“I’m into taking breakfast pastries and turning them into desserts,” said Jenna Katsaros, the new pastry chef at Nick’s Cove Restaurant, on Tuesday evening. “Right now I’m really into doughnuts.” For the past two months, Ms. Katsaros, a Santa Rosa resident who studied at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, has been serving house-made doughnut bread pudding as one of four dessert choices, decadently drizzled with both an orange sauce and a coffee caramel sauce. Now she’s working on a new dessert, for when the strawberries the restaurant grows in its garden across the street ripen. It’s a play on strawberry shortcake; she will replace angel food cake with a doughnut split in half and filled, sandwich style, with strawberry compote macerated in vanilla beans and crème fraiche. Aside from Ms. Katsaros’s predilection for doughnuts, she’s also playing around with buffalo milk from Andrew Zlot’s dairy and creamery north of Tomales, potentially for a trio of flavored panna cottas. For the next week or two, some of her first desserts are still on the menu; those include a meyer lemon cheesecake served in a half-pint mason jar; a pecan tart topped with bacon crumbs and buffalo gelato; and a porter chocolate cake decorated with cherries and porter ganache. (The pecan tart will soon be switched with a peanut butter concoction, and the bread pudding with the shortcake.) Her confectionary philosophy, she said, is to incorporate as many textures as she can; the lemon dessert, for instance, layers creamy cheesecake with tart lemon curd and soft crumbly vanilla wafers. The porter cake combines the dense, dark, bitter crumb with airy whipped cream and an understated cherry sauce. “It creates a composed plate,” Ms. Katsaros said, “to have different textures.” Nick’s Cove is open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., at 23240 Highway 1, in Marshall.
Nick’s Cove welcomes new dessert chef
