Aisha Momaney Makes Pastry Essential

When you went to culinary school, did you already know that you wanted to get into pastry? 

I had dropped out of college for graphic design, and I was cooking a lot for myself—actually more savory than pastry. But when I was considering culinary school, I was thinking, do I see myself being happy, fabricating lobster and cutting meat for hours every day? Absolutely not. For that reason, pastry was the way to go because I would actually enjoy 99% of what I would be doing. 

So a shorter runway to get to where you wanted to be? 

I think so. Or just more in terms of general happiness. So that it wouldn’t be like, here’s a task that I absolutely hate that I have to deal with. I was trying to get away from that. When I told the advisors at culinary school, they said, “Well, you have an art background. It’s a very natural choice for you to want to do pastry.” 

Is that is that something you’ve found to be true, working with others in pastry—lots of people from art backgrounds? 

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that there’s quite a lot of art or design backgrounds among people that pursue pastry especially, but even in culinary careers in general. Such people have a creative flair. 

You departed Michael White’s Vaucluse restaurant in New York pretty early in the pandemic, not long before it ended up shutting down permanently. 

I left in January 2020. I kind of used COVID as my catalyst to leave without a whole lot of backlash. It was right before COVID was really starting to happen in the US. We were seeing it on the news, and I had a feeling  it was going to get bad. I was being made fun of for thinking that at the time.

But I had been wanting to leave New York anyway—I had been there for ten years at that point. I was just over it. 

If I’m being completely honest, Vaucluse was not doing well. It was in a weird area on the Upper East Side—super-residential up there, and people in the summer always leave. I think they were probably glad to have a reason to close and have it be dignified. 

Was there anything specific about working in New York that you were tired of? What prompted the desire for a change? 

New York is just such a big pond. If you aren’t doing something like Natasha Picowicz and her Planned Parenthood bake sales, or making a cronut that people treat like a destination—then it’s really hard to be noteworthy for what you’re doing. 

I was also at odds with the managing director of Altamarea Group because he was constantly demanding people die on the cross for the restaurant. That’s not really sustainable. It got old after a while—the feeling that you can’t ever have a work-life balance. 

Have you experienced restaurant owners and managers giving ground on work-life balance for staff these days? The lack of such balance is long-running cliche in the industry.

Yeah, and I’m against that. Everyone who works for me, I do not want you to be afraid to ask for time off. I don’t want you to be afraid to tell me if you got shit going on with your family. I’m so tired of that unsustainable thing where people are killing themselves and are not healthy. I don’t agree with it, and I’m not here for it. 

I hear restaurant people say things like that all the time, but I wonder if a lot of it is just talk. Are you seeing it for real?

It has to be put into actuality because now, post-pandemic, people are like, “I’m not doing that anymore.” And I can’t really blame them. A ten-hour day is pretty standard in the restaurant industry. And it’s not like that’s a really long day. But it’s becoming a little more difficult to find people that are willing to do that, even in a more sustainable way. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the spine of the industry is being reexamined. 

I will also say that those who do show up, and really show up, are amazing people that really care about what they’re doing. The people that have stuck with this industry through the pandemic are really passionate. It’s a beautiful thing that we all survived this thing together. And now we can live in this post-pandemic restaurant world where maybe things are a little more sustainable. 

When you decided to leave New York, what made you pick Washington DC for your new home?

I moved to DC because it felt like another kind of food place, another food-heavy city. I had heard good things about DC, and it felt like a smaller pond. I get made fun of all the time for saying that DC feels like a small town, since I’m from Vermont. But it does feel smaller after New York City. 

I moved down here originally to work at the Dabney, which is a Michelin-starred restaurant, but the kitchen style there is extremely old school. It was miserable. So I was like, this is not working for me. I’m going to jump off a building. 

That’s not good. How long did you stay there? 

I worked there for about six months. And then I was like, I can’t do this. I can’t work 20-hour days. I found out that Matt Baker was looking for a pastry chef for Gravitas, which also is Michelin-starred. When I had my interview with him, he mentioned that he was in the beginning stages of forming a restaurant group, and he said, “I don’t know if I need to be looking for more than one pastry chef, or if one person could do this.” And I said, “Oh, one person could do this. I’ll do it.” 

Is the work culture there more your speed?

Yeah, absolutely. I had a big problem with the management style at the Dabney—the owner wanted to to be unapproachable. He wanted to be hard to talk to. And I don’t think that’s the right way to run a business. I understand as a manager or owner, you might have a lot going on, and you need your bandwidth conserved. But you can’t be like, “You can’t talk to me. You have to request to approach me.” I just don’t believe in that. 

