René Frank: Setting the bar for pastry chefs around the world
BERLIN: Pastry chef René Frank is riding the crest of the wave. Just last month, he was recognised as the best pastry chef in the world. But that is the last in a series of awards and accolades that he has been clinching since completing his training as a pastry chef in 2004. He’s worked around the world but he is mostly known for creating a two Michelin star dessert restaurant in Berlin, the first ever such restaurant in Germany and one of very few such restaurants in the world.
So what’s it like to have a dessert restaurant? Is it just for customers with a sweet-tooth only? In this interview, we ask René to explain his vision, the challenges of opening such a restaurant, why such a restaurant in Germany could only work in Berlin and why he thinks we will be seeing similar concepts in future.
Born in 1984 in Wangen in the Allgau region, the 38-year-old chef has worked in some of the top restaurants around the world before settling down on CODA which he cofounded with Oliver Bischoff in the German capital.
What is a dessert to you?
The dessert is the course in all traditional menus that is the most emotional. Most desserts have that nostalgic aspect and remind guests of a particular season, a moment, a person or a childhood memory. Some savoury dishes do this as well, but I think that most desserts have that special quality, and my original idea with CODA was to take advantage of that nostalgic feeling and make a whole menu out of desserts.
Most people define desserts by sweetness, because the desserts served traditionally on any menu are sweet. It’s the one flavour you usually don’t have during a meal, so if you analyse it, desserts usually have and combine specific types of flavours and textures very differently from the ones you find on snacks, starters or main courses. But desserts also change depending on the context. It can be a piece of cake with a coffee in the afternoon, or the last dish after an eight course savoury menu, or like in our case, one of the seven or eight dishes of a menu made entirely out of desserts. The context changes what the guest wants and if you have a menu like ours, then you need to include sweet, salty, acidity, bitterness, and different textures. In that way you don’t leave something missing. All done with inspiration from dessert techniques.
Do you think Berlin, with its eclectic scene, is the best place for a concept like CODA to work? What made you open it in Berlin?
When I thought about a dessert restaurant concept I knew that the only city in Germany where you could do this was Berlin. This is why I focused on Berlin and how I met Oliver, my business partner. Berlin is a city where you can do what you want and be what you want. You can go out wearing a pink tutu and nobody questions it or judges you.
When we started we knew that we needed some time to develop the concept. It was always going to be centered around desserts. But was it a bar? A restaurant? And to have that time, it was great to do it in a city like Berlin where you can do anything.
Did you ever fear that such a concept would not work? Were you afraid that people might not be ready for such a concept?
Actually we didn’t really have a plan B. We were very focused on realising our goal. But when we built the kitchen, we did it so we could change things and turn it into a regular restaurant. The infrastructure and possibility is there. But it was not so important for us. We didn’t know for sure if our concept would work but we knew what we wanted to do. It was completely driven by passion.
What would you say to people who do not necessarily have a sweet-tooth? How would you intrigue them to come and experience CODA?
Our dishes are of course on the sweet side but some of the dishes are even less sweet than some starters in other restaurants are. I always say that people should know that not all our dishes are sweet. We focus on balance and I think that even guests that don’t have a sweet-tooth would really enjoy coming to CODA.
This is something that I learned in Japan and that depends on umami and on the five flavours. Sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami. This needs to be respected in the menu and then of course the feeling in the mouth, so textures and temperatures also influence the experience of an all desserts menu. If you only eat cold dishes you’ll not be satisfied, for example.
This is how I think Japanese cuisine also works. In Germany, and traditionally, we just get big portions to get full. In Japan they cook so that your mind tells you that you’re full and they achieve it with flavour, textures and temperatures.
And actually dessert comes from the French language, from the word ‘desservir’ which means clear the table, and then there was the dessert, a dish completely different from the previous ones. Techniques are different, flavours are different, textures are different, and that’s what makes something a dessert for me, not the amount of sugar that’s inside. Let’s say you make a cake and you take out all the sugar. It’s the same dish but just not sweet anymore, so I think it shouldn’t be defined just by sweetness.
