First, a word on the Jumbotron engagement.
Have you ever wanted to seek out the Jumbo-couples and ask the bride if she'd have said yes, say, in the parking lot of a Home Depot? Is this gigantic public display of affection just too much pressure to say no and go back to your nachos?
On the opposite side of the spectrum sits the romantic restaurant engagement—small enough, in some cases, to fit in a spoon of sorbet, classic enough to still be surprising, and low-key enough to share with strangers. Stealthily hand the ring over to the experts (the pastry chefs) and sweat until the dessert course, in which the ring will come out under a cloche—perhaps surrounded with rose petals, plopped on a cake, or tucked into a fake souffle—and when the dome is lifted like a UFO ascending back into the unknown, just say the magic words.
At some restaurants, like New York’s River Café and One if by Land, Two if by Sea, engagements are as common as gluten aversions (=very). As many as two a night go down at these candlelight love dens, and on Valentine’s Day? Forgetaboutit. There are so many at One if By Land that they strategically seat the couples about-to-be engaged around the various rooms so they don’t bump heads when they go down on one knee. This Valentine’s Day, which has been booked for almost six months, there could be around 20 by the end of the weekend, predicts pastry chef Vera Elezovic. At River Café, which is situated right on the edge of Brooklyn with postcard views of the bridge and city, general manager Scott Stamford encourages the terrace technique: Take your love out to the restaurant’s terrace, where there are binoculars on a stand to see the Statue of Liberty, and when she (or he) takes her eyes away from the sparkling skyline scene—he’s down on one knee, holding another sparkler, this one a lot closer.
River Café even has a code in their seatings book to indicate a proposal, “K1,” just in case anyone should lean over and see the note, giving away the surprise. And they’ve seen it all. The groom-to-be who hired a sailboat to zoom by on the East River with his message on a banner—except the banner was facing the wrong direction; the hired violinist who showed up to serenade the special couple—though he had no idea what they looked like; and the couple who requested their song, a punk rock banger, to be played by the house pianist for what one can only guess were baffled guests. Other than those exceptions, they have the formula for engagements executed to a Champagne-topped science. Guests can have “Will You Marry Me?” printed on the top of the menu (just hope she isn’t more of a skim-reader). Then there’s the put-it-on-dessert method, which has been done with every sweet on the menu, but most popular is the Brooklyn Bridge dessert, a dark chocolate sculpture in which the ring dangles from one of the bridge’s cables. “Usually if it's elaborate and romantic,” said manager Stamford, the room will erupt in applause and “Husbands at other tables get a little elbow from the wives saying, you never did that for me.”
At restaurants with fewer rings to juggle, engagement requests can be more personalized. Per Se's pastry chef, Anna Bolz, sees a ring once a week, or every other week. Depending on the guest, some will arrive far ahead of their reservation to scope out the table, the lighting, to help plan every detail. Sometimes, a guest will casually mention it to their server in between courses, which causes a reality TV-like challenge for Bolz, who has to whip something up before the clock strikes dessert. “Pastry people pretty much have their service planned out,” she said, “There's not a lot of surprises for us. But when you have something like that it kind of throws you into a different mode of thinking...I find that sometimes those kinds of situations put me at my best.”
In the way the kitchen sends out a whole truffle as a sort of teaser before the truffle course, they’ll send out the ring as a pre-dessert course. Bolz plates the ring differently depending on the couple, and what’s for dessert, but her favorite is a golden egg dish, which opens up to reveal the ring nested in glittering Maldon salt (chosen because it doesn’t leave too much residue on the ring). Then the egg is closed, and covered with a cage of spun white sugar, which the maître d' removes at the table. That’s an ornate example. If the couple requests something more intimate, Bolz told us, she conceals the ring as if it’s food, like the time she suspending a chocolate cube in a tall dish filled with rose petal and a long, thin chocolate tube placed across, wearing the ring like a finger. In Elwyn Boyles’ run as pastry chef at Per Se before he was promoted to executive pastry chef, he was asked to conceal a ring in dessert, so he created a fairy tale-ish hollowed-out strawberry ring box, filled with yuzu cream which the ring was set in, then topped with edible flowers and served in the golden egg. Both diners received a strawberry dessert so that the surprise wasn’t revealed until they dug in, and Champagne naturally followed.
When a soon-to-be-betrothed young woman took a restroom break at Babbo, her boyfriend ordered the sorbetti sampler, a selection of seven scoops, and asked pastry chef Rebecca DeAngelis, “Hey, what’s the best sorbet to hide a diamond ring in?” “We were like, ‘What?!’” said DeAngelis. The good thing about the size of the sorbet scoops is that they’re small enough so the spoon will hit whatever’s hidden beneath—so no one accidentally chokes on a solitaire. “The first thing I thought [was] not in chocolate sorbet, not in gelato,” she said, “It's just going to be gross. I don't wear rings for that reason.” So she choose the green apple sorbet as the cleanest option, which would be “easy to lick off and put on her finger.” It all worked out beautifully—the guest was ecstatic, and DeAngelo was just relieved: “Thank God she liked green apple is all I could say.”
Stephen Collucci, the pastry chef at Colicchio & Sons, has done a few souffle fake-outs in his time, but when repeat customers from out of town made a dinner reservation—and the man revealed it would be a special one—they went all out. The guest told the manager that he and his girlfriend had an inside joke about getting married, referring to the ring as the “onion ring.” So Collucci made rings of churros that looked just like onion rings, and stacked them up in a tower of seven or eight churros high. Then they filled a few ramekins of cherry jams to look like ketchup and other dipping sauces, and placed the ring box among them. After dinner was complete, the couple was given a tour of the kitchen. “When he came into the kitchen for the part of tour, he was just sweating and shaking because he knew he was going to propose in 30 seconds,” Collucci remembered, and then after she said yes, “immediate tears.”
Elsewhere around town, rings are delicately placed on Gramercy Tavern’s allergy-friendly coconut cake with a torched marshmallow frosting, surrounded by flower petals from their in-house florist, and presented under a cloche. And in case you’re wondering—yes, someone has proposed with a Cronut. “I remember this gentlemen came into the shop and it was like 4:30 in the morning, and he was pounding on the door asking me for a Cronut,” said chef Dominique Ansel, “I told him that he had to wait because they just weren't ready.” The persistent young man was the first in line on an especially brutal winter morning. At 6:00 a.m., he knocked again—but the doors to the bakery don’t open until 8:00. Desperate, he showed Ansel the boarding ticket for his flight to California, and in a very rare exception, Ansel sold an early Cronut—because love conquers all.
The best Valentine is the one that arrives in your mailbox every month.