I love the environment at Gravitas. I love the people I work with. It’s very much like we are growing something. We’ve become a pretty tight-knit crew, and I really love being a part of that. 

Getting in this early leaves you with a lot of open territory to explore. 

Yeah, absolutely. We’re growing this thing, and sometimes there are harder challenges to overcome. But at the end of the day, when we overcome them and figure things out, it’s pretty cool. 

Have you worked at other restaurants that were relatively new, like Gravitas? How were they similar or different?

I worked at Danny Meyer’s North End Grill back in 2012, so that was a very new restaurant. I actually started at Vaucluse when it was only four months old. So I’ve been in very new restaurants, but I’ve never been involved in a new restaurant where it felt like it was going to be very well established. Even working with Union Square Hospitality Group or Altamarea Group, you get these identity crises, and there is none of that here. That’s a big red flag for me. 

What does a restaurant identity crisis look like to you? 

It’s like suddenly, everyone’s saying, “Oh, this isn’t it, this is not working. We have to do something different.” An example at Vaucluse—we had two different dining rooms. One was upstairs and one was downstairs. And after the first couple of years, we turned the upstairs dining room into this weird dance party supper club thing. This is a fine-dining French restaurant. Why is there a nightclub? It’s so weird. Why are we doing that? I couldn’t wait to get out of there because it was a fucking train wreck. 

Some time ago in the pandemic, I interviewed Jessica Craig, pastry chef at High Street on Hudson. She had a lot to say about how pastry is the first thing cut down or outsourced when a restaurant experiences tougher times, and how that made her feel that her work was not always appreciated or valued.

Sometimes those decisions are out of your control. But it was kind of crazy when even Natasha Picowicz got laid off during the pandemic, and she was a huge part of Flora Bar and Altro Paradiso. Everybody had a “holy shit” moment with that because she was so esteemed. The way to avoid that is to be indispensable, I guess. But someone made a joke to my boss at Gravitas about that. We were buying equipment for pastry, and I heard that this person said, “Well, pastry chefs are the first ones to go!” And it’s like, okay, first of all, I have things to say to your face if I ever meet you. But that is an old industry joke, and it’s not a great feeling. 

How do you get past that, as a pastry chef? How do you make yourself and your work essential rather than expendable?

You just have to become a part of the identity of the restaurant. I’m pretty lucky in the way that Matt puts a lot of weight on having the pastry department stand out. And I’m lucky we have the Baker’s Daughter locations as well. Fresh-baked goods are a big part of our identity. It’s really as simple as that, as well as working for somebody that realizes that your chef de cuisine busting out desserts is not going to be at the same level as somebody who is trained in and passionate about dessert. 

But all I’m trying to do right now is no different than what I was doing before—really pour a ton of love and whimsy into what I’m doing, and try to remind people why they should come out. We’re doing something special, and it’s worth celebrating life, because look what just happened. We took all this for granted—going out to restaurants. 

Have you noticed any change in how guests and staff interact, in terms of hospitality evolving into more of a shared experience—rather than the more traditional dynamic of obeying every customer’s demand?

I do think people in this industry are a little bit more willing to say, okay, well, the customer’s not always right. Sometimes they need to realize we’re charging X amount because we’re being absolutely dragged through glass on butter right now, or we need to keep people employed. Something that most restaurants have started doing is protecting the house a little bit more than they were before, which is great. 

What do you imagine you’ll be doing five years from now? Is it crazy to ask that? 

I feel like any time I have five-year plan, life really has a way of being like, “That’s cute. I’m not really sure what you thought was going to work out with that. But here’s something else to do.” There’s a lot of upward and outward growth happening in this particular restaurant group. So I want to see where that goes. 

If your operation continues to grow, at what point do you have to start delegating or handling more work through staff?

This year, I hired a pastry sous chef specific to Gravitas. I think we’ll open another location, and another restaurant next year. Beyond that, we’re going have to hire  another executive pastry chef somewhere. And Dessert for Dinner, this dessert tasting menu thing—that’s definitely something I’m going to be doing more of. I want to explore that and see where I can take the concept, because it was very well-received. 

I have to ask about something on your Instagram—what’s the deal with the person on staff getting a tattoo of your messy handwriting?

That guy was actually my first hire at Gravitas. I’m famous for having the most wild handwriting, though eventually people do figure it out. I had labeled a container of tasting spoons for “PASTRY.”

He saw it on the shelf one day, and he said, “What does that say? It looks like you took a word and just sneezed it out onto a container.” And then he said, “I feel like I should get that tattooed on me somewhere, because that’s you, and that’s pastry, and that’s what we do.” And I said, “You’re not going to get that tattooed on you!” But then he did. I was super honored. I may or may not have shed a tear about that.