple in the dining room with me that evening wasn’t concerned with the difference between a rough puff pastry and a machine-sheeted laminated dough, or the precise quantities of gelatin in one cream versus another. No, they were happy to leave all that to the professionals in the kitchen and focus on the real point of dessert, the one true duty of any dessert train — swift, expedient transportation to a land of visceral pleasure. And as I can attest, at The Noortwyck, Cho’s pastry kitchen delivers.
The Noortwyck
289 Bleecker St
New York, NY 10014
(917) 261-2009
Dinner nightly; Brunch on the weekend
*The regular dessert menu is not available at brunch or on Sundays, when Cho makes a special dessert for Sunday roast dinner.
Sounds like an interesting blend of flavours - yum….will try when visiting NYC next.
I love their desserts!! Their food is really good too:) great read!