I had an odd realization recently. In the gone-in-a-blink, two-plus decades I’ve been reviewing restaurants, across four cities and for a while the whole country, there is exactly one chef whose food I’ve been in the proximity to write about consistently over the last 20 years: Shannon Swindle, the pastry maestro at Funke in Beverly Hills and Felix in Venice.
How a brilliant pastry chef evolves over the decades
This dawned on me recently at Funke, peering at Swindle’s latest variation of meringata, an Italian meringue cake often layered with semifreddo that he completely reimagined. His is a base layer of crème fraiche panna cotta, spread over an oval dish, overlaid with seasonal fruit (right now it’s a textured, sophisticated slush of passion fruit granita) and topped with star-shaped vanilla meringues, some marshmallow-chewy and others shatteringly crisp.
It’s easily one of the best desserts in Los Angeles, and Swindle is one of our finest pastry chefs in California, arguably the country. He has an unerring sense of what is delicious and satisfying at a meal’s end.
Funke pastry chef Shannon Swindle prepares olive oil cake with citrus and candied fennel at The L.A. Times Test Kitchen.
(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles T)
When I think about the arcs of his career as I’ve followed it, I feel an absence too. The joy we reap from the skills of such gifted souls continues to disappear from menus. Locally and nationally, pastry chefs are deemed ever more expendable as the costs of running restaurants skyrocket.
Now I’m wondering: Were the 2000s the peak moment of national restaurant-dessert excellence, by quality and by the number of gainfully employed pastry chefs? I’ll need to gather more evidence. But in 2006, Swindle and I were both in Dallas.
He grew up in nearby Richardson, a northern Texas suburb, and after graduating college and working at restaurants in Austin, he returned to Dallas and worked for local greats such as Stephan Pyles before landing the pastry chef role at the Dallas extension of Tom Colicchio’s Craft. Colicchio was riding a career high. “Top Chef” debuted that year, and the Dallas Craft opened shortly before the Los Angeles location. The early menu structure was fascinating, with ingredients categorized by their preparation, centered around meats and vegetables organized by their preparation (roasted, braised, sautéed) and meant to be mixed and matched a la carte.
The approach required unusual decision-making investments from the diner, which could be fun, but also could lead to a shockingly expensive meal, which practically every critic reviewing Craft anywhere made a point to mention — including me, writing then at the Dallas Morning News.
Right away, though, I adored Swindle’s style. He’d absorbed the Craft ethos by looking at desserts in the broadly “Americana” idiom: cakes, pies and tarts, cobblers and crisps, ice cream and its frosty cousins. He maintained their essential form but had his own way of reshaping their intensity. Spicier, denser, sharper, creamier.
Torta di ricotta with sour cherries and cherry-almond sorbetto, created by pastry chef Shannon Swindle at Funke.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I could order his piercingly gingery, stout beer-malted gingerbread; team it with roasted pears to accentuate the richness, or a compote of citrus and passion fruit to go the acidic-contrast route instead; and round out a trio with high-octane vanilla ice cream. Or, in colder months, pair his coffee-laced chocolate cake with roasted, complexly sweet Manzano banana speckled with vanilla beans.
Their impressiveness came from their straightforwardness, their precision and generosity of flavor, without needless curlicues or misguided deconstruction.
In 2009, I moved back to Atlanta, where I had started my writing career, and Craft Atlanta had just opened. Swindle was the consulting pastry chef, so his chocolate cake came east, as did newer creations such as a pine nut tart, its shell all crackle and butter, with a pitch-perfect side of cardamom ice milk.
Swindle moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to take up professional residence in the Century City Craft kitchens. I had one meal there during his tenure, really just for dessert. It was June 2016. The abundance of Southern California had clearly gripped the man. The company-wide Craft tenet grew to favor more composed courses, sweets included. In L.A., one could also browse a list of a dozen fruits, from the last of the season’s blood oranges to the earliest peaches and honeyloupe melon, served individually or as an assortment.
I asked for a side of lush, roasted apricots alongside his cherry pie — there was the buttery mastery of crust, now with next-level fruit — and fluffy sourdough corn cakes with peaches, blueberries and blueberry-buttermilk ice cream. I loved being able to trace the Texas-to-Los-Angeles passage in Swindle’s creations.
After a dozen years, in December 2018, Swindle left Craft. He took a beat to recharge, traveled, volunteered his time for numerous fundraiser bake sales and had been working for the Lucques Group when the pandemic changed the world.
I remember blinking in surprise in late 2021, when I spied Swindle among the front-of-house staff at Felix. Soon, though, he was back in the kitchen, leading pastry teams for Evan Funke.