For me, the amount of sweetness can be compared to the amount of salt and the feeling you get from it. I want to have the feeling of it, I want the sweetness or the saltiness of the dish to be balanced and to enhance the flavour. So for us it’s very important to control the sweetness and incorporate other flavours to create a pleasant menu and experience.
It is a very different and unique dining concept in the world. How did you come about it and was it difficult at the start?
Actually, regarding a dessert restaurant or bar, we’re not the very first ones to do it. You have Spai Sucre in Barcelona, for example. They really started with this concept of dessert only. You had different options. You could have some sweet tapas, you could also have a complete menu with a savory main course or the whole menu with dessert. Like that, there are some more examples but when we created CODA we wanted to do things differently.
We never wanted to have a savory main dish, for example. We don’t want to have a piece of fish, fried chicken or meat in the middle of our experience. We really want the approach to be all about desserts.
Do you think we will see ‘copies’ of this idea in future?
I think the concept of dessert dining is going to take even more strength because pastry chefs can see that they can express themselves better with a dessert restaurant than with a pastry shop or being the pastry chef of a restaurant. But I don’t think that that means that it’s a copy of CODA. I think everybody can do it in their own way, just like in savoury restaurants, everybody has a different approach and philosophy.
Our thing is very unique in terms of not using any industrial ingredients, processed or refined sugars, we do everything fresh, we pair every dish with a cocktail. Of course I’m proud of being an inspiration to other pastry chefs that want to take this route in the future, and even let them know that you can be taken seriously as a restaurant only with desserts and even get two Michelin stars. It’s the beginning of something great for the pastry world.
What would you tell young pastry chefs who most often are not in the limelight?
I would encourage them to try to find their own style and most importantly, do things with passion. Don’t do what everybody is doing… Try your best to express yourself through your work.
You have a tasting menu of desserts. When it comes to savoury items, we have seen the rise of menus with lots of courses. Do you think this is possible with desserts or is there a limit to how much customers can eat?
I think that there’s no limit and it’s just a matter of personal style and what you want to do. We decided to have less courses in our menu, but at the same time we wanted those seven courses to be more complex and for them to have more than one bite. I’m not a big fan of having 20 one-bite courses.
Anything is possible really. If you have a 20 to 30 course menu consisting of bites, then I think those bites would have to be less complex and have less components and that would make it more difficult for me to identify them as desserts. For me it’s very important that our guests get dishes and not bites or small plates. But this is definitely a personal decision and depends on the concept and the chef.
What was the intention of always pairing every dish with a cocktail?
When we started with the idea, we thought that if we did a dessert only concept, it needed to be during the evening. An experience worthy of spending the evening. It is very different from maybe having some dessert during the day with a coffee or tea, for example.
You have places like Cakes & Bubbles in London, which is a great concept but is more thought of for the day and to spend a shorter amount of time. We knew that we wanted a place where guests wanted to spend their evening and with that came alcohol. Not always, but most people like to accompany their special diners with wine or alcohol, and again, since we wanted to make things differently, we decided that a wine pairing would be too simple. It also happens that dessert wines are very sweet and it would have been too intense. Then I thought that some traditional desserts, pastries and chocolates include alcohol, like a crêpes suzette or a baba au rhum… So I figured that It would be a good idea to always combine every dessert with a cocktail.
I love challenges and CODA was a big one, so why not make it even more challenging by adding a cocktail to every dish? It ended up being a very special touch because CODA now offers not only complex dishes, but also complex drinks.
How do you go about the creative process? Tell me how you create new dishes?
We don’t really have a system. But we do know how we start and how we end the menu, and also always have two cheese courses in the middle of it. It’s something that we’ve always done. But the creative process is always different and can come from any idea and then turn into a product that turns into trying and experimenting different options.
I can get an idea in the middle of the night and then just get to work with someone from the team the next day and try different things. At the same time I always think about what I would do for the drink, since every single dish at CODA comes with a cocktail or a pairing drink. For that I always think about the ingredients I chose for the dish and go back to my two years being in charge of a bar. During that time I gained a very good memory of the flavours of the spirits because I think spirits are like liquid food. For me it was very easy to keep those flavours in my memory. My idea, from the beginning, was always to combine desserts with drinks, a desserts bar.
