An entire menu of sugar-free desserts: René Frank's disobedience, starring in Milan

Throwing shade on the techniques and layouts of 'savoury' cuisine, transferring the rigour of pastry making to an entire tasting menu. Which, however, contains no refined sugars, milk or butter but only natural sweetness. And vegetal too, with an interesting interweaving of umami, salty and sour.

This is the disobedient approach of 39-year-old René Frank from Baden-Württemberg, a gentleman who started learning the art of pastry making in important establishments in Spain, France, Japan and the United States and then gained three Michelin stars as head pastry chef of restaurant La Vie in Osnabrück. In 2016, he started his own adventure, at the helm of restaurant Coda in Berlin, a sign rewarded first with one (2018), then with two Michelin stars (in February 2020, right before the pandemic). And in 2022 comes another title that boosts his popularity: Frank is the 'World's Best Pastry Chef' according to the jurors of the 2022 World's 50Best.

René Frank is not a laboratory pastry chef, but a restaurant pastry chef who has become the integral chef of a restaurant serving express dishes, transferring the rigorous approach to each course. While explaining the concept, we are captivated by an unusual detail: at the restaurant's pass, head chef Julia Leitner lines up six precision scales. Weights, times and temperatures of the highest precision. Isn't this what makes pastry a different art from cooking? Shouldn't it be, cooking tout court, more and more precision and less and less improvisation? Shouldn't we increasingly blur the line between two arts that have long been kept unduly separate?

In the hubbub of a never-so-high volume for a two-star, Frank intervenes with an important concept, very Asian and not very European: 'The greatest lesson I learnt from the Japanese is the obsession to do the same thing over and over again to the point of exhaustion, the progressive approach to perfection. Perfection does not exist, but it is better to behave as if it were a real goal, like Blaise Pascal’s god of bets: methodologically, you can only gain. The opposite of Western cuisine's terror of repetition, always searching for something new, of endless reset and restart.

Thus, Coda's tasting menu is a sequence of 15 steps, many of which are interweavings of ingredients perfected, refined, and transmuted over time. ‘The sweet and the umami, to be exact,’ Frank lights up, ‘the two flavours we have loved since our mother's milk. Hence all the caramelisation, reductions, concentrations and multiplication of textures. And the always open dialogue with the savoury, the acidic, the bitter.

There are no industrial semi-finished products in the pantry, but vegetables, cereals, dried fruit and herbs: wheat and rice, beets, aubergines and carrots, walnuts and almonds, and a few small fermented items. And very little milk and butter, meat and fish, in a quasi-vegetarian 'dessert' menu, always careful not to exceed the total calories. All this with the precise geometric shapes of pastry making: the round or elliptical shapes of tarte, biscuits, sorbets and ice cream prevails. Is this a syncretism of the fine dining to come?

 

Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso