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Taste this!
The News & Observer
Taste this!
by Greg Cox
I hope you'll indulge me in a little rule-breaking this week. You see, my self-imposed rule for this column is that I single out one particularly memorable dish I've had somewhere in the Triangle and tell you about it in lavish detail. But when it comes to Hereghty Heavenly Delicious, an elegant little patisserie and cafe on Glenwood Avenue, I find it impossible to narrow my narrative down to just one pastry.
Believe me, I've tried. I was going to tell you about an extraordinary rice tart I had the first time I visited the shop, not long after it opened in the spring of 2005. I intended to describe how the grains of rice were cooked to silken tenderness in sweetened milk and enriched with a rum pastry cream, and how their texture played beautifully against the delicate crunch of an almond tart shell. I would briefly explain that Hereghty is run by Swiss-trained pastry chef Chris Hereghty and brother Brian. If follow-up visits confirmed my initial experience, I'd note that Hereghty's creations are on a par with some of the best I've had in Paris (an assessment that was recently confirmed when Chris Hereghty was invited to cook at the James Beard House in New York -- an honor even more rare for a pastry chef than it is for an executive chef).
To give you an idea of the breadth of the offering, I'd tell you that Chris Hereghty is partial to his pasta di mandorla (almond paste cookies with kirsch buttercream, dipped in chocolate); Brian's favorite is his brother's Normandy cake (vanilla mousse, almond dacquoise, and caramel mousse with poached pears); and that the best seller is the flourless chocolate chewy cookie. But for my money, I'd conclude, you couldn't do better than the rice tart.
Alas, when I returned for a follow-up visit, the rice tart was no longer available. To console myself, I ordered the Nice cake (named for the city on the French Riviera, featuring an ethereally light lemon sponge cake, vanilla mousse, fresh raspberries, peaches and pears). And I discovered that I had a new favorite.
The next time, I couldn't resist the temptation of a passion fruit tart that beckoned to me through the sparkling glass of Hereghty's display case. The time after, it was a chocolate caramel tart, and the time after that, a raspberry mille feuille. Each time, I came away convinced that I had finally discovered the single pastry I could write about in my Taste This! column. And every time I returned, I couldn't resist the siren call of some new, yet-to-be-explored confection. In short, as I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I haven't yet been able to summon the willpower to order the same thing twice.
But that could change soon. Turns out the rice tart is a seasonal specialty, usually offered around Easter time.
Correspondent: Greg Cox
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