READ MORE FROM OUR “BEST DESSERTS” FEATURE HERE.
While guests at Lupi & Iris are seated in the dining room lunching on quiche Lorraine and steak frites, Courtney Beyer and her team are in the kitchen, immersed in their world of intricate dessert production.
Beyer, the restaurant’s executive pastry chef, uses the slower midday pace to prepare for busy nighttime service. In the kitchen, she’s both a Francophile and Italophile, a student of classic European artistry and technique folded into a fresh, modern aesthetic.
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Her work includes nougat semifreddos (frozen mousses), profiteroles (crisp pastry puffs filled with ice cream), satiny pots de crème (baked custards), rich butter-crust tartlets, and tiny French yeast cakes saturated in liquor-infused syrup.
Thirteen years ago, Beyer graduated from MIAD with a degree in illustration. Within months she’d given up the idea of an art career and was studying pastries at MATC. In 2022, after six years as Lake Park Bistro’s pastry chef, she was hired by chef Adam Siegel to provide the refined end note to a Lupi & Iris experience.
“There’s a lot of pressure to make someone’s meal memorable,” she says, but the “gratification” she gets from “making something people celebrate over” is worth the sometimes 12-hour days. And then, there’s ice cream, an omnipresent part of her work life. “I’m always handing out spoons to [staff] walking by [the kitchen]. Like, ‘Here, you should eat this.’ Freshly made ice cream – doesn’t get any better.”
Dessert is derived from the French verb desservir, which means to clear the table. It makes sense that this ritual ending is attributed to the European country that brought us crème brûlée, right? It’s also sweet by nature; dessert in its earliest form was fruit.
