9

DESSERT 

Faced for the first time with the long drive past the ugly clusters of fluorescent-lit automobile dealerships that litter the Harbourside district of North Vancouver, only to have the taxicab pull up in front of an ugly strip mall, I paid up and disembarked with the sinking feeling that there had been some sort of ghastly mistake. It was not the driver’s, though—it was the chef’s. Still, while Thomas Haas Fine Chocolates and Patisserie occupies a decidedly ugly, remote, and peculiar setting, it is equally evident that locals in possession of a discerning sweet tooth have been very quick to forgive the man.

When I first visited his shop, lunch hour had barely begun, and already customers were pressed up against the counter two or three deep, clamouring for cappuccinos, croissants, danoises, croissants amandines, brioches, and pains au chocolat. A few opted for the daily sandwich. But most proceeded directly to what was supposed to come next, what had really brought them here—dessert. Say, the Haas take on the classic tarte au citron, which he calls “lemon lemon tart in shortbread crust,” or the Stilton cheesecake with rhubarb compote, or the princess cake (white chocolate mousse with light lemon cream and a coconut almond biscuit), or the Manjari chocolate cake (with Manjari chocolate mousse and rum-spiked Manjari chocolate crème brûlée), or the almond and mascarpone cake (light mascarpone cream over soft almond sponge cake with amaretto and coffee). Some customers were taking it easy—with a couple of his famous Chocolate Sparkle cookies, or a small, hand-picked selection of his house-made chocolates.

Chef Haas was evidently enjoying the commotion—his habit of planting himself cheerfully at its epicentre was conspicuous. A buoyant, youthful man, he gave a compelling impression of being everywhere at once. When I first walked in I spotted Haas through the window of the swinging door behind the cashier, mouthing unheard instructions to his all-female crew of chocolatières. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was behind the counter, bobbing this way and that, extending a hand to greet one customer and then another, then starting their individual orders, disappearing through the kitchen door again to fetch something essential, only to return and engage a new customer afresh. The girls stationed behind the counter with him were picking up the slack and finishing the orders he had started without to-do. They were obviously used to the routine, however dizzying it appeared from the vantage of the shop floor.

The public area of the Haas patisserie is cramped and modest. Walk in and you are confronted first, dead ahead, with the current Haas raison d’être, the crux of this business—chocolate. The large, glass-fronted display case shows a beautiful array of elegantly presented little chocolates in every sensible contemporary flavour that a refined addict could ever long for (yes to cardamom, no to tarragon and spruce). Some are coloured red or yellow, others are embedded with gold, none are gaudily overwrought. The boxes that you could fill with your selection are displayed on shelves on the left wall, and their design is value-added, another expression of the refined Haas aesthetic. Only the small ones are of conventional flat and rectangular form; opt for any selection greater than twenty-seven in number and the chocolates will be packed into a multi-level home of three floors or more, each one hinged to pivot outward independently of the others, so that if the variety you most desperately wanted was on the bottom level, you need not disturb the neighbours upstairs to get at it. The design for his chocolate bar packaging is equally clever, but in this case mainly for its deceit—because it looks to be packing twice as much chocolate as it really contains.

Chocolate is the crux of the business. Thanks to online ordering, the customer base spans far and wide. On the off chance that you have ever wondered to yourself if Barack Obama, George

W. Bush, Bill Gates, and Alain Ducasse all had something in common, take it from me—they do. For although Haas refuses to confirm it, and instead insists that discretion and quality should alone speak for his brand, I have it from a very reliable source that his chocolates have been served for years at the White House, Microsoft HQ, and select Ducasse restaurants. The Haas client base is varied and sizeable enough that he orders and processes roughly eighteen tons of raw chocolate each year. His sources are Valrhona of France and Felchlin of Switzerland. Haas does not roast, winnow, or conch a single bean of his own raw cacao. “Why should I? It’s so labour intensive. I think that someone who does four hundred times as much work like that does not always get a better product. I prefer to rely on the expertise of the chocolate maker—as long as they source fair trade beans and, like Valrhona, conch for seventy-two hours, so it is perfectly smooth.”

