A Day at a 143 Year-Old Restaurant With NYC's Most Iconic Desserts

My menu for pastry at Gage & Tollner

is just like the menu of my dreams.

When I was building the menu here,

I wanted to take into account the history of Gage & Tollner,

what this incredible legendary restaurant was,

and then what it would be

taking it into the present and the future.

It speaks to me, for sure, as a chef.

[bright music]

Good morning, I'm Caroline Schiff.

I'm the pastry chef here at Gage & Tollner.

Come on inside, follow me.

[lively jazz music]

Welcome, okay, so it's about 9:00 AM

and the first thing we have to do is go feed Edna.

Edna is our beloved sourdough starter

here at Gage & Tollner.

She likes to eat first thing in the morning

so come follow me.

We're gonna go downstairs to the kitchen.

This is our Victorian era dining room.

Everything in here is landmarked and has been restored.

These are the original chandeliers.

You can even see the gas valves from before electricity

which I think is just very cool.

We seat about 110 people at any given time,

including the bar.

I would say about 80% of people order dessert

which is huge for a restaurant,

makes me very happy as a pastry chef.

Come downstairs with me, I'm gonna show you everything.

So this is our service kitchen.

Prep is all downstairs.

Are those raspberries?

Yeah, they're from Highland in New York.

Oh my god, very exciting day here.

Welcome to the basement production kitchen.

Everybody's kind of getting started for the day.

I'm just putting on my schmatta here before we get going.

This is our whole team.

It's like our Facebook, but it's in real life.

So this is Edna, our sourdough starter.

During the pandemic, to keep her alive,

everybody from the pastry team

took some Edna home, we fed her,

she survived and thrived throughout the pandemic.

She's a beautiful, bubbly fermentation.

A blend of farmer ground rye flour, whole wheat bread flour,

high extraction whole wheat, and some all-purpose flour.

That blend is really unique

and it creates an incredible flavor and texture

so it's something we're really, really proud of here.

She like to eat twice a day.

This is 400 grams of starter.

The rest is discard, but we also use this.

We don't throw it out, no waste.

We'll make anywhere from four to six large loaves a day.

This starter is what's known as a hundred percent hydration,

just meaning, basically the ratios are always the same.

So if I have 400 grams of starter,

I'm gonna add 400 grams of flour

and I'm gonna add 400 grams of water.

It's gonna gimme 1200 grams.

And that's enough to make four loaves.

Sourdough starters, they're just like us, you know?

She's gonna get grumpy if she's not fed,

if she's too hot, too cold.

I think there's a lot of intuition in sourdough.

That's kind of what makes it really fun and interesting

but also tricky.

You kind of have to know how to sort of

read the personality of your sourdough starter.

We're gonna just let Edna do her thing.

These are the sourdough loaves that we mixed yesterday.

We do basically an overnight fermentation at like 18 hours.

These are gonna be for dinner service tonight.

In general, you wanna score sourdough

because if you don't,

the loaf will split really irregularly.

So if you score it, you can kind of control where it splits

and we call it the ear.

Everybody here has their own signature scoring.

Like I can always tell who did the bread in the morning

based on the designs.

Sourdough, you want a hot oven.

So 475 for the first 25 minutes

and then we'll turn it down to 450.

It'll get really, really super crusty,

delicious, dark brown sourdough goodness.

It's about 10:00 AM,

things are very much in full swing here.

Whole team is here.

This is Grayson.

Kayla.

Kathryn, our pastry sous chef.

I'm gonna check in with everybody,

just go over our prep list,

all the things that are happening tonight, we have a party.

Grayson is working on the Parker House Rolls.

The Parker House Rolls are beautiful,

buttery, enriched dough.

They are super popular.

Almost every table gets them.

We will sell anywhere from 45

to like 60 some odd orders a night

with four pieces of bread per order.

So do the math, it's a lot of bread.

We're gonna churn Alaskas because we're down to 37.

That keeps me up at night.

If we don't have like 90 orders

of Baked Alaskas at any given time, like I'm not sleeping.

[romantic music]

Deliveries are gonna start coming in.

I wanna do an inventory of the ice cream freezers

and just make sure I'm on top of everything.

So it's down this way.

Savory's getting going, potatoes.

