Michael Laiskonis: Sharing Excellance

Artist, scholar, mentor Michael Laiskonis ennobles the pastry world

By Brian Cazeneuve

As a young chef, Michael Laiskonis would reach into his bulky bag of culinary tricks and present them to a rapt audience. A foam here, a coulis there; something freeze dried, molded, sculpted, tweezered into culinary showmanship. “There was,” Laiskonis says, “a desire to get as many elements on the plate as possible. Even if they didn’t necessarily enhance the dessert. I could rattle off the nickels I’d get every time I put dots on a plate and someone said, “oh, that’s too pretty to eat.’”

These days, Laiskonis’s bag of tricks has expanded to nearly bursting from its core, the residual toil from years as Executive Pastry Chef at the standard bearer Le Bernardin; and a project profile of instruction, experimentation and scholarship that seems to run on a sugar-coated loop.

Yet Laiskonis’ ethos in 2024 could not be more generous and less showy. “How do I find the right way to share everything I’ve learned in ways that will help other people?” he asks. Listen to Laiskonis for minutes or for hours that merely seem like minutes, and you can’t help gain appreciation for what the industry has been and how good it can be.

To be fair, Laiskonis wasn’t raised in a culinary family. He wouldn’t allow his foods to touch; and at 16, he asked his mom how to bake a potato. But there was a fertile mind inside the boy who was creative enough to win an art scholarship to a school in Georgia and studious enough to research topics until the minutia shriveled up in front of him and cried uncle. The boy’s vigilance was also tinged with rebellion. “I became vegetarian, but I wasn’t just going to be a junk-food vegetarian,” he says. “I wanted to do it right.” So Laiskonis went to the library and dove into veggie-friendly cuisines from India and Southeast Asia.

He learned photography and traveled the country in search of the punk-rock underground, but his viewfinder was finding a new focus. Laiskonis took a job one summer at a bakery in Northville, Mich. run by his roommate’s brother. The picture grew clearer. “Pastry was technical like darkroom work,” he explains. “You deal with temperatures and chemicals. Yet there is also creative expression. Gradually, it went from something to do until I figured out what I wanted to do to something I knew I had to do.”

At the bakery, he bought books about French bread and created an overnight position for himself, and soon there was no sleep in Northville. “I’d get there at 7 p.m.,” he says. “As long as the cases were full of what needed to be there, I could experiment.” Laiskonis was a vampire making bites for someone else. “When there’s something that triggers an area of interest,” he reasons, “you can’t go back until you get to that trigger.”

Not yet the chef he’d become, Laiskonis was already reading the triggers that pastry compelled. “Even if it’s on a subconscious level, it’s going to give you some sort of memory of your grandmother’s apple pie,” he says. “It’s child medicine; scrape your knee, get a piece of candy. It’s an introduction to commerce. What’s a five-year old gonna spend his allowance money on? Not much else. So sweetness is wrapped up in nostalgia, and as a pastry chef, you have an opportunity to play with that. If you have to distill what I’ve done for the past 30 years, I put sugar in stuff.”

That’s the chemist demurring before his test tubes as if they knew what to do without him. The painter is more fun. Laiskonis took his active trigger finger to Tribute restaurant in Detroit, where his tenure as pastry chef from 1999 to 2003 helped the restaurant earn a James Beard Award. During that time, Eric Ripert, the esteemed executive chef at Le Bernardin in New York, was doing pop-up dinners across the country in order to raise funds for families of victims and rescue workers affected by events on September 11. When Laiskonis was ready for a new challenge in 2004, he met with Ripert, fully expecting that the job at the Aqua-centric destination restaurant was beyond his reach. Then they talked. And talked. Laiskonis’ passion radiated the discussion, though he prefers the word drive. Ripert hired him without requesting the usual tasting demo.

Laiskonis assimilated smoothly once he shaved some whiskers from his bravado. “That was the era of white powders, hydrocolloids and how many elements you could fit on a plate,” he says. “Le Bernardin was and is a temple to minimalism. Most of the menu is a piece of fish with a sauce and a garnish. Yah, but that sauce took three days to make. And the cooking method chosen is very deliberate based on the anatomical properties of the fish, itself. It was my job to complement Eric’s approach. That made me shed some ego and mature a little bit.”