Conching is a process that was invented in Switzerland in 1871 by Rudolphe Lindt, by which coarse and granular chocolate paste extracted by the winnower is slowly stirred in a vat with rotating paddles or blades until rendered smooth. Additives such as sugar, vanilla, and cacao butter can simultaneously be blended in. The combined effects of heat friction and pulverization of solids eventually yield a liquefied product of undetectably minuscule particles. The process also exerts chemical changes, rounding out the flavours inherent to the beans, eliminating acidity, bitterness, and other unpleasant top notes until the mix arrives a supple, silken whole. In other words, long conching makes for consistency, and is thus one of the principal reasons why Valrhona’s basic chocolate (rated for strength, rather than identified by individual plantation) tastes as identical from one year to another as does, say, a bottle of N.V. Veuve Clicquot, regardless of variable external factors (like source and weather). That sort of consistency is ideal for making boxed flavour chocolates, wherein the chocolate is a vehicle for added flavours in the filling or the mix. If you want to instead showcase the complex flavours of individually sourced beans, exhaustively long and homogenizing conching is not necessarily the way to go.

Enter David Castellan, the only Canadian chocolatier I know of who disagrees with Haas about whether making your own chocolate is a good use of one’s time. Like Haas, Castellan is a pastry chef by training, and in the nineties filled that role very ably for Marc Thuet at Centro Grill & Wine Bar. Then he moved on to a succession of restaurants in the Oliver and Bonacini Restaurants group (like Canoe and Jump). In 2001, with the blessing of his employers, he decided to take a short leave in California to enrol in some chocolate-focused courses at Richardson Researches, a culinary school near San Francisco (it was subsequently folded into the University of California at Davis).

“My goal was to learn panning—it’s the oldest machine in confectionery,” Castellan explained to me. “But when we were there we also made chocolate from scratch.”

And that was that. Suddenly, the panning machine that applied chocolate coatings to nuts and their ilk was no longer so very exciting. Cacao bean roasters, winnowers used for coaxing pure cacao nibs from the raw fermented bean, and conches for turning their paste into smooth chocolate were suddenly everything. So Castellan changed his focus from full-fledged desserts to pure chocolate, and dove in. He went home to Toronto, found a location in the old brick-paved Distillery District, and got to work on opening a small artisan chocolate shop. He called it Soma—the Latin equivalent of the Greek theobroma, which is the name of the genus of all cacao-yielding trees.

Theobroma and soma mean “food of the gods,” but in those early days Castellan toiled on a very mortal scale. So much so that he was unable to locate a cacao roaster small enough to suit his modest needs—or fit in his shop—and thus was obliged to purchase a coffee bean roaster. They are not interchangeable: Castellan calibrated it to its new task by slowing its speed of rotation (to lessen the oil-extracting impact on the oily cacao bean) and lowering its generated heat (for the cacao bean requires a long, slow roast to purge its high moisture). And as no one manufactured a winnower suitably sized for a cottage- industry chocolate maker either, Castellan manufactured one himself. Where industrial machines could extract nibs from a ton of roasted cacao beans in one hour flat, his machine took all day to process fifty kilos. Only then was it time for conching.

“It was so hard to get cacao beans back then,” Castellan recalls of a time when brokers were unaccustomed and disinclined to doing small-scale business. “When we got our two or three bags direct from Venezuela it was so precious. If we dropped a bean on the floor we’d actually go scurrying after it. The chocolate and the process was so expensive we thought we’d never be able to make it work.”

To supplement the business of selling his own bars, Soma ordered chocolate from Valrhona just like Haas, to turn into truffles with different centres, other flavoured chocolate, gelato, and so on. And with a surprising swiftness word got around the Toronto restaurant scene that Soma’s house-made chocolate was top quality and highly distinctive. Thuet bought it for his pastry chef Bertrand Alépée at The Fifth, and later for David Wilson at his Bistro and Bakery. Oliver and Bonacini restaurants were investors in the Soma start-up and did their part to help make it work on the sales side, too. Soon the little shop expanded into new quarters next door.