We have the best French fries in the world here,

the world, anyway.

Lots of ice cream in this freezer.

Not a lot of places are making

ice cream in house like this at this volume.

I like to organize it by flavor

and then I just get a tally.

If I had to choose my favorite flavor, it's the fresh mint.

It's the last layer in the Baked Alaska.

It's nothing like mint ice cream

that you get at the supermarket.

The fact that I get to make dessert for a living

is just like, it blows my mind every day.

It's just so cool, I love it.

Follow me, inventory part two

is in the mise walk-in, down here.

Looking at my list, this is the inventory

from closing last night.

Baked Alaskas, that's urgent, 37?

On a busy night, we could easily sell 37 Baked Alaskas

and it's a three day process to make Baked Alaskas

so that is like number one priority.

So we're getting a whole bunch of deliveries in

and I'm expecting blueberries hopefully

and definitely strawberries.

I wanna do some R and D and update the cheesecake

which has rhubarb on it right now.

It's time to move into summer, summertime.

So let's go, let's check it out.

We have this incredible delivery chute,

it's like a slide.

And so this hatch opens and boxes just slide down.

It's a really good time.

I have been waiting for strawberries for weeks.

They're my favorite.

They're typically the first berry of summer.

So I got two flats of strawberries from two different farms

because I wanna compare and contrast,

see which one is gonna be sweetest and most delicious.

We work with amazing purveyors

that source from all different local farms.

It's a way for us to be able to support

all of these small growers and producers.

For me as a chef, like this is what gets me so excited

is the seasonality and the quality of this stuff.

I mean, it's just amazing.

This one's really sweet.

And I love when they have the little stem, cute as a button.

All right, let's go.

[romantic music]

It's 1:00 PM.

I have a few more ingredients to play with here.

I adore my cheesecake.

It is a chevre cheesecake.

It's all goat cheese.

It's unique, it's not a New York style cheesecake.

It's really tangy, has a lot of brightness to it,

and it is like the perfect canvas for fruit.

I'm just thinking about

how to put this beautiful local produce on a pedestal.

The pedestal is the cheesecake.

I don't even know if this is gonna end up on the menu.

I will go through iterations and iterations

and iterations of things.

It's all just sort of part of the process.

So these strawberries we got in today

are a little more tart.

So I'm gonna roast them with some sugar,

vanilla bean, thyme.

Vanilla beans, the pods,

they're the gift that keeps on giving.

Like after you've scraped out the seeds,

you wanna keep the pod

and you can use it for all kinds of stuff.

It'll infuse sugar, jams,

you can make your own vanilla extract.

They're pretty magical.

I'm gonna put these in the oven.

So while those strawberries roast,

I'm gonna take these sweeter ones

and we're gonna toss 'em with a little bit of sugar,

give them some acid.

And I'm gonna do some verjus,

which is basically unripe grape juice.

It's not quite as acidic as vinegar

but it's not terribly sweet.

Ooh, I wanna grab one more thing.

I'm so glad I remembered I made these.

I made these sumac meringues the other day.

I just wanna play with them with the strawberries.

And sumac has a really tart,

kind of almost like citric acid-y kind of quality to it.

Playing with something here.

I always add a little salt.

Okay, it's my timer.

Oh my god, look how jammy that is.

Like, look at that.

Mm, when fruit tastes like this,

like it almost tastes fake like a strawberry candy.

I always like to plate it up because I also wanna see, like,

how does the composition look on the plate?

I'm gonna finish it with a tiny bit

of this lemon oil that I made.

I like my whole team to try it.

Ugh, gosh, summer.

I want a little bit more jammy, you know?

I love jam.

[Caroline] I knew you'd say that.

[Employee] More of that goodness,

more of that goodness that you made.

Right?

And I love the meringue,

a little pop of surprise in there.

This is making me summer excited.

I know.

[bright jazz music]

Ice cream is churning downstairs for Baked Alaska.

I'm bringing spoons down for everybody, let's go.

If you have never had ice cream right out of the machine,

you're not living, I'm telling you.

When we assemble the Baked Alaskas,

we use this freezer and we have these big molds.

So as you can see, they're in the process.

This is the first layer,

it's setting as the chocolate churns.

