Bite Me

We had cookies. We had cake. We talked about using cornstarch and lemon juice blasted in the oven to fake the texture of proper lemon curd without any eggs, and how everything Scimio does is about trial and error and incessant tinkering. "I've fucked these things up so many times," she laughed, then stopped, then was serious. She told me how she would test recipes over and over until she could bring every element -- the flavor, the texture, the moisture, what have you -- into line with the classical pastry work she knows so well. She's an obsessive. A perfectionist. "There's a method for everything," she said. A true classicist at heart. "And it's just about finding a way to make that method work here. I like the challenge."

"Hell, no," she said.

The one thing we didn't try were brownies, because Scimio has yet to come up with a brownie recipe that doesn't taste like crap. "It's all about covering up that taste," Scimio said, wrinkling her nose (with "that taste" being anything that doesn't taste like a brownie should taste).

"We'd rather just not serve it than serve a bad one," Landes explained. "And it's not like you can say, ŒOh, it's vegan,' like that's an excuse. It's either good or it's not good, and we're not going to sell something that isn't good."

That's an admirable attitude. Because every other vegan bakery I've tried seems happy with being good enough. Say you're a vegan and you want a chocolate chip cookie. You go to the co-op or the health-food store or the hemp wholesaler, and you buy a chocolate chip cookie and it tastes like crap: like cardboard, dirt and carob. You're okay with that, though, because you're a vegan, so pretty much everything you eat tastes like one or all of those things. But then you go somewhere else -- like to a new co-op or a new health-food store -- and you buy another chocolate chip cookie that tastes 1 percent better than the totally awful one you had yesterday. You're thrilled. It's the best chocolate chip cookie you've ever had, because it's slightly less awful than every other chocolate chip cookie you've ever tasted. To be just a little bit less terrible than the competition -- that's the business model most vegan bakeries follow.

Not this one, though. Deanna Scimio is the Ferran Adria of vegan bakers, a wild talent the industry never saw coming. But now she's turned all that on its ear. The cakes that come from her hands and the hands of her crew taste like cakes. The scones taste like scones. The wheat-free spelt flour molasses and ginger cookies like molasses, ginger and sugar, not like spelt, not like anything healthy at all. They just taste good. And for me to say that about a spelt cookie? That's saying something.

"You've got to love it," Scimio explained, meaning the food, meaning the life and the challenge and the process that made it. "And if you don't love it, don't do it. But I do love it, so I'm not going anywhere."

Leftovers: I know I talk a lot about the life-or-death importance of every little thing that goes on in a kitchen -- the heat, the stress, the pressure of performing flawlessly night after night after night. But once in a while, the ridiculousness of it all is brought home by the worst kind of news. This past Monday, Richard Ruiz -- the new chef at Le Central (112 East Eighth Avenue) who was just hired by Robert Tournier -- died of an apparent heart attack. Formerly of the Brown Palace and a seven-year veteran of La Petite Maison in Florida (he'd moved to Colorado so his daughter could pursue her dream of becoming an Olympic ice skater), Ruiz had only been in his post for three weeks.

"He was a great guy," Tournier told me when I got him on the phone Tuesday. "He was a great chef and a great guy."

Ruiz had been commuting every day from Colorado Springs to central Denver. According to Tournier, he was working in the kitchen Monday afternoon -- doing prep and desserts for dinner service -- when he started feeling poorly. He stepped outside for some fresh air, and was found at the bottom of the steps soon after by someone driving past the restaurant. "It looked like he was asleep," Tournier said. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Ruiz was 44 years old.

Le Central will remain open, and Tournier assured me that nothing would change, that service would continue in the face of this loss. "It's the business, you know?" he said. "It's restaurants. You have to keep working."

And the sad thing is, he's absolutely right. Despite having one less star on the marquee tonight, the show must go on.