When I last visited Castellan, in the spring of 2012, he was fresh back from a fact-finding mission to Japan with his wife, Cynthia Leung, who designs all the packaging for Soma products as well as the shops in which they are sold. A second Soma outlet had opened on King Street West at Spadina Avenue the previous June, a bakery was next in the works, and the noisy, dirty part of his chocolate production—the roasting and winnowing—had been moved to a third site, deep in the west end at Roncesvalles Avenue and Dundas Street. Out there he was operating on a whole new scale, processing about 150 kilos of beans every week with new purpose-built machinery. In particular, he had just acquired a classic German roaster from the 1940s called a Barth Sirocco. (It was previously the property of the award-winning chocolate maker Scharffen Berger, whose operations in and around Berkeley, California, were wound down after its 2005 sale to Hershey’s.) But despite the increased capacity, he was more focused than ever on making chocolate tasting bars of single-origin beans of distinctive character, which get conched behind a glass display wall in the Distillery District shop for an average run of fifteen hours—but sometimes double that, and sometimes less.

“Conching is mysterious and times don’t tell that much,” Castellan cautioned, as we sat over espressos at a table alongside the display window. “Conching time depends a lot on the exact process and the type of machine. With top-quality cacao you never want to over-conch, because it removes top notes. What I can say is that we roast our single-origin beans at a very low temperature of about 250 to 260°F”—300°F is more commonplace—“to preserve character. The precise amount of conching time is a decision you have to make as you go, like blending whisky or kneading and baking a loaf of bread.”

Procuring beans of quality from different origins is far easier today that it was when Castellan started. Once confined to Venezuela, Soma now sources from Ecuador, Java, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Java, and just about anywhere where he is convinced that the fair trade label is honest. En route home from Japan, he had even stopped in at a five- hectare start-up plantation in Hawaii. The tasting bars he produces from the beans are assertively pure, restricting ingredients to cacao, organic cane sugar, and cacao butter, and excluding the customary additives of soy lecithin and vanilla. He blends them all to the same 70 percent purity, to encourage the tasting of different origins side by side. And doing so is pure pleasure. Alto Beni, from wild Bolivian cacao trees, is singularly creamy, with a hint of dark molasses. His beans from Java yield an unusually pale chocolate with fruity notes and a trace of smokiness. The beans for his Guatemalan bar are grown by an indigenous tribe in Cahabón in the Alta Verapaz mountains; the chocolate tastes pleasantly earthy, with notes of ripe berries. Another, from the Dominican Republic, boasts a hint of tobacco. Or at least that’s what I thought of them at first—but I keep second-guessing myself and going back for another taste just to check.

Back in Vancouver, meanwhile, the shelves alongside Haas’s chocolate bars are crowded with ingenious products he has created with his blocks of Valrhona and Felchlin. A glass-fronted refrigerator is packed full of another Haas marketing success story: readyto-bake-at-home varieties of his stupendously (and deservedly) popular chocolate truffle cookie, the Chocolate Sparkle. Then there are a host of hot chocolate mixes by the tin, chocolatecovered citrus peels of varied interpretations, and fruit jellies. The aforementioned viennoiseries, cakes, and tarts are all displayed behind glass at the main counter, on the far side of the chocolate display, where Haas was stationed.

