Albert Adrià-trained chef shares recipes for sweets success in cookbook

It’s not every pastry chef who can get Albert Adrià to write a foreword to their cook­book. The chef behind Tickets and Enigma (both in Barcelona, Spain) and, with his brother, Ferran, of the now-closed elBulli, writes about being impressed with Will Goldfarb’s focus from the moment they met.

“I perfectly remember the spring of 1999, when the new crew arrived at elBulli to start the season with us [...] When everyone had been assigned to specific sections of the kitchen, this boy – Will – who was working in the pastry section, came up to me and told me in Catalan, with a strong American accent, ‘Em dic Will I treballeré amb tu’ (‘My name is Will and I’ll be working with you’). Wow! It turned out he spoke better Catalan than Spanish. Why? Because he had chosen to learn Catalan, as he knew that was the region he wanted to work in.”

In Goldfarb’s introduction to his book, Room for Dessert (2018), he writes in a series of 18 “episodes” about his journey from potential law school student (he was accepted, but never enrolled) to having a restaurant, Room 4 Dessert, in Bali (the original, which closed, was in New York), and being featured in Netflix’s Chef’s Table: Pastry.

He starts with his first restaurant gig, as a busboy in a place in New York with links to organised crime, and moves on to enrolling in Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, working at elBulli, Tetsuya’s and other big-name establish­ments, opening Room 4 Dessert in New York, his bout with cancer and thenthe move to Bali.