D Bar Desserts

Now he has D Bar. And he hasn't just lent the place his good name, his likeness, his menu. He's actually here — standing post behind the L-shaped bar close enough that you can reach right out and grab him by the pastry bags — working beside his wife and personally cooking almost every plate that goes out. A bona fide celebrity chef, he could easily have gone the route of Flay or DiSpirito or Ducasse — flitting about from location to location, giving interviews, shaking hands, seeing to the empire and the image rather than the kitchen. But instead, on a Saturday night, Gerhard was making me milk and cookies: fresh-baked, hot from the oven and incredible. A double-chocolate with macadamia nuts so good Laura that threatened to stab me over the last bite, an oatmeal raisin with hints of cinnamon and brown sugar that was simply better than any cookie I've ever had in my life.

It was busy on this Saturday night — bar full, patio full, the twenty-odd seats in the tiny, modernist and spartan dining room full. Nearly everyone ordered the molten chocolate cake (dull mainstay of dessert boards everywhere but textbook here, made to order with Guittard Madagascar chocolate and raspberry ice cream), the cake and shake (meltingly rich chocolate cake with Manjari chocolate frosting and vanilla, chocolate or raspberry shakes in small glasses). But I went for a perfected version of the Beard dessert. It came as a soft pillow of chocolate, almost a mousse, with a stiff bottom and a candied surface with a single large and untouched early cherry on top, poached cherries smeared around the plate in a sauce of cherry juice and Laphroaig Scotch. The smoke flavor was bold and powerful, the sauce bittersweet, the textural balance between the fresh cherry, the poached cherries and the gentle, 64 percent cacao chocolate in ideal equipoise. It was a chocolate-covered cherry as imagined by a guy who wanted to make every element of that already idealized dessert better, more complicated and more deeply rich at the same time.

The dinner menu here is called simply "things we like to eat...," and it isn't so much a restaurant menu as it is the board stolen from the dream snack bar in the cook's Valhalla. Gerhard and Bailey offer salad — baby greens, pine nuts, grape tomatoes and a Meyer lemon vinaigrette, beautifully composed — and Medjool dates served with Marcona almonds, parmagiano Reggiano and smoked bacon. They do a baked mac-and-cheese topped with crushed cheese nips that's white-trash genius, and an avocado, fanned and topped with nothing but a squeeze of lime, British Maldon salt, fresh cracked pepper and a drizzle of olive oil, that's a different kind of genius entirely.

Our dinner took almost three hours. It was worth every minute.

Laura and I came back for lunch a couple of days later and dined virtually alone, drinking Mexican Cokes in the bottle and eating paninis — smashed avocado and cheddar cheese with thick-cut bacon for her, the Presley for me: peanut butter, caramelized plantains and Colorado honey. We watched Bailey doing the fine work on a wedding cake while Gerhard did his prep, wearing a T-shirt, joking around with his staff, good music playing in the back. It felt almost as though we'd come in the back door rather than the front and were being fed in the kitchen, just a little something thrown together between meals.

And yet, what impressed me just as much as it had impressed me at dinner was the phenomenal amount of attention paid to every single item put before us. Every plate and every element on every plate had been carefully considered, specially sourced and then artfully combined by a chef with a deep and personal understanding of the complicated interplay between them. This was fun food handled with heavy seriousness and respect; a jazzman's tossed-off licks and riffs that seem so light and effortless only because he's practiced them a thousand times out of sight, on his own, until they've become second nature and are ready to be played for the crowd. The best trick any chef can ever play is to make it all look easy.

And when Gerhard is up there, under the lights, behind the bar with his customers around him and orders on the slide, that's exactly how it appears: easy. But it's not.

He may be a celebrity, but the man really knows how to cook.