I asked him to select for me something archetypically Haas, and he stopped moving for a good ten seconds of rigid contemplation of his current offerings. Then, without consultation or any further ado, it was decided that I should sample his pistachio and sour cherry tart. One of the sales personnel was instructed to make a cappuccino for accompaniment, and then Haas looked around his bustling shop for a place to put me. The four stools crammed in on the counter’s right flank were occupied. There were four more lined up at the windows to either side of the front door, overlooking the parking lot, but only a single perch was free in either row. It was in any case too noisy in there for undisrupted conversation, so Haas told me to take a seat outside and wait for him there. By the time I slipped out of the shop, he was there already, clearing the dishes from a table for us and wiping it down—and then he disappeared again. There were four or five other plastic tables on the narrow sidewalk, wedged between the front of his shop and its designated parking slots; one near me was occupied by an SUV, the overhanging nose of which was pressed against my chair. The other tables were half-full, most of the customers young and female. None of them was the tiniest bit overweight or showing any hint that such a fate might be lurking in her imminent future. Vancouverites—they probably cycled here, I thought as I took a long sip of my cappuccino, its topping of foamed milk prettily streaked and patterned in that way that no one ever seems to have the time to bother with back East.

My focus shifted to the cherry tart, and it looked promisingly fattening. It had a pastry shell of standard buttery shortbread crust—just like you would find on a lemon tart. The sour cherries were set in a thick, light green pistachio cream and, in turn, capped with a luscious-looking dome of pale mousse, lightly glazed so as to sport an enticing sheen. Shards of toasted pistachio had been scattered overtop, and around the periphery, in the gap between the outer edge of the mousse dome and the surrounding crust, five paper-thin strips of shiny dark chocolate had been affixed to the glaze. I carefully cut off a forkful of the tart containing every visible component, and was working on it when Haas returned and took a seat across from me.

“I didn’t know that you were licensed,” I said.

Haas smiled but said nothing.

The patisserie is not licensed, of course, but all the same it must be noted that, like so many other German and Alsatian chefs whose work I have happily sampled, chef Haas will never be accused of short-pouring when it came to the kitchen speed rail and his marinades and pastry fillings. Simply put, if you passed some of these tarts around at an AA meeting, you would soon be responsible for dispatching a shocking number of the crowd down a road they ostensibly no longer wished to travel. The sour cherries had been marinated in cognac until soused, and the dome of mousse compounded this boozy state of affairs, for it was a chantilly cream heavily spiked with kirsch, the clear brandy made from sour cherries. And what a lovely mix: the pastry was crisp and buttery; the cherries both sour and rich with the flavour of brandy; the pistachio cream provided a backdrop of rich nuttiness; the chantilly added a mildly bitter almond-like note from the cherry pits in the mash that made the kirsch; its glaze packed a citrusy tang; the pistachio slivers added a crunchy counterpoint; and the hint of chocolate brought it all together with flavour notes that were the perfect balance of bitter and sweet—about sixty percent cacao, I guessed.

“Sixty-two percent,” Haas corrected me.

The craft of the pastry chef is by necessity highly precise, and the product of this particular set of calculations was profoundly enjoyable—but not definitively so. Our expectations of great desserts have evolved considerably over the past two or three decades, and are no longer established by the corner pastry shop, whether it be some run-of-the mill Just Desserts or Dufflet outlet in Toronto, coasting on locals’ sentimental childhood attachment, or even the real thing, like Lenôtre, Dalloyau, or Ladurée in Paris. Because no matter how exemplary your preferred patisserie might be, its staff will inevitably sell you a ready-made dessert, and as such, it cannot compete with a plate assembled just for you à la minute in a top-quality restaurant any more than a pizza that spent thirty minutes in a takeout box will taste as good as one delivered to your plate directly from the brick oven.

Think, for example, of the classic upside-down apple cake, tarte Tatin. A pastry shop, even a very good one, will make a large tart, and very likely sell it to you already righted—which is to say with its bronzed apple filling showing and the pastry beneath already growing soggy from the syrupy runoff from the caramelized apples. But in a decent restaurant, they would make it for each customer by the portion; in a fine restaurant, the pastry would be cooked separately to ensure a perfect state of flakiness, and only at the very last moment before being sent to your table would it meet its topping of impeccably arranged braised apple and be paired with, say, some freshly churned ice cream or something of that ilk.

Some decades back, the great Paul Bocuse proclaimed that one could always judge a restaurant by its lemon tart and crème caramel. No coincidence, then, that back in the eighties, when the young Marco Pierre White was advancing English standards in his quest for Michelin stars for his restaurant, Harveys, he decided that as his restaurant was open for lunch and dinner, his lemon tart should be cooked not daily but instead twice a day—one batch before each service, to be served in its prime. Is there a pastry shop anywhere that will serve you an à la minute tarte Tatin or a lemon tart so incontestably fresh that it is still warm and fragrant from the oven? No. And that will always be so—or at least, it will remain thus until the day your corner pastry shop can charge twenty dollars per portion, and then reliably talk you into an extra C-note’s worth of espresso, cognac, and mineral water on the side. So pastry chefs in charge of pastry shops will forever toil in the shadow of their fellow pastry chefs who work in the restaurant business and continue to put together those plates that raise the bar. And while Haas is no exception, there is an irony to that because he himself was in his last life a restaurant dessert chef who did as much as—and often more than—anyone else in the business when it came to elevating our expectations of the final course.

“It’s such a different energy working in a restaurant kitchen, and I loved the high pressure of it—the fact that it’s just got to be done,” Haas said, leaning back in his chair, his brown eyes widening for a moment at the recollection. Then, looking down at what remained of my cherry tart, he added, “Plated—I would do that differently. The process, the way you do it, it’s all different. I would do it à la minute. The pastry would be much smaller, more delicate. There would be other components on the plate … ”

The Haas tart of the Thomas Haas Fine Chocolates and Patisserie era was lovely; but the plated restaurant desserts on which he built his reputation were more than that. They were magical. And they still are when he turns his hand to them.

Confectioner’s sugar—puderzucker—runs thick in the Haas blood. Back in 1918, which was not a big year for starting new businesses in Germany, Thomas Haas’s great-grandfather finally realized a dream and opened Café Konditorei Haas in his hometown of Aichhalden, in the Black Forest. Eventually, his son took over the family business and became its master pastry chef—the konditormeister. Then it passed to the next generation, and by age ten, young Thomas, too, had begun the unofficial training that it was presumed would one day allow him to take over the business. It began, of course, with washing dishes. By age twelve, he was lending a helping hand with arranging the pastries. But by the time he reached sixteen, his father had decided that Thomas should not serve his formal apprenticeship at Café Konditorei Haas; father thought son would learn more, and learn it better, elsewhere. Thomas complied, decamping for a pastry shop in nearby Gengenbach, where he spent three and a half years, and then to the town of Karlsruhe, near the French border, where he found work at the Confiserie Endle. “They are still two of the best patisseries I have seen anywhere,” Haas said.

Pineapple Carpaccio with Ginger Vanilla Syrup and Cilantro

Chef Thomas Haas

Serves 6 to 8

1 ripe pineapple, peeled

Leaves from 1/4 bunch cilantro

1/4 cup (60 mL) granulated sugar

1/4 cup (60 mL) simple syrup

1 tsp (5 mL) finely grated ginger

Seeds scraped from 1 vanilla bean

3 tbsp (45 mL) lime or lemon juice

To finish

Lime sorbet

Diced mango and fresh raspberries (optional)

Slice the pineapple as thinly as possible––on an electric slicer, a mandoline, or with a very sharp knife. Muddle together the cilantro and sugar. Combine the simple syrup, ginger, and vanilla seeds in a bowl and begin adding the lime juice until the desired level of tartness is obtained. Arrange 6 or 7 overlapping slices of pineapple on each chilled plate. Sprinkle them with the cilantro sugar and drizzle with ginger vanilla syrup. Top with a quenelle of lime sorbet––and, if desired, a scattering of raspberries and diced mango.