Maritozzo from pastry chef Shannon Swindle at Mother Wolf.
(Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
The most Instagram-shared pastry Swindle likely ever will introduce was his maritozzo at Funke’s Roman palazzo Mother Wolf in 2022. You might remember the fluffy sweet bun filled with cream in a shape that resembled Pac-Man with his mouth full. His version hid a surprise: a pocket of ripe, macerated strawberries from Harry’s Berries that lightened the whole affair. I was on vacation in Sicily the month after my Mother Wolf review ran, and I scarfed down a maritozzo at a renowned bakery in Trapani, feeling a little guilty that I thought Swindle’s rendering was superior.
Funke in Beverly Hills opened a year later. Among cream-filled bombolini and a riff on cannoli with Sicilian pistachios and local cherries, the first meringata paired tangerine granita with candied fennel, a vegetable both he and Funke favor. (Last year Swindle shared his recipes for olive oil cake and candied fennel with The Times.) The Beverly Hills restaurant, for all its three-story glamour, doesn’t have a corresponding amount of kitchen space, so Funke rented Swindle a commissary kitchen in a former Lette Macarons factory, where he and his crew bake breads for Funke and Felix, and make the dessert components that are plated right before serving.
When I asked Swindle in a phone interview last week how he feels his style has evolved, and whether he adapts his style of dessert to the savory cuisine of the chef he’s working for, he mentioned that Colicchio gave him carte blanche, and that Funke gives him an equally supportive collaboration.
“The desserts are rooted in Italy,” Swindle said, “but it isn’t a country where you find composed plates. We had to agree at the beginning that, even though Evan is all about Italian tradition, we’re breaking the rules and these are not strictly Italian desserts. Americans don’t want that.”
Shannon Swindle’s meringata variation with Harry’s Berries strawberries.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Funke, as a whole, keeps fine-tuning in both the savory and sweet realms. It’s become the marquee Italian fine-dining experience in L.A. But here’s a tip: If you want to home in specifically on Swindle’s splendors — to discover or remember why he’s one of our greats — show up solo and ask for a seat at the mezzanine counter, or reserve some seats on the third-level bar. Throw in a scoop of vanilla gelato with Mexican vanilla beans. It reminds me of the smooth, floral ice cream he made in Dallas all those years ago.
Review: A dazzling fine dining debut
Continuing on the subject of dessert, I’ll include some details I left out of my review last week of dazzling new Lielle. Marcus Jernmark, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner, has a kitchen full of talents, but for his California-Scandinavian four-course menu, he doesn’t specifically employ a pastry chef.
“I’m doing all the desserts, and it’s something I’ve always done,” he said in an interview. “I probably spend more time working on pastry than any other recipe development. There are so many variables and intricacies.”
Since the restaurant opened in February, its final course has had two parts. One is something sweet and sharp, like Harry’s Berries strawberries with elderflower granita, tangy ice cream made from sake lees and finished with ultra-fragrant lemon verbena, or a play on tres leches with salted-milk ice cream and anise hyssop mousse. The other is a golden circle of pull-apart cardamom buns, soaked in a concoction riffing on Swedish punsch steeped in rum, apricots and spices.
Chef Marcus Jernmark at his Lielle, a new crown jewel in Los Angeles dining.
(Catherine Dzilenski / For The Times)
I hope the cardamom buns never disappear, but Jernmark hinted at the fall-themed dessert coming to the menu in October: tarte tatin made with apples cured in lavender, served with pistachio gelato and elements involving fig leaf oil and verjus caramel.
It sounds very in line with the balance and brilliance that has made Lielle one of the most exciting fine-dining debuts in L.A. in recent memory.
Also …
- Speaking of Jernmark: Stephanie Breijo reports on the opening of his second restaurant, a bistro called Marée, in the space on West Pico Boulevard above Lielle. Get the saucy, peppery burger.
- Jenn Harris details the sad closure last week of Monarch Donuts in Arcadia, where Jonathan Ung made L.A.’s best apple fritter.
- Nava Rawls has a fantastic story about Freedom Farms Collective, an organization investing in local urban gardens and youth training programs to create economic empowerment and increase access to fresh, culturally rooted produce in Black and brown communities across L.A. County.
- Cody Reiss teaches us the secrets to cooking with a stainless steel pan. (Hint: It involves “Terminator 2.”)
- In Daniel Hernandez’s debut L.A. Omnivore newsletter, he dives into the dubious (and likely here-to-stay) world of freaky “A.I. slop menus.”
- And don’t forget to get your tickets to this year’s reveal party and tasting for the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles on Oct. 23 and our Food Bowl festival on Oct. 24 with tastings, chef demos and cookbook signings.
