Partners in cream offer 'Bananas Over Baleen'

BY JARED ZWERLING

Grove Isle's Baleen Restaurant is going bananas.

Not only are there monkey statuettes hanging over the restaurant chandeliers, but everyone is simply bananas over Baleen, which just happens to be the name of one of the new edible-art desserts created by pastry chefs Estella Perez and Jennifer Margolin.

For the record, Bananas Over Baleen consists of moist banana bread with a banana ice cream cover and a semi-sweet chocolate shell, served with chocolate-covered frozen bananas and a chunky pineapple sauce.

If your mouth is watering right now, you'll be drooling by the time you reach the end of this article.

Since Baleen's new dessert menu was released to the public on July 25, Perez and Margolin have been overwhelming all customers, from their dessert guinea pigs to sweetness aficionados, with lip-licking last impressions of the restaurant.

Offering delights such as the Chocolate Hangover, these innovative taste bud twisters have sugarholics begging for seconds. This powerful pastry is a tower of dark chocolate and milk chocolate mousse, with a dark chocolate truffle holding a caramel center, served with homemade chocolate sorbet on a hard chocolate sauce.

Since their transition from pastry cooks to chefs last September, Perez and Margolin have been given the opportunity to "run with it." Now, with the addition of their dessert menu, they have created a few patented pastries and made a name for themselves under the umbrella of Robbin Haas, Baleen's corporate chef.

"Our desserts are real catchy with their names," said Perez, a Coral Gables resident. "The Bananas Over Baleen is my particular favorite."

"I love the Bananas Over Baleen and the Chocolate Hangover because they both have a lot of chocolate," said Margolin, who calls Miami Beach home.

"To me, chocolate should be its own food group. We add a touch of it to just about every dessert."

Before the pair teamed up to mix sweet ingredients, they considered including some themes in their desserts, such as the summer season for lighter and fresher tastes, something for everyone, and ethnicity to satisfy cultural taste preferences. Once proposals were on paper, 10 pastries were on plates, including Estella and Jenn's Featured Sweet of the Day.

Just like the Monkey Love Banana Split, Baleen's signature dessert for two, Perez and Margolin's relationship holds no sour taste buds. Besides being colleagues 12 hours a day and six days a week, they are the closest of friends. Each is 24 years old and they were born just two weeks apart. Both graduated from Johnson and Wales University.

The Monkey Love Banana Split, by the way, is a tasty twosome of twin layers of a large thin crispy cookie filled with three different ice cream flavors, topped with rum bananas, pineapple, strawberries, fudge, whipped cream and toffee sauce!

"We get along really well," said Perez. "It was like a stroke of luck working here together because we're two peas in a pod who see eye-to-eye in our desserts and friendship."

"We have a great, great thing going here," said Margolin. "Our desserts are made with a lot of love and that has a lot to do with the chemistry of our friendship."

Perez and Margolin say they hope their new dessert menu spreads the name of the restaurant to the community and influences people to come to Baleen, specifically to have dessert, but also for good conversation and a memorable dining experience.

"We want to make memories with our desserts," said Margolin. "Since a meal always ends with dessert, we want people to come away with a sweet last impression."

For more information about Baleen Restaurant, please call 305-857-5007.

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