Campton Place
340 Stockton Street,
San Francisco, California 94108,
U.S.A.
Tel No. :  1 (415) 781-5555
Fax No. : 1 (415) 955-5536
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Boris Portnoy likes to playwith his food.

“For me, it’s not enough for people to eat it,” says the Campton Place pastry chef. “I need interaction with whoever’s eating it. I like to evoke an emotion.”

That is exactly what I was looking for when I went in search of the city’s best pastry chef – someone to engage my intellect and make me shiver with giddy pleasure. I started with the usual suspects. Tartine was good, if a bit boring; Rubicon was clearly resting on long-gone laurels. But at Campton Place, Portnoy serenaded me with six sweet courses that veered from subtle to brazen, with nary a trite flavor combination among them. I was transfixed and transported.

In person, Portnoy is as disarming and romantic as his desserts. Blame it on the slight lilt in his speech (he was born in Moscow, raised in Brooklyn) or on his ever-present laugh. How did he go from peeling potatoes for pommes Anna to pairing heady rosé mead sorbet with wisps of fig carpaccio and fresh cilantro? Blame that on his inquisitive nature.

Portnoy started cooking classic French cuisine eight years ago at Philadelphia’s Deux Cheminées where chef Fritz Blank, a onetime microbiologist, piqued his interest in food chemistry. He left for Salt to cook modern food with clean flavors alongside chef Vernon Morales. Then he staged at Mugaritz in the mountains outside San Sebastian, a city many consider to be the capital of Spain’s cutting-edge alta cocina. There, Portnoy started to question the rules.

“It freed me from thinking you have to make a sabayon with egg yolk,” the young chef explains. “What if I make it with egg white? It’s going to give me a different texture. That’s really cool.”

When Portnoy returned home, it was to be the opening pastry chef – his first pastry position – at Cru in New York. Eventually, he reunited with Morales at the now shuttered Winterland before joining Campton Place this May.

Portnoy’s creations are elegant and playful, and they betray a curiosity about what makes dessert, dessert. “I treat a piece of cake like it’s a medium-rare steak,” he explains. “It’s crispy outside. The middle is warm and moist. I think of it as the continuation of the meal.”

Why is Portnoy my pick for Best Pastry Chef? Because he cleverly riffs on childhood snacks by wrapping celery confit “ravioli” around earthy raisin pâté de fruit and serving it with lush Concord grape sorbet. Because he teases the taste buds by juxtaposing buttery chocolate sponge cake with tandoori-spiced “paper” and an herbaceous lime marshmallow. Because he ends the meal with a wink, serving “coffee” in the guise of bitter chicory cake wrapped in milk skin with coffee mousse and cookies. Because with every bite, he makes me swoon.

Q&A with NorthsideSan Francisco Best Pastry Chef Boris Portnoy
Born: Moscow, RussiaRestaurant: Campton Place

When did you know you wanted to be a chef?
Always. As long as I can remember. My parents were terrible cooks. They bought me a cookbook and I started to cook by pictures. I would make dinner for my parents. In Russia, our vacation was going camping – foraging, canning. Food was always on my mind.

Why desserts?
What attracted me to pastry was the mathematical detail. Precision is needed much more in pastry. What did you learn from working in Spain? What I learned is there is no right or wrong way, as long as the end point is what’s desired. There’s no dogma. You start thinking for yourself.

What’s one of your favorite ingredients?
Spice. It’s such a bendable ingredient. You can interpret it so many ways. Cardamom, black caraway, sesame, curry – you can really take a spice anywhere you want to. It’s like the violin section of the dessert.

What do you do when you’re not cooking?
I ride mopeds. Not scooters, not motorcycles – mopeds. Just wheels on an engine. My friends and I hang out and we tinker, try to figure out how to make our mopeds go faster. You go 45 miles per hour tops. If you’re going 2 m.p.h. faster than the other guy, you’re going fast.