The collective experience unfolded precisely as an apprenticeship ideally should—at least, for such a motivated student. “There were new tasks all the time, new things I had not done before, and I had to learn a lot of them by myself. The benefit is that [at that age] you don’t have any fear of exploring different ways of doing something new until you get it down. Let’s say you’ve never made a tarte Tatin in your life. You look it up in three good books and it’s all different. You have to try them all.” This process of learning by experimenting within the framework of tradition continued apace for four years, and then, at age twenty-two, Haas was made konditormeister at the Confiserie Endle. He concedes now that he was “way too young” to take on the job; his perception of his inadequate training for the position is one of the principal reasons Haas today describes himself as “self-taught.”

Next, travelling on a Rotary Club of Germany scholarship, Haas wound up in Brazil, where he instructed young local chefs in the German technique of the chef patissier. Upon his return to Europe in 1993, he made the jump from the pastry shop to the posh Swiss restaurant kitchen, courtesy first of the Hôtel Belvédère, in Davos, and next at the two-Michelin-starred restaurant Jöhri’s Talvo, in St. Moritz. In February, at the peak of ski season, this exclusive alpine resort plays host to the St. Moritz Gourmet Festival, and it was an accident of this particular event that set Haas on course for North America. One of the perks afforded the posh clientele of the festival is that they may ride by calèche around town, stopping at any or all of the participating restaurants. And among those who stopped off for a little dessert at Jöhri’s were the general manager and executive chef of the Four Seasons Hotel Chicago. And they liked what they ate. They liked it a lot. “They asked for me to meet with them, and then they handed me hiring papers under the table.”

As with so many other young European chefs struggling with the cost of living in the Old World, America had already figured in Haas’s plans, and so he accepted the offer on the spot. And then, like so many others before him, he was refused an American work visa, and in the pinch, settled for the place next door: in 1995, Haas was named executive pastry chef at the Four Seasons Vancouver. In 1997, he took his Four Seasons team to New York City to compete in the North American Pastry Chef of the Year competition, and they finished in the top three. In 1998, they did it again. Among those who took notice was the renowned chef Daniel Boulud, who enticed Haas to New York City to serve as his executive pastry chef at his flagship Restaurant Daniel, which he was then about to relocate to the Mayfair Hotel and the recently abandoned site of his former employer, Le Cirque.

The new and improved Restaurant Daniel opened in December 1998 to a flurry of accolades (New York Times: “four stars”; International Herald Tribune: “top ten in the world”) in which Haas played no small part. But the routine pace of the working life at a restaurant operating at this lofty level quickly began to wear on him. Workdays typically started at seven in the morning and ran to midnight, and often later. It was an unpleasant challenge for his young family. “I picked up my daughter when I got home and she barely recognized me,” Haas has noted many times, sometimes even venturing that he was so unfamiliar to the baby that she was actually scared of him. Meanwhile, New York did little to quench his taste for the unadulterated outdoors and the sports that went with it. Thinking about Vancouver again, Haas decided that in the end it might be more enjoyable to be a big fish in a small pond rather than the other way around.

So in 2000, Haas quit Restaurant Daniel and returned to the West Coast to open a business of his own: Thomas Haas Fine Chocolates and Pâtisserie. To help pay the hefty bills for all that hideously expensive equipment particular to the pastry kitchen (proofers, vacuum emulsifiers, tempering and enrobing machines, Robot Coupe blenders, Tekna coolers, Ecolab sanitation systems, and more), he also took a job as pastry chef at the Metropolitan Hotel, looking after its restaurant Diva at the Met, as well as dessert and chocolate operations sold under its café and restaurant brand name Senses. “Senseless,” he calls it now that the relationship is over. But it must be mentioned that in 2001 he took his Senses team to the Valrhona National Pastry Competition in Los Angeles, and they placed first in the chocolate category, first in design, first in sugar—and took the prize for first overall, too, because that was the only category left.

