This rule-breaking SF pastry chef puts oysters and chicken in her desserts - and makes it work
Deirdre Balao Rieutort-Louis, who was named Best Pastry Chef as part of this year's Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area, samples a dessert at her R&D test kitchen in San Francisco. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
In 2012, when a master pastry chef at Deirdre Balao Rieutort-Louis's French cooking school asked what flavor of ice cream the class wanted to prepare, she made a bold suggestion.
"Oysters?"
The master chef approved, so Rieutort-Louis got to work shucking them for what would become a savory frozen confection flavored with shallots and wine.
Ten years later, Rieutort-Louis became executive pastry chef at Aphotic in San Francisco, a fine dining restaurant so focused on seafood that she was asked to incorporate shellfish into its dessert. She knew what to do, but this time, she took the oyster ice cream in a sweet direction, serving it on the half shell with mignonette foam. "I'm the kind of person that's just insane enough to be like, ‘Let's try it,'" she said.
At Dalida, the nationally acclaimed Mediterranean restaurant in the Presidio where Rieutort-Louis, 31, worked until late 2025, she stunned critics as a pastry chef who could bridge the sweet and savory divide in unexpected ways. A signature was her version of tavuk göğsü, an Ottoman pudding enriched with chicken that Chronicle critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan called "bewitching."
Ottoman chicken and milk pudding, a delicacy called tavuk gögsü, that Deirdre Balao Rieutort-Louis made while a pastry chef at Dalida in San Francisco. (Courtesy Isabel Baer)
Chung Fegan described Rieutort-Louis's presence in the Dalida kitchen a "game changer," leading The Chronicle to name her Best Pastry Chef as part of this year's Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area. "I just find her so wildly creative, and she has the chops to back up desserts that read like jump scares - scallop ice cream, chicken pudding," Chung Fegan said. "There's a sense of playfulness that I find really compelling."
Pastry chefs rarely get top billing in restaurants, even though they can elevate the dining experience with creations that cement the last impression of a meal. The position - predominantly held by women - is often the first one to be cut when budgets get tight, which Rieutort-Louis said discourages people from getting into that side of the industry. "It's hard to find jobs as pastry chefs, and it's hard to find people who really care about fostering the desserts."
Growing up in the Netherlands, Rieutort-Louis's French family sat down together for homemade lunches and dinners daily. They also visited relatives in Brittany in the summer for copious lobster, crab and oyster feasts - the beginning of her idea for the ice cream. By age 8, she knew she wanted to become a chef, after her parents took her and her siblings on a trip to Paris, where they had lunch at Jules Verne, a restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. Rieutort-Louis asked to meet the chef, and her fate was set.
On birthdays, Rieutort-Louis's mother took her back to Paris for cooking classes. In sixth grade, she enrolled in a food technology program, learning about recipe development and nutrition. "I was making macarons in my parents' kitchen when I was 12 years old, and I don't know how normal that is," she said.
Rieutort-Louis first made an oyster-based ice cream while an 18-year-old student at the professional pastry cooking school Lenôtre in Paris in 2012. (Courtesy Deirdre Balao Rieutort-Louis)
At 18, she attended the prestigious cooking school Lenôtre outside of Paris. "I really wanted to get all of my basic pastry knowledge in France," she said.
Not yet done with her education, in 2013, Rieutort-Louis came to the United States for a baking and pastry degree at the Culinary Institute of America in New York along with a bachelor's at Cornell University, where she learned hospitality managerial skills. Summer internships followed at restaurants including Jean Georges in New York and Spruce in San Francisco, as well as at the French presidential palace, where she helped construct pulled-sugar centerpieces for state dinners and was the only woman in a team of 20.
One of Rieutort-Louis's first jobs after graduation from Cornell was back at Spruce, where she met her husband, Vincent Balao, now the beverage director at the two-Michelin-star Kiln. She next made desserts at Restaurant Gary Danko before joining the team at Palette, a restaurant, art gallery and retail space chef Peter Hemsley opened on Folsom Street in 2019 and later transitioned to the all-seafood Aphotic.
When she began developing Aphotic's desserts and created the oyster ice cream, she decided to use a base of milk, cream and sugar thickened with pectin and ice cream stabilizer rather than egg custard for a more neutral backdrop. "Because the oyster flavor is really pure, saline and briny, you don't want eggs to detract from that and make it a flan texture or flavor," she said.
She cooked the oysters in the base, which she then blended, strained and froze. Tasting it, at first she couldn't tell if it was good or bad, savory or dessert. She soon decided it was definitely good, and definitely dessert. "It felt like it shouldn't work, but it worked," she said.
Oyster ice cream created by Deirdre Balao Rieutort-Louis while she was a pastry chef at the now-closed Aphotic in San Francisco. (Courtesy Kelly Puleio)
Michelin inspectors named the oyster ice cream one of their favorite desserts in California in 2023, solidifying Rieutort-Louis's standing as a pastry chef of note. "File this under strange, but surprising and successful," they wrote, "the oyster lends a delicate oceanic note to a dish that somehow manages to find the sweet spot between shellfish and dessert." Chung Fegan had a similar reaction to Rieutort-Louis's scallop crème brûlée at Aphotic, which she described as "a squidgy cylinder of pudding with a crackly brûléed crust, tasted of coconut, vanilla and, ever so faintly, scallop. You'll have to take my word for it, but it worked."
There were some fails, though, she said, like a smoked trout and peach cobbler that never made it onto the menu, and some social media commenters who dismissed her desserts as "disgusting" without ever trying them. "It forced me to step out of my comfort zone, to see dessert in a different way," Rieutort-Louis said of her time at Aphotic. "Creatively, I feel like my mind opened to a whole world of incorporating savory elements into desserts."
Aphotic earned a Michelin star during its 1½-year run, closing in late 2024. Moving from the fine dining world to Dalida was a transition; desserts in the much larger restaurant had to be prepared in a shorter time and with fewer components. But Rieutort-Louis's creations were still fairly complex, such as a play on a Turkish dessert consisting of milk bread sandwiching white chocolate anise cream, amaretto ice cream and shards of anise meringue.
Rieutort-Louis left Dalida late last year, when the team behind Aphotic asked her to be the head chef and pastry chef for Jupiter Room, a cocktail bar due to open this fall on Polk Street. She also will develop desserts for the restaurant group's subsequent project, an unnamed restaurant opening in Jackson Square next year.
She's excited that Jupiter Room will stay open late, with "midcentury Space Race kind of vibes" both in the decor and food, such as plays on pineapple upside-down cake. "I want the desserts to be an ode to the '50s, '60s housewife that was kind of disregarded in that time," she said. "She couldn't get a credit card unless a man signed off on it. But she was really the person of the household."
Hummingbird pie is filled with banana cream and walnut pineapple cake. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
What she has planned for Jupiter Room is simpler than the desserts at Dalida, at least on paper. She makes a pie inspired by the Southern hummingbird cake, with banana cream, pineapple cake and vanilla cream cheese frosting. Her strawberry shortcake comes layered in a glass like a trifle, and she soaks dark chocolate cake in Guinness for a devil's food cake.
"Is it going to be my most intellectually mind-boggling dessert? Probably not, but I'm OK with that," she said. Right now, she wants to create desserts that people crave. "I had an amazing time breaking barriers, and I would absolutely do it again, but it's been nice to not have to reinvent the wheel. I want to make things that I also want to eat every day."