So Laiskonis did his own deep dives into the expressions of particular components. “One ingredient,” he says, nodding his head. “How can you manipulate it? If it’s apple, you can have five or six different expressions of an apple. If we’re talking chocolate, then instead of just roasting cocoa beans, let’s roast the same beans three different ways and bring them together.”

Soon, Laiskonis’ plate was covered in accolades. He was named Bon Appetit’s Pastry Chef of the Year and won the James Beard Award as the nation’s top pastry chef in 2007. Le Bernardin earned three Michelin Stars and received a four-star rating from The New York Times.

If Laiskonis had a signature, it must have been The Egg, a dish that simply couldn’t disappear for fear that the regulars and royalty who ordered it would engage in mass mutiny and dump the restaurant’s tea into the East River. The dessert was fashioned as a perk for VIPs, an offering for those in the know, a secret menu item that was as secretive as the gold at Fort Knox. Inside a hollowed egg shell sat layers of milk chocolate pot de crème, caramel sauce, caramel foam, maple syrup and Maldon Sea Salt. The concept that Laiskonis actually originated at Tribute, was almost contralogical. When confectionary progress called for pairing flavors and contrasting textures, The Egg was soft from top to bottom without much flavor contrast. Yet the impression was of luxury dressed in opulence, topped with splendor and served with a demitasse spoon.

Laiskonis maintained a strong relationship with Ripert, who trusted him to merge his curiosities with Le Bernardin’s unpretentiousness without stifling oversight. Keeping a weekly schedule of 11 services over six days, Laiskonis would deconstruct and reconstruct to his artistic content, or as he puts it, “I’d say, ‘if it’s not broken, let’s break it and see what happens. So I kept at it. I joked I had the freedom and flexibility to do a 12-hour shift any time of the day I wanted.”

He spent much of that time making sure each person toiling under him worked with clean precision. By his own admission, Laiskonis found himself with less time for daily R&D because of his penchant for mentoring with ample TLC. Laiskonis stayed at the restaurant until 2012, before casting about for new challenges. The next one was an obvious fit.

After leaving Le Bernardin, he made his first call to Rick Smilow, President of New York’s Institute of Culinary Education, where Laiskonis still holds court. “Rick and I came up with the title Creative Director,” Laiskonis says. “It looks awesome on a business card.

“I realized  my role was shifting. There comes a time when you don’t just create, but help other people create. You give back. I don’t understand keeping a secret recipe. I understand there could be intellectual reasons for keeping intellectual property, but don’t keep something back and not give the real recipe. None of us cook from a blank notebook; we’re all starting from somewhere.”

In practice, Laiskonis could impart his expertise in classrooms, while keeping time for other projects both collaborative and theoretical. He consulted for restaurants, ice cream projects and chocolate projects. “I try to approach everything with excitement,” he says. “That’s why I like consulting so much. There was a time I said yes to everything. On the other end of that phone call was a challenge. Maybe there was an alternative sugar I wouldn’t use, myself. I’d look at it as a chance to learn about alternative sweeteners. Or a granola bar on a large scale. . . It gave me time to look at the science of things. How does lemon curd actually work? Can it be improved? What about pate a choux?”

It was actually a marketing person from ICE who suggested offering the bean-to-bar experience that would become ICE’s Chocolate Lab. In a room surrounded by chocolate’s mechanics and unmistakable aromas, students could partake in one-day, two-day or four-day dives into roasting, winnowing, grinding, tempering and, of course, savoring at the end. Rare was the day Laiskonis wasn’t left smiling by another student’s pride in their successes.

Of course he couldn’t stop there. “I wanted to know more about the craft chocolate movement,” he says. “My relationship to [chocolate] changed when I went to a cacao farm in the Dominican Republic. I didn’t know as much about chocolate as I thought I did. The more you learn about something, the less you know, and I’m getting dumber every day.”

So perhaps it was a search for truly immersive imprudence that brought Laiskonis to the mother of all cacao callings, a dive into its vast vat of history, going where no encyclopedia had gone before. “I had researched my family genealogy, and that was the impetus to learn more about chocolate,” he says. “It’s interesting to ponder: what happened here 300 years ago? I found a cousin who ran a brewery in the 1650s. If I can find [him], I can find out about chocolate. When I put chocolate history into Google, I saw nothing, so I had to attack this through real detective work.”

Laiskonis put the genie in genealogy, finding articles, documents and enough crumbs to build a cake. “Not just the manufacturing part of it, but also cultural, historic, geographic, socio-economic.” He framed his search within his host city, since New York had long been the capital of culture and commerce.

