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What’s the criteria for something that goes in the Platine case?

I guess our thing is a sophisticated twist on old favorites. That’s kind of my tag line, so it’s got to be high quality, it’s got to be made with care, by hand, it’s got to be a little whimsical and a little bit different than the ordinary. Also, I like everything small, nothing huge. We have some tarts that are about five inches that are meant to be eaten with a fork, not with your fingers, but most of the stuff we sell is definitely small, so you can have a lot of a little things. You can have three or four cookies and not feel bad. You can have cheesecake and pot de crème and not feel bad. It’s fun to play around.

Where do the savory offerings fit with what you’re doing?

The savory offerings have gotten a lot smaller. The sweets have gone up and the savory has gone down, so we haven’t done much savory lately. I did the personal chef work and some catering, and we used to do sandwiches, but we don’t do sandwiches anymore. But my thing about savory – I was thinking about this yesterday, actually – I’m trained in both sweet and savory, which most pastry chefs aren’t. I think that my training in savory has a big effect on how I bake. Like a lot of stuff has salt in it. Like our snacky cookies, there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of technique that I understand from cooking savory. We don’t sell that much savory stuff anymore.

You have a bacon pancake offering?

It’s our short stack, so it’s mini pancakes, and they’re soaked in a maple-orange juice emulsion, and then it’s candied bacon, and then bacon candy. It’s on the spring menu, so it’s only on the menu for another month.

What was your approach behind that?

I had always wanted to do a French toast kind of thing, and I was thinking about the French toast and how we could sell that. Then there’s this chocolate bar – Vosges chocolate – you know how she makes that chocolate with bacon? I had that, five years ago, and it was so good. I was like, “How can we use it? How can I do this?” Over a couple nights or a couple weeks, I thought, “How can I use all these things together and make something that we can sell in the store?” It became the short stack.

What’s the most recent dessert you developed?

Definitely the strawberry rhubarb crisp…We had a strawberry rhubarb tart that we did last year, but the strawberry rhubarb crisp we just kind of thought about in the past two weeks. We have these little cups. It comes in the same kind of cups because I wanted to do something with strawberry and rhubarb that people could take to go, but not so big, something kind of small and easy. The rhubarb is kind of elusive, especially here in L.A. it’s hard to find rhubarb, so it’s kind of a fun thing to mess around with.

Is there any single thing that you can’t imagine offering anymore?

There’s a couple, but I would definitely say the brown butter-dark chocolate-smoked salt cookie. That also was sort of a fluke. I had thought about using brown butter because we use that a lot in cooking. I thought, “How can we use brown butter?” I had seen a recipe online for a brown butter cookie, and I kind of looked at that and thought, “How can we make this ours?” We tried it with a bunch of different things and messed around with it for a little while, and it was good with the dark chocolate and brown butter. I thought, “This is good, but it needs something else.” We use salt a lot, and had a bunch of these different samples of these cool salts. We have the black salt that we use on pot de crèmes and we have fleur de sel that’s in the camays, and we had this little container of smoked salt, and I was kind of like, “Let’s try it,” stuck it on there and it totally worked. It’s become one of our most popular cookies. I thought this will be a seasonal item that we’ll just have on the menu – play around with it – but people come in for it.

CLICK HERE TO FIND CANTOR’S RECIPE FOR STRAWBERRY RHUBARB CRISP