And then that's gonna be our middle layer.

So in our Baked Alaska, the three layers of ice cream

are vanilla amarena cherry first,

chocolate which is the middle, that's happening right now.

And then the very last layer is the fresh mint ice cream.

And then to order during service,

we make meringue, cover each one,

and we blow torch each one.

Then we do a layer of chocolate cookie crumbles

and send them out to the dining rooms.

Now we're gonna churn the mint ice cream,

the fresh mint ice cream.

So I'm gonna add about half of this into the machine.

The Baked Alaska is our most high maintenance dessert,

I would say, in the sense that it really does take

three days to make.

So you make the ice cream bases one day,

those need to chill overnight.

The next day you can churn and layer everything

like we're doing now, but then this has to sit overnight.

So I won't be able to serve the Baked Alaskas

that I'm making today until tomorrow.

So you've always gotta be like three days ahead

but it's our best selling dessert.

We sell anywhere from 20 to 30 something a night

which is a lot.

It's the most expensive dessert on the menu, it's $25.

But like, depending on, you know, the rest of your meal,

it could be up to four people.

It's a really, really big, celebratory, dramatic dessert.

It's a Victorian era dessert so, you know,

it fits the time and place of Gage & Tollner.

And it was originally, as the story goes,

developed in New Orleans at Antoine's in the 1860s

to commemorate the United States

purchasing Alaska from the Russian empire.

So we're almost done here.

Sometimes I joke with people

who don't know what it's like to be a pastry chef.

And I'm like, I'm up to my elbows in ice cream.

And then I'm like, No, but guys like, literally I am.

[employees laughing distantly]

I'll be here all week.

[dark accordion music]

It's three o'clock.

This is the staircase up to the Sunken Harbor Club

and the private dining rooms, it's just so beautiful.

This building is so historic, maybe a little haunted

but like in a very good way.

I need to restock them a little bit

with dessert, ice cream sandwiches.

But before we go to the kitchen,

I really wanna show you the bar

because this is the coolest bar in New York.

You're in a sunken ship.

This is so amazing.

A artist who's friend of the restaurant

painted this gorgeous mural for us.

So this room is just such a fantasy space.

It just totally transports you.

It's Tiki drinks.

We have our own menu up here

and I get to do two desserts, which is really fun.

Come back to the kitchen.

It's obviously small, but it's mighty.

We have this delicious chocolate amaretto

ice cream sandwich.

The ice cream sandwich up here is double chocolate.

So it's the chocolate ice cream,

same one we use in the Baked Alaska,

and a super thin, chewy wafer chocolate cookie.

And there is a amaretto almond toffee ripple

kind of throughout the whole thing.

It's crazy delicious.

The miso butterscotch pudding.

Old school sundae coupe

with whipped cream and toasted coconut.

And it's just really fun and unexpected.

They work really independently up here during service

but I always wanna check the pars

and make sure they have at least two quarts of pudding.

They should have about, on any given night,

like half a dozen ice cream sandwiches.

So they've got a couple to start.

I can get them more as they need them.

It's pretty low maintenance up here.

They do such a great job.

It's 4:30, service starts at five

so we gotta go downstairs, start setting up.

We have a private party tonight,

all kinds of things going on.

So it's go time.

[upbeat jazz music]

Front of house is here.

[Employee] Hi, everybody. Hello.

So we've got like 30 minutes to fully set up

both the dining room pastry station.

So back to the kitchen.

I gotta set up my station.

The very first thing I do is

I just wipe everything down with sani.

I can't set up and work unless I do this first.

In the very beginning, I used to get nervous before service

and now I don't at all.

You know, pastry is the first station that gets hit here

because we're bread.

So people are gonna sit down.

First thing they wanna order

are Parker House Rolls or Pain au Levains.

So the bread and butter mise en place,

that needs to be set up first.

It's almost five o'clock.

We can probably expect some tickets.

All right, service.

The way I organize my tickets is bread is over here,

sweet stuff is over here, and I'm working in this order.

All right, tickets are coming in.

You guys better get outta here before I put you to work.

So thank you so much for hanging out with me

today at Gage & Tollner.

It's been an absolute pleasure.

Service.

Does it look like me?

[Employee] It does!

Twins.