Would you travel to the end of the world for the best chocolate cake ever? You may have to.
The Tavern on the Green chocolate truffle cake, which spent decades on the menu at the world-famous restaurant in Central Park, was gobbled by celebrities and royals alike, and praised in food columns around the globe. I thought it had disappeared off the map when the eatery changed hands, until I recently found out that it’s being served at one notable spot — Bennett Shellfish on South Debusy Road in Montauk.
Not surprisingly, this seemed like a good story to me. My father, Warner LeRoy, was the restauranteur who owned Tavern on the Green from the mid-70s until his death in 2001. The chocolate truffle cake was a constant during dad’s years there — and as soon as I heard that it still existed, I needed to find out the how and why.
I was greeted at Bennett Shellfish by the cheerful Kimberly Esperian, whose mom, Lola Snow, was a well-loved Montauk bastion. Esperian runs the cozy shop, with barely room for four or five customers at a time. It seemed incongruous to find the Tavern chocolate cake here, which was made by the hundreds with thousands of slices served weekly. And yet, thanks to Esperian and award-winning pastry chef Bill Bertha, there it was; chocolate curls thickly covering the top, dabs of decorative whipped cream — the whole damn thing, just as I remembered it.
“I was working at Gurney’s in the mid-’80s, and one of the chefs from the Tavern came to Gurney’s,” said Bertha. “I don’t know exactly what position he had in the restaurant there, but he did work as a pastry chef, and he said, ‘Oh Bill, I’ve got this great cake.’ I’d never seen a chocolate mousse cake like this before. I tried it. And I was like, ‘oh my God,’” he said with a laugh.
Bertha’s background before the first taste was mostly with American and German confections. “This was egg yolks, sugar, and whipped cream, and nice chocolate. It was so good. It was so French.”
Bertha and Esperian had worked with the Gurney’s kitchen for a number of years, and sold cakes wholesale, including the Tavern chocolate cake, all over the Island, in around 300 locations. “Me and Kimmy, when we were working at Gurney’s, we started the Beach Bakery and these things were flying out the door.” Esperian agreed: “They were wildly popular.”
In the early ’90s, Bertha heard that Bon Appétit magazine wanted the chocolate cake recipe. By then, the French chef who had come to Montauk with the recipe had moved on, leaving the legacy in Bertha’s hands. “I didn’t want to give it away,” he said. “I kept it; it was always one of the bigger sellers. And I kept it on the Gurney’s menu too. I called it Death by Chocolate. You needed a glass of milk or a nice cup of coffee to wash it down. That cake put me on the map,” he said.
When Gurney’s went a different route, Bertha and Esperian moved to Bennett Shellfish (Esperian is married to Clint Bennett), and picked up where they left off, but on a much smaller scale.
“I make mini versions of the cake, it’s very popular,” Bertha said, although he admitted that the cakes are not easy to make or store. “You’ve got to make sure that your cream is a little soft when you fold it in, because the cocoa powder sucks everything up. Then you need to keep it in the freezer until you’re ready to slice and serve. But it’s worth it.”
“You just need a little sliver,” added Esperian. “You really can’t eat much of that cake. It’s very decadent.” I was given my own full-sized cake to take home and enjoy.
Ever since the restaurant passed into the hands of others, I have avoided it — both visiting and even discussing it. It’s just too awkward and distressing, like watching strangers move into your childhood home. I’ve visited the street sign on the corner of 67th Street, which was renamed Warner LeRoy Place, but have barely cast a glance toward the restaurant which no longer bears my dad’s flair for the flamboyant.
So I didn’t really know what to expect when I popped a bit of this luscious dessert in my mouth. Would I cry like a baby?
I brought my cake home from Bennett Shellfish. I waited patiently for it to defrost (okay, not so patiently). I sliced off a piece and plopped it on a dish. It felt somehow ceremonial, so rather than eat in my normal fashion (hovering over the kitchen counter) I took my plate to the dining table, cleared a spot by moving things that had no earthly business being on a dining table, and sat down.
That first bite.
