“Chef, call on line twelve …”Photo courtesy Will Goldfarb
Making weird restaurant dishes at home is a dicey business, especially when you’re talking about avant-garde trademarks like Room 4 Dessert’s “Ice Ice Café.” (Ingredients: white coffee sabayon, espresso fluid gel, basil-seeds caviar, and passion-fruit sponge cake.) Still, ambitious suckers now have a glimmer of hope: Will Goldfarb, Room 4 Dessert’s chef, doesn’t mind giving away a few secrets, if it means another revenue stream. Through a service he’s calling “Willpowder,” Goldfarb’s selling the obscure (in the supermarket, at least) constituents he uses to make his dishes — and offering live advice over the phone to supplement the recipes on his Website. “The idea is to be able to reproduce anything you had in our restaurant,” Goldfarb tells us. You want it, he’s got it: methylcellulose (a stabilizer: “it makes ingredients hold together so you can aerate them”), lecithin (an emulsifying agent: “hot chocolate mousse that doesn’t fall or break”), and flavor agents like tandoori masala. But isn’t Goldfarb worried about every nut in town calling and interrupting him and his people in the kitchen? “Nah. Every nut in town calls me up already.”
