Take Five with Pastry Chef Extraordinaire Emily Luchetti, On Leaving the Savory Side for the Sweet One
The name, Emily Luchetti, is synonymous with desserts so luscious you want to seriously lick the plate even after swallowing the last forkful. Civility, be damned!
That’s not surprising given her reputation. The 51-year-old Luchetti is executive pastry chef of Nick’s Cove in Marshall; and Farallon, Waterbar, and Epic Roadhouse, all in San Francisco. A veteran cookbook author, she also was named James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2004.
Recently, I talked with her about why she made the switch from line cook to pastry chef, the one baked good she’s been unable to master, how she stays trim around all that butter, and the incredibly sweet tale of how she met her husband, Peter.
Q: You were working as a cook in the private dining room of Goldman Sachs in New York and Peter was a trader. You dated, and then decided to head to France without him for a year to study cooking. And at the end of the year, he picked you up at the airport, and you two have been together since? That is way too romantic.
A: (laughs) But he didn’t tell you that the first time he asked me out, I said ‘no’!
I had just broken up with a guy. I needed a break. It was nothing personal. But the second time that Peter asked me out, I thought he might not ask a third time, so I said ‘yes.’
Q: So did you court him with your cooking?
A: I was doing savory food then. I was at Goldman’s because I needed a job to pay the rent. Cooking was something I always loved to do, but I didn’t consider it as a career. This was in 1979, back when cooking wasn’t as popular as it is now. But the more I did of it, the more I fell in love with it.
Maybe I did keep Peter interested because I fed him. Plus, I think he liked my enthusiasm.
Q: When did you start doing pastry professionally?
A: I was at Stars in San Francisco then (in the mid-1980s). I knew I wanted to do desserts. The woman who was doing pastries there was pregnant and wasn’t going to come back. I didn’t have pastry training, but I figured I had nine months to convince my boss to give me the job.
Q: What was it about pastry making that you enjoyed?
A: Peeling shrimp or cooking a bunch of salmon fillets didn’t excite me. I didn’t like cooking on the line, not knowing what was going to happen each evening. So much of my destiny seemed out of my control. When you do desserts, you plate them to order, but a large part is done ahead of time.
I’m a day person, too, not a late-night person. Plus, I married a guy who was a trader, and he was getting up really early, too. You can’t have opposite shifts all the time in a relationship or you’d be like two ships passing in the night.
Q: Were you one of those kids who baked all the time?