It was in 2003, at Lumière in Vancouver, that I first sampled a plated dessert prepared by Thomas Haas, and to come clean, when I noticed that his contribution to the meal was imminent, it inspired a certain dread. Nine other fabulous courses had already come and gone, most of them conceived and prepared by a sensational guest chef visiting under the aegis of the Relais & Châteaux—Santi Santamaria of the three- Michelin-starred Can Fabes, near Barcelona. And as Santamaria had finished his run with a dessert of his own—raviolis de frutas tropicales con mascarpone—my palate was a long way from complaining that the kitchen had left anything unsaid. My belly was equally satiated, straining as it was under the recent influx of oysters, scallops with slivered pig’s ear, two-way lobster, rockfish en crépinette, confit of duck, and foie- gras-stuffed squab—not to mention my ill-considered decision that afternoon to take a late lunch nearby at Memphis Blues, where the slow-barbecued pork side ribs and beef brisket had turned out so well that I had decided to follow up with an order of Cornish hen. In short, when the Haas item finally came up on the schedule, a second dessert looked to me like overkill no matter who was going to be making it. And when I consulted the menu to see what it was going to be, hoping for something tiny—or even better, something dry that could be discreetly slipped into a jacket pocket—I discovered rather gloomily that Haas in fact intended to send out not one dessert but two, and intended to follow those with petits fours and finally the mignardises.

The first dessert was a salad of sage-scented winter fruit (peeled segments of sweet clementine figuring most prominently) served with feather-light parfait of yogurt and a bracing lime sorbet. It proved to be so startlingly refreshing that my slumbering appetite was roused once more, and my curiosity sufficiently piqued to get me out of my seat and off to the kitchen to watch chef Haas plate the next course. This one was a crispy chocolate napoleon plated with caramel- poached Anjou pears, coconut sorbet, and vanilla gelée. I finished every exquisite morsel. The execution, the attention to detail in the individual components, and chef Haas’s exquisitely light touch in balancing his principal flavours with subtle counterpoints made for an experience I had seldom even come close to encountering on the dessert plate, and it left me wanting more. No small achievement under the circumstances—and I learned over the intervening years that he can perform the trick again and again and whenever he wants, all because it is essentially impossible to eat so much as to be uninterested in a final course of his celebrated and supremely refreshing pineapple carpaccio with lime sorbet and cilantro.

“These signature dishes from our past repertoire that are such crowd-pleasers, these are what I do at special events,” Haas explained that day to me on his café terrace, when I inquired about the state of public access to his plated desserts now that he has left the high-end- restaurant business.

That night, for example, he was booked to prepare desserts for six hundred at the launch party for the latest Audi A6. This, after his customary 7 a.m. start and a typically hectic service at the patisserie, from which he also operates an internet and telephone mail-order boxed-chocolate business that sees him plough through about eighteen tons of raw Valrhona chocolate every year. Obviously, Haas is doing good business in the only field a pastry chef can go his own way after leaving the formal restaurant trade. And the fact that he counts the White House and Alain Ducasse among his customers must be pleasing. But all that satisfaction aside, one is obliged to question how the pace at Thomas Haas Fine Chocolates and Patisserie can be much of an improvement on that of Restaurant Daniel that he worried was leaving him estranged from his young daughter.

“It’s the same shit,” Haas said of his new hours, smiling as always. Then he conceded that earlier that spring he had suffered herniated discs and had subsequently felt for the first time that he was burning out. He followed with a health cleanse, abandoned caffeine, and made a minor adjustment to his six-day-a-week, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. schedule by giving himself three hours off each Wednesday morning to go mountain biking. “I take baby steps. I cannot change drastically—I would not be capable to do that.”

Evidently not: not long after that conversation, Haas opened a second retail branch in the far more pedestrian- friendly locale of Kitsilano, on West Broadway—although in a nod to the home life, he resisted public pressure to open it for business on Sundays. Shortly thereafter he admitted to a friend that he had just cracked a tooth while playing hockey.

“No big deal,” his friend told him. “It happens all the time.”

“I didn’t have the puck,” Haas clarified. “No one hit me.”

He was just standing on the blue line, clenching his teeth with a little more than his customary intensity.