“A lot of people think Hershey was the first chocolate manufacturer here,” he explains. “At the time when Hershey purchased the first piece of equipment in 1893 or 1894, there were a dozen nationally-known brands being manufactured in New York. Everyone would have known those brands. By the 1920s, there was one left. Why? World War I. It’s amazing how things are potentially lost to the past. There’s always a backstory, a deeper story. Even Theodore Roosevelt’s great, great, great grandfather made chocolate on Maiden Lane.”

With an artisan’s perspective, Laiskonis also giftwraps his scholarship in context. “Until 1850, chocolate was always a beverage,” he says. “Tea, coffee and chocolate emerged at the same time. How do you make coffee and tea? You infuse them. With chocolate, you use the whole bean. If it wasn’t for finding another application for it, chocolate might have stayed a beverage and there might never have been this evolution into this pipeline of candy.”

Laiskonis put chapters on the web, complete with relevant photos he also sourced. His work remains unpublished as a full manuscript, but it deserves a home. The industry needs it, more than he does, for Laiskonis is too restless to rest on his letters.

In 2019, he took over Recolte, a sweet spot on New York’s Upper West Side, converting the daytime bakery into a evening hangout that offered elevated three-course dessert tasting menus and a delicious 17th-century-inspired spiced hot chocolate that had few peers anywhere. Recolte closed just as the pandemic arrived.

Laiskonis was working with an NGO under the umbrella of the UN in the cocoa sector in the Caribbean, when he met a sales rep for Boiron, a manufacturer of frozen fruit purees that use neither preservatives, nor thickening agents. Laiskonis liked the product and the mission, increasing his workload for the France-based company until they named him Culinary Director for North America in Sept. 2003. As brand ambassador, Laiskonis found ways to add art and science to nature’s gems; Violet Fig, Mirabelle plum, blood orange and sea buckthorn to name some. Laiskonis wasn’t there to be a face in front of the brand, but rather a force behind it.

“I’m asking what kind of white peach goes into the puree?” he says. “Where does it grow? Can I take everything I learned about chocolate and apply it to this new set of ingredients? I want to be on the front lines, helping them tell their story.”

One can almost open up Laiskonis to the relevant page in his mental archives. “I can tell you where that peach is grown,” he begins. “I can tell you the farms are between 50 and 30 kilometers away from the factory. I can actually tell you farmers’ names. One of our farmers actually has a YouTube channel. And you can see his white peach orchards, which we financed the planting of. We were going to buy all of his peaches for the next 15 years or the lifespan of the tree, I can also tell you why the Bellarine variety was chosen, I can tell you what they do with the pits. Because every time you process fruit, there’s always some byproduct, right? The bits go into a basic plant-based gravel product, like a landscaping product.”

Ideally, the director would instill some Laiskonian curiosity into other players, urging them to tap into their brainstorms.

“One cool thing that I’ve been doing with Boiron is kind of disrupting the typical pastry demo with an interactive-like sensory exercise,” he explains. “We actually kind of make it into a game where I will give you six fruit purees tasted blind. You can see the color. And then I’m going to give you six flavor profiles that are unique, but unlabeled. So you’ll see the flavor elements that are most important: aromatic intensity, sour notes, green notes, maybe vinegar or woody or candy. What are your impressions?

Then we go through the answers and then I tell you the deeper story of the white peach or kalamansi, which is a hybrid of Mandarin and kumquats mostly associated with the Philippines. All of a sudden, you just change the way people usually sit through a pastry that uses Boiron. We call it food technology. It actually started as a way for the company to talk internally about the product. You have to have a common language.

“Maybe the mango farmer in India doesn’t know what a pastry chef in New York is capable of doing with their products. That exchange can be really powerful. Let’s make the connection across the value chain.”

So the chef of 2024 is connecting more than concocting, sharing a common understanding from makers to manufacturers to consumers. That chocolate egg is a by-product of terroir, culture and imagination, so you savor the product, but you savor the process, too. “What’s my favorite thing to do?” he asks rhetorically. “Learn stuff. What’s my second favorite thing to do? Take what I’ve learned and share it with others.”

In Laiskonis’ skilled hands, the transfer of taste wafted nicely about the palate; the transfer of knowledge has a longer shelf life.

(This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Pastry Arts Magazine)