Flour power
Farzam Fallah makes his pastries into works of art
When I asked pastry chef Farzam Fallah if we could photograph his sketchbooks — in which he imagines, on a twodimensional plane and using his very Ralph Steadmanesque painting technique, the platings for his desserts at Toronto restaurant Richmond Station — he one-upped me.
“I've always wanted to do a really large piece, something wall-sized of one of my dishes,” he wrote in an email, “splattering it with all the colours that the dish would be made up of. If you’d like ... I can do some live painting. (We can) make this piece outstanding. Think White Heat (Marco Pierre White) outstanding. I hope I’m not being too out of the box.”
Four days later, Fallah set up a makeshift artist’s studio in the private dining room at Richmond Station, queued up a playlist on YouTube and painted one of the restaurant’s current desserts — a white chocolate cake with pistachio ice cream, cooked oranges, cultured tres leches and afsaneh spice — on a canvas so large, he couldn’t fit it on the table. But it wasn’t for us: Fallah jumped at the opportunity to do something he’d never done before, because he can’t stop creating.
“When it comes to pastry, you’re using flour,” the George Brown culinary school graduate, who moved with his family to Canada from Iran at age eight and got his first kitchen job in Toronto at 15, said later, over coffee. “You can’t eat flour. My job is to make flour taste good. It gives you so much room for creativity: with flour, eggs, butter and sugar, you can make so many things.”
Fallah’s insatiable creative energy has positioned him, at 23 years old, as one of Toronto’s — if not the country’s — fastest-rising culinary stars, remarkable less for his age than for the fact that his medium is dessert, the part of dinner most readily skipped. His imaginative dishes and artful presentations were the centrepiece of a pop-up event in March called Stranger With Candy, a five-course dinner designed by Fallah with the secret aim, he says, of creating some camaraderie among Toronto’s pastry chefs.
“There are a lot of events happening just for chefs,” he said, “but I don’t know the pastry chefs in the city. So I invited a bunch of pastry chefs, and I fed them. We had some other guests, of course — we needed to make money.”
Three of those invitees — chocolatier David Chow, chef Elia Herrera and pastry whiz Cora James — will cook alongside Fallah at the second instalment of Stranger With Candy on May 24. Fallah says the five-course menu, which will comprise four savoury courses and one sweet, came together in about half an hour. He later notes, though, that despite using the title to describe so many of his contemporaries — and in spite of his vocation — Fallah himself would prefer not to be called a “pastry chef ”: it puts him in a box, he says, when he’s so much more comfortable working outside of one.
“I’m simply someone who likes to create,” he says, “And I like to use ingredients to create. I don’t always consider myself a professional. A lot of times, when I do create a dish, I don’t taste it. It’s as surprising to me as it is to the guest. I use ingredients and I use elements to create: the same way that I would use ink or paint or a paintbrush, I use cake or ice cream or a spoon.”
Fallah later posted a photo of the wall-sized painting on Instagram, suggesting that, rather than mount it in the restaurant (“That’s too much me,” he said), he’s going to sell it. Interested? Make him an offer. He might surprise you.