Chocolates à la Carte

Alain Roby: A Sugar Artist

Some people might be tempted to call Alain Roby a cubist, imagining him in a room full of sugar cubes, creating elaborate designs, teetering towers, skyscrapers and such.

Indeed, Roby is a sculptor and his medium is sugar. But Roby's seamless designs will make you forget there was ever such a simple structure as a sugar cube. The designs of this top U.S. pastry chef are - in a word - sleek- marble fountains, swans and sugar clouds, among other innovative feats.

One of Roby's most notable endeavors was the centerpiece he created for the recent NFL commissioner's annual Super Bowl dinner: a green marble fountain coupled with a chocolate Greek goddess made by Chocolates à la Carte.

This stunning piece played to the crowds, taking center stage on a total of 80 tables, captivating the 5,000 guests who attended the event this year at the San Diego Convention Center.

The guests equally impressed by Roby's 50-foot dessert table display with six sugar centerpieces .The display showcased a peaceful ocean scene with three life-sized blown sugar dolphins jumping, two large swans, two parrots on a perch, a fisherman fishing and a five-foot high sugar cloud in the sky. An enterprising masterpiece, Roby was praised by his colleagues, the Hyatt team preparing the dinner, including Corporate Executive Chef Janos Kiss.

Sugar: A powerful Medium

As if Oz behind the curtain, Roby regularly creates sugar sensations at the flagship 2,100 room Hyatt Regency Chicago where he is the executive pastry chef. He makes small sugar sculptures for plated desserts and amenities. Sometimes he combines sugar with chocolate for large sculptures like his life-sized Cleopatra in which the body was chocolate and the dress and jewelry were in decorative sugar.

Roby, 42 manages a 24-hour bake shop with 13 employees and two sous chefs at the Hyatt. He is responsible for the hotel's seven restaurants and for creating unique desserts for banquets of 10 to 5,000 people. In Roby's spare time (as if he had any) he runs the Sugar Artistry School in Chicago where he trains other pastry chefs in sugar. Sugar, he preaches, is a powerful art form.

On Chocolate

Roby knows that people love chocolate and "you can't go wrong with it." Yet, there can be too much chcolate and there must always be a balance with other flavors.

He likes to combine chocolate with such flavors as raspberry, apricot, coffee, hazelnut, kumquat and strawberry. His favorite chocolate mousse truffle cake that he has developed.

Roby has worked with Chocolates à la Carte for almost 10 years and he really likes using the company's unique products for banquets and amenities. "I use a lot of their products and the company really helps me out all the time," he says.

Philosophy on Desserts

Roby firmly believes that taste is most important with desserts. "Taste, like color, has to be mixed right or you end up with something unappealing," he says. He likes create simple desserts that are clean and elegant.

One of his current favorite desserts is a "Creme Brulee Tower" that has stacked layers of phyllos dough and chocolate or praline creme between layers of phyllo dough is simply dusted with powder sugar. It is dramatically presented on a large black plate with an orange mango sauce, fresh mint and raspberry garnish.

A Sugar Calling

Roby, from the Alsace region of France, studied to be a notary public. At the age of 18, he made a change in career direction and decided to train as a pastry chef as a result of cooking with his grandmother.

He was accepted as an apprentice at the world-famous "Lenotre" pastry facility in Paris. After three years, he received his CAP (professional) degree in pastry arts and graduated at the top of his class. In fact, he was so good that he was selected to continue working at Lenotre with four master pastry chefs in the special projects "decorator" room. Where the finest chocolate and sugar work was done for the elite state dinners of France. He discovered right away that he had a special calling for sugar work.

After Roby's compulsory military service, he began his world travels which eventually landed him pastry positions at prestigious hotels in Sri Lanka, London, Tokyo and New York.

Ten years ago Roby moved to Chicago where he lives with his wife and two sons, ages 4 and 6. Today Roby is a certified master chef of pastry & sugar artistry, and he has won more than 18 prestigious culinary awards.

Roby continues to create eye-catching sugar sculptures that will inspire a double-take--clever designs that could be displayed in fine art museums. He has a sweet life, Roby says he lives by his father's adage, "If you do something for a living you enjoy, you'll never work a day in your life."