The creamy, the bitter, the sweet, the pure chocolate-iness of it. It had an instant “madeleine de Proust” effect. Suddenly I was in the Crystal Room at Tavern in its heyday. The carpet, the chandeliers, the birthday balloons, the fresh flowers, the chink-chink of glittering glassware warmed by the humanity of thousands of fingers, the sounds of Louis Armstrong piped through the speakers, interspersed with tidbits of eager chatter.
But it was more than that. It was the taste of belonging, of family, of the feeling of inclusivity that Tavern always tried to impart to its guests.
Kelly Alexander, writing about Tavern on the Green for NPR in 2009 had this to say: “I ate at Le Cirque both when I was known as a food writer and when I was anonymous; the experiences were quite different.
“Tavern on the Green was never like that. It had a longstanding reputation as a tourist trap, but rather than be embarrassed by that designation, it flaunted it. Rather than a private reservations line, the restaurant had six full-time telephone operators to field the approximately 4000 weekly calls. That was to make sure that, yes, just anyone could get in. It was New York for the rest of us, and New York for non-New Yorkers.
“I ate at Tavern on the Green when I was known as a food writer and when I was anonymous, and it was exactly the same.
“The restaurant seemed to believe it was too big, too famous, and too much fun to leave anyone out.”
I wanted to dive deeper into the history of this cake. I reached out to Bill Yosses, the former head pastry chef at Tavern who went on to be executive pastry chef at the White House under George W. and Laura Bush, and then for the Obama family. He now works with Dan Barber at the esteemed Blue Hill at Stone Barns farm and restaurant in Tarrytown.
Yosses recalled making the chocolate cake when he was in the kitchen at Tavern, and he agreed that it was labor-intensive. “The ingredients that were used were high quality,” he said. “We were buying Valrhona chocolate. I mean, it wasn’t like Hershey or something that was commercial grade. It was really artisanal chocolate. And we made hundreds of them.” He estimated that Tavern, at its busiest times, would serve between 70,000 and 80,000 guests a month. “And a lot of them ordered that cake,” he added.
He also remembered catering a birthday party at The Dakota, at my father and stepmother’s apartment, and making the chocolate truffle cake at that party for guests like Pierre Franey, Craig Claiborne, Lauren Bacall, and Joan Rivers. “I made a huge version of it,” he said. “Lots of tiers, like a wedding cake. I put pastel colored chocolate polka dots on the outside of the cake. Unfortunately, we didn’t have iPhones then, or I would have a photo, but I’ll never forget that night or that apartment.”
Before we signed off, Yosses suddenly thought of the chef who may have been responsible for the cake — “I wonder if that recipe was Dieter’s. Dieter Schorner, you remember him?”
I kind of did, and looked him up. Schorner died in 2020, and his obituary in The Washington Post had this to say: “He worked at upscale New York establishments including Le Chantilly, L’Etoile, and Tavern on the Green. In 1986, when Tavern’s flamboyant owner Warner LeRoy opened the opulent Potomac restaurant in Washington, he brought Mr. Schorner with him.
“The extravagantly chandeliered Potomac operated for only a year, but it made a splashy mark on Washington’s restaurant scene. Washington Post restaurant critic Phyllis C. Richman called it the city’s ‘biggest, glitziest and most expensive restaurant ever.’ When it shuttered in 1987 . . . she lamented the loss of Mr. Schorner’s sweets.”
To get the full story and to bring it home — in a very real way — I asked my stepmom, Kay LeRoy, who was always involved in the menus and even more specifically the desserts, what she remembered about the chocolate truffle cake at Tavern.
“You’re talking to someone who could eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” she said with a laugh. “That cake was incredible because of the ingredients. That Valrhona chocolate, artisanal chocolate, would come to the restaurant in this enormous slab. No one was doing that back then, at least not on that scale,” she added.
Bill Yosses waxed philosophical about chocolate cake. “There’s so many varieties and so many places, it has become the iconic dessert,” he said. “And the secret is that the ones that always stay in people’s minds are, to me, the lightest ones. They’re not heavy layers of chocolate. They’re a light genoise, usually what we would call a whipped ganache, which is a very light filling. And in the case of Tavern, those curls, which are really just all air. It looks great, but it’s all air.”
The Tavern on the Green chocolate truffle cake can be purchased at Bennett Shellfish.
