Spun Sugar: Bill Corbett brings pastry to a new level

When Coi chef Daniel Patterson hired Bill Corbett, formerly of Michael Mina, as his company’s executive pastry chef, we suspected he had met his match. And now we’re sure we were right.

One of the desserts currently on Coi’s lounge menu, It’s Almost It ($6), is a twist on the classic San Francisco treat, with milk-chocolate ice cream spread between crunchy oatmeal cookies. Another dessert transforms tres leches cake ($6), combining goat’s-milk ice cream and caramel with toasted hazelnuts and floral yuzu.

Corbett’s tasting-menu desserts (available a la carte in the lounge) are technically complicated, yet never fussy. He swaps lime for lemon in a stunning lime meringue tart ($11, pictured) in which the meringue is flavored with minty shiso and surrounds the tart in pointy droplets.

His chocolate cake ($11) is a genre-exploding marvel: It’s the finest we’ve ever eaten. Inside, the rectangular cake is soft; outside, it’s crackly from high-heat caramelization. On top is vanilla whipped cream and a quenelle of frozen raw milk. It’s Oreos and milk with a PhD.

Soon, these four desserts will disappear. But if our first taste of Corbett’s creations at Coi are any indication, their replacements will be similarly astonishing. Plus, new flavors of his house-made soft-serve will be pouring from Il Cane Rosso’s machines in no time at all.

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