Do you have any comments on sustainability?
CODA is a restaurant where we don’t serve any fish or meat as we created a concept where you don’t need those products. The only exceptions right now are a small amount of bone marrow that we use as a fat for a small bite of cake and caviar for our caviar popsicle. We also don’t use any industrial products, so yes, it might be more sustainable to use white sugar than to reduce down the juice of carrots, but those could maybe be two very specific exceptions to what in other ways is a very, very sustainable way of producing a fine dining menu.
So in a general way, what is sustainability to you?
For me, first of all, to respect the product and use of it all. I don’t cook things with a product that needs to be brought from a small farm into the city with a car every day, for example. I take really good care of where my produce comes from, and the places we get them from. But something that also is very important to me is the human part of it and how you treat your team. Human sustainability. For me the pleasure of the guests should be as important as the happiness of my staff. Everybody needs to be happy.
Apart from that, we try to cover all the basics. We have as little waste as possible and use the whole product; we don’t use processed or industrial products – and being a dessert restaurant, we don’t use fruits like pineapple, mango, passion fruit or exotic fruits, for example. What breaks that rule is cacao, coffee and tea. And as much as we would love to get it locally, it’s simply not possible.
Tell me about cacao. Do you actually make your own chocolate?
We use cacao from Ecuador. There are tons of varieties and regions to get cacao from but to me it isn’t really that important to have five or many different ones. We focus on one type of cacao and with only that one, we do a lot of different applications. The one from Ecuador is super fresh and I like its fruitiness and mildness. We grind it for just two days and achieve a chocolate with a lot of character. We don’t really want the super fine industrial taste, like chocolates from Switzerland. Then we just play with different ways to sweeten it or mix it with our own milk powder to create different recipes, flavours and textures.
What is your mission with CODA?
People can ask themselves why there is a need for a dessert restaurant. My wish and my mission was to create a restaurant that allowed guests to have a fun dining experience, without any fish or meat, where they could try new stuff and that’s what we’ve created at CODA. This mission motivates me.
For me the important thing after creating CODA is to achieve balance. For example, at one time we tried being as plant based as we could but that didn’t let us find that balance. Now we work with dairy products but not a lot. A lot of things are plant-based but our goal is not to go vegan, like we definitely use sweetness, but the menu is not too sweet. It’s all about fun and balance.
So now that you say this I wonder what came first. The idea to create a desserts restaurant and then as a consequence you realised that you wanted to have a fun place where people can enjoy a menu without fish or meat, or was it the other way around?
The idea was clear. To make a dessert concept. And then that evolved as we tried and discovered what the guests wanted and responded better too. The idea was experimental and light desserts because in a restaurant, as a pastry chef you always have the challenge that when it comes time to have dessert and petit fours, the guest is always full. They don’t need too much, just a bite of something sweet. but I always wanted my guests to be able to finish their dishes. It is super frustrating as a chef to make a dessert, to get good comments about it but to see that guests can’t finish it. With all the work and detail that goes into making them, into creating the perfect ending for a meal, even with petit fours only….
I used to work as a pastry chef at a three Michelin starred restaurant where I realised all this and there I started to work and create lighter desserts just so that guests could finish my chocolates in the end. So, I got more and more into plant based desserts, sugar reduced and fat reduced. At that time I also got sort of obsessed with not using industrial or refined products.
In pastry all over the world, from Tokyo to Berlin, Barcelona to New York, you get pastry, and all of them use the same processed chocolate and bases, the same fruit purees and processed fats and even the same molds and shapes. All over the world, the same result. Then even as a pastry chef you get your recipes from the same companies that sell these products and end up having no idea about pastry and it all ends up all being the same. It kills the art of pastry and that’s why we do things differently at CODA.
I would say that this happens also in savoury cooking but not as intensely as with desserts. If there’s a trend or a new shape then everybody does it. I never say that I have a new way of making desserts, or that everybody needs to make desserts how I do it, because as I said before it depends on the context and it’s something that works for us and our CODA vision. CODA is my point of view on desserts.
CODA is open from Wednesday to Saturday from 6pm onwards.
CODA
Friedelstraße 47
12047 Berlin
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