Nicholas Pine’s audition to become the new pastry chef at ultra-chic 2941 Restaurant in Falls Church involved, among other things, creating three chocolate desserts and two fruit desserts in a few hours’ time. He passed with flying colors and started his new job in October.
A 2012 graduate of Maryland’s L’Academie de Cuisine cooking school (which has since closed), Pine previously held long stints at the now-shuttered Co Co. Sala restaurant in Washington, D.C., and at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. But what really impressed 2941 chef/owner Bertrand Chemel was that Pine labeled all of his ingredients and created diagrammatic drawings of his desserts—with all the components explained in the margins—before he set out to prepare them. Any chef can appreciate that kind of precision and attention to detail.
Pine, 28, calls his culinary style simple and clean with a sense of nostalgia. “I stick to seasonal ingredients and highlight them with complementary flavors,” he says. A few cases in point on his spring/summer menu include a deconstructed version of the classic French strawberry cake known as the fraisier. He pipes strawberry mousse into two white-chocolate spheres that he then glazes bright red, serving them with pistachio ice cream, vanilla chiffon cake, basil crumble and strawberry sauce. Another dessert, The Exotic, is pure drama. It’s an orb of white chocolate—surrounded by chopped fresh mango and tiny scoops of tropical sorbet—that melts when passionfruit sauce is poured onto it, revealing a hidden treasure of coconut mousse inside.
Count us impressed, too. 2941 Fairview Park Drive, Falls Church, 2941.com